Tuesday, October 26, 2004

the last time i went to church

...was two days ago. before that, it was too long ago to remember. circa late high school probably was the last time i went to church regularly. and since then, it's been the occasional wedding or funeral that has driven me into such hallowed sometimes-quiet spaces.

funnily enough, it was a disastrous fling with a liar that once again got me into a church. i had tried almost everything to get over this hairy chunky balding pretty-boy-gone-to-seed and his 80,000 kilowatt smile -- hours-long talks with a whole battalion of extremely patient friends, a sleepless night spent putting together a mix CD of happy songs, some misguided and very inaccurate tarot readings (both professional and self-inflicted), bottles and bottles of light beer (all i can afford lately), chainsmoking packets and packets of marlboro lights, a visit to the spa, several facials, long walks in the moor (metaphor!), weeks of wallowing, the baking of random muffins, cakes, puddings and cookies, etc.

i've even tried demonizing the guy in my head! you know how that works: calling him names, recalling him at his weakest and ugliest moments, etc. but i just couldn't. because no matter his three weeks of witholding that crucial bit of information (i.e., he has a girlfriend), the whole time we were...ahem, seeing each other (and said period being characterized by so giddy and obvious a transformation that colleagues stopped me in the corridors and asked whence such glow came from), i knew in my occasional moments of 97.8% lucid honesty that happy as i was being with him (e.g., boozing, hanging out, talking, etc.) , i could never let myself be with him on a permanent basis. as in no commitments, cannot be anything more than a very enthusiastic (haha) playmate. (i won't go into details, just that it involves diametrically opposed value systems, among other things.)

and so although it was great and it seemed like we were good together and wanted the same things, there was that gigantic BUT involved. so if i were a better person, this was when i should have stopped the fling. because if i must be perfectly honest, i was kinda playing him. the good person in me didn't want to hurt him or anyone (least of all myself) but i was enjoying said self and his company too much to actually stop. i didn't want to be accused of leading him on, etc. etc. that vamp-demon-in-a-skirt-other-woman role got old a long time ago. i wanted to come clean and i tried to (cf. that talk in that coffee shop).

BUT. despite all my reservations w/r/t playing him, i went on. (i can imagine my friends giving me a bitch slap at this point and hearing them say that i have nothing at all to be guilty about because he lied to me when i was being totally honest.) and that's the crux: i wasn't being totally honest. and so you can just imagine my annoyance (even anger?) when i found out that this guy that i was sorta playing had been lying through his beautiful teeth all along! haha. ha. my first semi-conscious, half-guilty attempt at playing the let's-just-have-fun-without-commitments game and i got effing played.

and so even if the fling lasted only three weeks and that i took the high moral ground and actually walked away (that is one noir-ish scene i will never forget: very filmic, with rain and the occasional yelling, and walking away in high heels and a tight skirt) from something i still wanted but was clearly wrong for me -- i still felt awful. i'm of course a little better now but i still have occasional flashes of what christians like to call backsliding. you know what that's like: those unexpected moments when your arms feel curiously empty, when you can actually feel the absence of the other.

so i tried doing all those things that i would do post-breakup. but. nothing. worked. so i started reading these two apologetics books by c.s. lewis because with them, you have to have almost superhuman abilities of concentration. it's not just a matter of understanding or comprehending in a rational or intellectual way the basic concepts of morality, religion, belief in a higher being, and what the heck all that means to someone going through real everyday problems like me. no, it also involves pausing every couple of sentences and, with at least 97.8% honesty, see how this or that idea/action/truth/etc. really truly applies to the way i choose to live my life, the small nitty gritty details and decisions that somehow add up to what we like to label with impressive tags: "Life" (note the capital L), "worldview", "lifestyle", "philosophy" or whatever.

and so that's how i got back to church. of course, my cousin A had a hand in it also, as she was the one who suggested which particular church we could attend last sunday. and i must admit here, since i am aiming for honesty, that it felt extremely uncomfortable attending worship service. i felt like a faker. i couldn't bring myself to sing along to their songs, mainly because i don't like that kind of worship music (watered down synth pop; i grew up singing along to 19th century church classics found in old hymnals). and after reading screwtape, i felt like the world's biggest sinner, a certifiable diabolical feast that would keep old slubgob belly up and belching for a while. but it got better after a while because the sermon (more like a scholarly lecture, which pleased me much) was very good.

i'm hoping i can get over my church-related quibbles and pretensions enough to actually go to church on a regular basis. but the whole communal worship thing is going to be really difficult for me. it's nasty but the word "pharisee" keeps popping into my head whenever i see eyes closed in prayerly delirium and hands waving in the air. i don't mean to be judgmental but i don't want church or worship to be a spectacular spectacular (cf. moulin rouge) but that's how most churches do things these days (haha, fallacy of the golden past!). so there. my snootiness and my "tastes" are what basically keep me from being the good christian that i want to be. awful awful awful.

and so i hope (and yes, pray) that i have it in me to do the right thing.

and that i can figure out whatever that is.

here and now.

Wednesday, October 20, 2004

apocalypse meow

it's the end of the sem and i have nothing to do. actually, i have tons of work waiting for me but i like to pretend that i can afford to lounge around the house watching pirated DVDs and reading the piles of books that keep appearing around my pillow.

i wasn't able to read much this last semester because MA classes forced me to read a bunch of other stuff (e.g., Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond, Rimbaud's Rainbow, Death in the Afternoon, A Moveable Feast, The Great Gatsby). talk about canon fodder. wahaha, i can't believe i wrote that.

and so the kick ass books i bought the past year are still on the shelf or teetering on the edge of pillow piles, threatening to kill me in my sleep. imagine coming to my funeral and seeing all my protestant relatives wailing over the fact that the combined hardbound weight of david foster wallace's behemoth Infinite Jest, ballard's Empire of the Sun, duras' The War and boyle's Drop City had bashed in the front of my skull during an unfortunate 3:00 am earthquake. tsk tsk. what a waste that would be.

that would also be the end of my dog. who would feed her and give the tummy rubs necessary for her survival? she's a lovely little lhasa apso who hates baths and who everyone hates in turn. my friend M calls her the devildog and my friend R feels this urge to kick her whenever she's in the vicinity. i think it's wonderful that this small handful of dirty white fur is actually able to sink her teeth with deadly accuracy into her choice target, usually my hand or my nose. her last attack involved an attempt to rip open my upper lip while i was kissing her between the eyes.

yes, kitty's her name and i love her.

riding shotgun

The guy who drives me home is always a friend of sorts and I’m always one of the guys. From the passenger's seat, some things always get cleared away: the girlfriend's pink sweater, the wife's hairbrush, a book he says I should be reading. Only then do I get to say shotgun, if only in my head. Because in most of these rides, it's just him and me.

Where I am, it's always past midnight and he's always driving me home. After a party, a book launch, a poetry reading, an ill-advised post-breakup meet with his ex-girlfriend. Always I’m there to keep him awake, to keep us alive. Each intersection we approach could become an explosion of crumpled metal and glass shards flying in glittering parabolas under the streetlights. We're both drunk and the air between us becomes thick with beer fumes and something else we both pretend isn't there. The slightest thing can set it off.

And this is where I have to be careful. Keep my eyes on the road and the lights flashing by. Try not to watch how the rain on the windshield is casting shadows on his face. The way he bites his lip when turning a corner. The shape of his mouth when he says my name. Those eyelashes. Things weren't always like this. Used to be that a car seat is just a car seat is just a car seat.

My first kiss happened in what I think was a Toyota Corolla. I'm probably wrong because I don't know cars, really. Red car, green car, new car, old. They're just things that people use to get from point A to point B, or in my case, from first base to second.

Anyway, I was nineteen, in a car with my best friend, after a night of hearing him play his new songs on my sister’s guitar, his voice scratchy from the cheap rum we’d been drinking. We’d spent the last couple of hours looking up at the moon, the clouds drifting across the sky. Some stars brighter than others. The sunken garden's clipped grass prickly against my back through the thin cotton of my shirt. One of the roving guards had come over and asked if that car over there under the tree was ours and could we please park it somewhere else. So we got up and parked somewhere else. It didn’t really matter where. We were both grinning like mad, couldn't contain ourselves. In the dark, we started giggling. We knew what was going to happen next.

My friend told me to take off my glasses, as he had: we were likely to fog them up. Then we exploded, laughing, the loud kind where you take deep gulps of air in between the hahas, and our brash young voices seemed even louder in that small cramped space and then his face was an inch from mine, big as the moon, and I had to close my eyes to keep from laughing into his mouth. I felt the gentlest of tugs, a small fluttering movement: young butterflies trying out their wet wings, flashing their colors for the very first time. It’s been the longest kiss of my life. Some days I can still feel it warming the corner of my mouth, the pulling away and the swooping back, never really letting go.

Which is exactly how my last boyfriend described the way I kiss. That story started in a car, too, with me saying shotgun in my head until all our friends got used to the idea of me sitting up front. I actually remember the rides more than the relationship. Those comfortable companionable silences we always had as the lampposts whizzed by. It didn’t last long, just a few weeks, and it ended exactly the way it should have: in the car, in a long awful silence, with the rain streaming down the windshield. Just like what happens in those old black and white movies.

Some nights when a guy is driving me home, we see bridges that aren't really there. Just early morning mist lending possibilities to a mall's grey pavement. The car slows and glides to a halt in front of my building. Then: A deep breath. A sideways glance. A hand coming to rest on my knee. In those charged moments before the door swings open, anything can happen. But I’m learning to do things differently now: a kiss on the cheek, a pat on the arm. Still, the hardest way to say goodnight is to grope for my keys, step away from the car, and walk up the dark staircase into my apartment, alone.

Tuesday, October 19, 2004

what now?

people keep telling me i should keep a blog. for three whole years i resisted, and i'm not really sure why. so here i am with my first blog ever. and nothing to say. what a great start.

waiting for the boat at galera