Tuesday, March 22, 2011

i have only words to play with.

i'm currently having a furious battle with my college library database. it is giving me wonderful books and critical essays that would be PERFECT for my paper (that i need by thursday) and absolutely no way to read them.

does my wonderful library, in which i currently sit, have these lovely critical essays that the MLA database tantalizes me with?

of course not.

so now, it's march 22nd, and i am sitting in the library watching it snow.

i feel like there's something completely and utterly wrong about all of this.

forgetting about the snow (which is so utterly terrible i want to forget about it), i have this pressing paper. i have a few things for me and against me.

FOR ME?

1. i have a slight working thesis. it's way too general. but i have it.
2. my book is covered in sticky notes and i can flip to each one and say AHA. POINT.

AGAINST ME?

1. the library database obviously does not want me to complete my topic proposal on time.
2. my proposal, or working thesis, isn't really a proposal anyway.
3. the book is lolita.
4. that needs repetition. the book is lolita.



it was either that or ellison, and i honestly can say that i enjoyed lolita. ellison just gives me more silent migraines. so now i'm stuck with nabokov's pedophile humbert humbert telling me all the time how much he loves games and damn it, how much he loves lolita, his twelve year old step daughter.

i like humbert's fascination with games, and that's where my thesis is headed, eventually. the thesis hovers somewhere in this vicinity- the entire book of lolita is nabokov's game, and humbert is the pawn of it, who... also likes to play games? it's games and games and games and the novel is a game, and humbert himself is a game and he plays games.

it's so many games i can't wrap my mind around it, which is why i have three different colored sticky notes in the book denoting games played and game type, and i have like... 500. i swear to god, i turned that book into a rainbow.

eventually some awesome thesis is going to pop into my head and everything will be fantastic and the library will suddenly blossom with critical essays about nabokov's obsession with games and elevating pedophilia to art. but this has to happen by thursday and tomorrow is a big day for me, and none of that involves english. i must go to lab, blow up some stuff, acquire my brother's birthday present, and pretend to be a seventy-year-old lady with a bipolar son for two hours. skipping psychology sounds like a good option at this point. but alas, setterlund might actually tell me something worthwhile and make a good joke.

until this fantastic moment happens, i remain, in the library, with a dr. pepper and some hostess cakes, pathetically blogging about my paper, watching it snow. the pathetically blogging about my paper part needs repetition. i am pathetically blogging about my paper.

but isn't this what blogs are for?

"i have only words to play with!" humbert humbert.

Sunday, March 13, 2011

fish bowl.

there were six of us in my grief group.

one of those confidential things.

we couldn’t talk about who was in it to other people.

and you didn’t want to admit to anyone that you yourself were in it.

i never lied about going to it.

but i thought about it.

the third day we met, there was a fish bowl on the table that we sat around. it was perfectly round and full of clear, pure, water.

there was paint next to it.

we were told to pick an emotion we felt.

that’s grief.

grief isn’t just grief.

grief is so many things, it’s complex. it’s all of these emotions that just eat you up inside and you have to take the time and sort them out, and that’s the first step to getting better.

sort it out. then there’s acceptance.

the emotion i picked was shock. shock dominated everything that i had felt so far. shock shock shock kept my anger at bay. which was a good thing.

i picked white paint for shock.

when we were asked to share the emotion we picked and the color, i went first. i said the words ’shock. it’s white.’

and our counselor opened the white paint and poured some in the perfect fish bowl full of the perfect water.

the five other people went next. anger. sadness. betrayal.

grief.

it was all poured into this fish bowl. the counselor stirred it up with a paintbrush.

by the time that innocent fish bowl was through with us, six hurting people, it was the nastiest shade of brown i had ever laid my eyes on.

there are a lot of things that i want. they change from day to day. but most days, most days i want assurance.

right then, i wanted that bowl to be clear more than i wanted to live.

i kept staring at it, that innocent bowl that was so clear and pure, now suddenly filled with paint that made it look like the color of shit.

i just kept thinking that i was that bowl. i was so innocent and clear and pure. and here i was, sitting there staring at myself, a nasty shade of brown, swimming with grief emotions that i couldn’t sort out, didn’t have the time to sort out, didn’t have the guts to sort out.

our counselor had some type of bleach that was supposed to make it go clear again. we watched as she poured it in and she stirred it, but it didn’t go clear. we all laughed about how it was supposed to work, and of course it would if she tried it again when we weren’t there.

but i honestly don’t think it was meant to work.

going back to clear would be way too easy.

and it’s not even plausible.

no matter what i think, there’s no way i’m going to be clear again.

i’m a fish bowl.

i’m not brown anymore.

but i won’t be clear again.

Monday, March 7, 2011

think back.

memory- the mental capacity or faculty of retaining and reviving facts, events, impressions, etc., or of recalling or recognizing previous experiences.

says mr. webster.

i'm slightly notorious for not always going with webster. i generally prefer connotation to denotation. i am absolutely in love with the poem 'anyone lived in a pretty how town' simply for its connotation. if you love denotation, that poem will kill you. with a baseball bat.

so i'm thinking that this webster definition of memory is a little too technical. it's verbose, but isn't webster always?  but here's the thing- we can't really make it less technical. i was honestly going to write this blog with my own definition of memory, and then i realized something.

i don't have one.

memory is something i want to try to wrap my brain around. i've been stewing on it for a while for a number of reasons.

1. i have a somewhat functioning photographic memory that generally works when i don't want it to.

2. there are people in this world that have perfect, flawless memories.

3. and there are people that have perfect photographic memories called eidetic memories.

my photographic memory is pretty spastic, but when it works, it works well. unlike my perfect pitch, it doesn't work on command, and if it did, i would've gotten a much better grade in my precalculus class. mostly it works with numbers and history texts.  during history exams if i didn't know the answer, i could close my eyes and read the textbook, assuming i'd read it before. i also have a strange ability to memorize dates and numbers without trying. i don't necessarily think it's memorization, though, because they definitely have a memory context. i got my braces on february eleventh, i got them off and february third. this was almost nine years ago and i remember the dates. i went and got coffee with my friend ainsley on june twenty-fifth 2009, on april eighth 2009 my friend kevin told me he was methodist, and if you tell me your birthday, i'll probably remember it forever. i memorize music without trying to as well. i have never understood people who practice and practice to try to memorize musical pieces. it just happens to me. i can play piano songs from fourth grade, and if i get stuck, all i have to do is close my eyes and nine times out of ten, i can keep going. i also memorize neaningless numbers, normally locker combinations and license plates. i think the license plate thing could get me a steady job at the FBI. when i was eleven there was a black ford escape that cut off my father while we were driving in alabama- and i know its license plate number to this day.

the idea of a perfect memory simulatenously excites me and terrifies me. there are lots of things in my life i wish i could forget (like pointless dates, numbers, and fifth grade), but these select people with flawless memories know every moment they've ever lived through. can you imagine that? i would remember typing every word of this blog, how i felt while typing it, when i cracked my toes and ate a jelly bean. every moment has a fountain of memories, and they just build and build and build.

children between one and three years old have a kind of memory with language- they hear a word once, they assign meaning to the word by context, and they can use it. when we try to learn spanish in high school we have to repeat and repeat and repeat. wouldn't the world be wonderful if we could just hear it and pick it up like these children?

the memory that children have is possibly closely linked to eidetic memory, which is my photographic memory on steroids. people with these memories are able to read something or look at something and be able to recall it in perfect detail on command. since i'm still on my criminal minds kick i can reference reid, and if you've seen the show, you know what i'm talking about. he can recite the entire bible and memorize everything he's ever looked at.

since i have a small brush with this awesome memory, i have that fatal syndrome where you know what you could have but don't have it. and that's okay with me, because the more i look at it, the more terrifying and mysterious memory seems to be. i think i'll be okay walking around with dates, locker combinations, and history books in my head rather than an entire lifetime of EVERYTHING.

but it would be pretty sweet to be able to recite the bible. i can almost do it with harry potter.

Thursday, March 3, 2011

blogging for killers.

i've never truly blogged before.

back in the space age where myspace ruled the world, i blogged there. but we won't talk about that.

so this is my attempt at blogging. we'll see how it goes.

so, right off the bat, i'm going to blog about serial killers, because i have honestly spent today watching six episodes of criminal minds. part of that is the attraction of serial killers, and the other part is the fun that is spencer reid. but we won't get into the mystery of him and his good looks.

i don't think it's weird that i'm fascinated by serial killers. for one thing, it works as a great conversation starter, even if people do think i'm insane and don't talk to me afterwards. fascination with serial killers also leads to nightmares if i read about them too close to bedtime and paranoia when i run to the fridge at two in the morning. but i know what's out there. and it really is intriguing.

i honestly don't know when this strange fascination started, because i don't seem like the type. i'm paranoid in general. i'm afraid of the dark. i'm terrified of being murdered. but something about jeffrey dahmer and his apartment housing thirteen human heads makes me intrigued. their patterns, their lives, everything is just interesting. and taylor finn and ms. sculley got me rolling.

taylor finn, my wonderful high school swim teammate and fellow captain, and i ventured out in ms. sculley's english class to write a sixteen page paper about a societal issue. we picked serial killers, much to ms. sculley's astonishment. we backed it up with 'serial killers are a problem to society. they're out there killing people, aren't they?' you can't deny that.

the paper went about a standard route: definition, cause, effect, solution. as a two person group instead of a four, we each got two parts. i got stuck with definition and cause, and taylor landed with the effects (dead people, i presume) and the solution. which, if you're wondering, there really isn't one.

the definition of a serial killer is a person who kills three or more people over a period longer than a month. but there's so much more than that. they have patterns, a specific social disorder (most of them, anyway), trademarks, and trophies. jeffrey dahmer kept those thirteen heads and that full skeleton in his shower for a reason.

i dove into research headfirst, and i got some strange looks from the local librarian when i carried out nine books about the biggest serial killers of the recent decades. but the recent decades weren't enough, oh no. serial killers date back to the fourteen hundreds. they were just as sadistic back then too, let me tell you. the best part is, they keep cropping up more and more. there was a boom in the eighties, and we just keep going up and up.

serial killers are born. 19 out of 2500 people is born with sociopathic or psychopathic tendencies. these are buried in most people. it erupts in animal cruelty, being asocial, or being that kid that you swear one day will bring a semiautomatic to school. and one day, it'll snap, and someone will be dead. after the snap, the murder is generally driven by a need for power and dominance. most serial killers believe that they are the only thing that truly matters in the universe and therefore have no conscience and are incapable of human emotions. the killing is all about power and is sex driven. strangling someone, for them, is a sexual high.

it's highly likely that in these 19 out of 2500 people, this won't happen. nothing will erupt. nobody will snap. nobody will die. this is good for you, for me, for everyone!

taylor and i finished that paper, turned it in early, and got an A. when i handed ms. sculley the folder, she said, "i've been looking forward to reading this." she had intrigue. just like me.

i don't think that talking about serial killers should be taboo. it doesn't necessarily have to be disturbing. sure, it's creepy down to the core, but we're just talking about people with problems. everyone has problems. they just have bigger ones. i don't feel like my fascination with them is any different than following taylor swift on twitter. i know far too many people who do that, and nobody i know follows serial killers.

it's highly possible that writing my first blog about serial killers was a bad move. but i did it. i think i did okay.

now back to criminal minds.