Kamau was right.

He had said that the revolution will not be televised, that it would be sent to you as an attachment and go directly to your junk mail, where it will be silently deleted.


Well.



That's exactly what happened.



I just saw this note in my hotmail junk mail folder that tells me I won the green card lottery (I have been entering it for the past decade).


My first thought: shit; the photo I submitted was a horrible one. I will not hear the end of it from my friends. (I am not kidding.)


Second (more rational) thought: Don't panic. Send this to your lawyerº.



So...we shall see what this all means.





º I just emailed her today about renewing my work authorization card and travel documents since the final step of the green card approval was still another two months or so away (which means the green card is another year away, at least).

Just...NO.

I love a good city that offers me good food, good freaks, good stories.
I love sex.
I love the movies.


But I am NOT going to see Sex and the City. Everº. Not even on DVD.

I cannot stand the privileged whiny bitches who pretend to be all about women power and sisterhood, and whose lives revolve, at the end of the day, around men's whim.

Very well. I'll be the first to admit that a man's whim can be charming and piss you off into a state of ceaseless desire. But you should know yourself enough, woman, to meet that man at the door with your own damn whim.

So let me continue: I cannot stand that the source of pride and envy for the skinnyass WhatsHerNameº in the show is that she is a woman who spends more on a pair of shoes (that are butt ugly) than I spend on my rent each month.º


I'm all for Sisterhood. I miss the sisterfriends I used to have (one moved out of town; the other went crazy and became a ghost) and the Monday wine and cheese nights. I miss the Friday Supper Club. (Yes, food is important to sisterhood.) But what I miss has nothing to do with having shit loads of money and having vaginas without knowing in what direction to throw either one of these things. (I know exactly what I want to do with my vagina, thank you.)






So get those ads for the movie out of my face.



º If you have a Sex and the City gathering at your house, it's OK for you not to invite me. In fact, I would be offended if you invited me. I'd rather watch infomercials...online (I don't have a tv).

º Seriously, I don't remember her name. Carrie something-something? OR is that her tv show name? I think so. Fuck, I don't care. I need my brain cells to imagine nomadic plots and plans. According to a student of mine, she redeems all the anti-womanness of the show by being a writer who is processing these stories at the end of each episode. "Isn't that empowering? She's writing out her stories, owning them." You almost got me there, little girl... But NO. She is annoying. She has no will power. She is a self-indulgent whiner.

º 1% of the population in this country control 47% of the wealth therein. That same 1% controls education in this country. And 5 corporations in the US control the media.

tk the Terrible

Today, in my junior/seminar elective The Theater of Ideas, Sally asked me a question, her voice an usually high pitch for her. I've given her shit about her timid, high pitched "Tiiiilda?"s before with "Saaaalllyyyy?" in the same tone. I smiled. She caught herself and said, "There is something about this class or you...it makes me talk in a high pitch." I told her I often have that effect on people. Then, Thomas joined in the conversation with "I was terrified of you last year in Shakespeare." I just looked at him and said nothing. Silence. He looked back at me. Silence. Then, "Um...I'm still terrified* of you."





YESSS!





My favorite tk the Terrible story was reported to me by a teacher who drove some students somewhere in a van. For some reason, kids in a van always forget there is still a teacher within hearing distance; you end up hearing what you never wanted to hear sometimes.

On this occasion, my coworker told me, the students were talking about my hardassness: "tk would give Shakespeare a B."

HellyeaIwould...if he also didn't proofread his essays before turning them in.

Little shits. (I love them.)












* My dad, a decade of such stories later, still says he can't imagine me being a hardass in the classroom. I'm the goofy girl my parents and my aunt used to call maymun: monkey.

He. Has. No. Idea.

An AWEsome match

Today, I got a surprise in the mail from Vanessa...whom I cannot wait to meet someday.






Tomorrow, she will come back and swim among the waves.
Maybe la gitana will join her.







THANK. YOU. THANK. YOU. THANK. YOU.

And even, ♥Thank You♥. *






* I can't believe I just did that. You are turning me into a monster. A gay as fuck monster.

m e m o r y .

And the things you can't remember tell the things you can't forget/That history puts a saint in every dream*. I am so intrigued by memory. Years can go by and my body refuses to forget certain things. I wonder why—I would have imagined the path of least resistance would be to forget. But my body stubbornly remembers. Maybe the least resistance is the most expedient but not the most meaningful way; this body just knows it would rather remember than avoid disequilibrium.

So I am compelled to think about people and places and conversations and food I can't ever forget.

Sometimes it was a New York City hotel room. An elevator with multicolored lights fading in, out, in, out. A straw fedora hat. A painting of her (or maybe it was a self-portrait) taken out as trash by the cleaning staff the next morning. A phone that doesn't ring when it was supposed to. Whispered conversations when it wasn't supposed to. Blood, often. A hospital, once. The last time.

Sometimes it was tears on a rooftop. A cab ride. A lingering glance. Beauty. Sushi. A purple flower. A woman named Fatima. Serenades on a guitar. A newspaper read in peaceful silence in another town. Kalimotxos.

These days, it is a street corner. Balsamic vinegar and avocado on ciabatta. Hands, pressing. Raised voices; raised eyebrows. Invisible Man. Sounds from a trumpet. Then, Ahmad Jamal. Flies in smoke. Stencils. A room painted brown. Another painted red. A black hat left behind, returned. Silences.


My body remembers and wonders. I wonder.





I wonder why it is that a forgotten dream rushes to my consciousness when I bend over to tie a shoe or to wrap a towel around my hair. There is a passage in Ulysses, too. A memory while tying a shoe. The upside down brain, the disoriented frontal lobe, the disarmed defenses...

I want to know.












* Yes, once again, Tom Waits. I went from obsessive indulgence in The Little Prince to a Tom Waits kick ever since I realized the intensity of my envy of friends who get to see him in concert in July (I'll be in TR).

AWEsome.

Back after a long absence..


I need more vampiric friends. People who will go out for dinner at 10 pm. People who will come over at 11 to watch a movie (I have a projector I have been "borrowing" from work for over a year). People who will explore whatever places are actually open after 11 pm in this tiny ass city with me. Biters, too.


Please feel free to nominate yourselves.


* * *

The now-ex is resentful that after crashing at 9:30, 10, 11 pm the whole time we were dating, I am now back to being a night owl. I used to be a night owl before we started dating. He had a hard time believing that, seeing that I was always so exhausted at the end of the work day.

Interestiiiing. My guess: receiving wireless signal/having internet access at home, finally, is the key.



* * *


I have decided life is too short to have mediocre meals when you can help it.*


The same goes for wine.

The same goes for sex.





When in doubt or in an existential crises, call upon hedonism to carry you through. Works for me.


* * *



I want the word awesome back.

As in AWEsome. As in awe inspiring. As in oozing with enough awe to last you a week in a city.
I thought about adding a new suffix to the root, but "-ful" is already taken...for the fucking antonym! What's up with that?

I want "Wow, that was awesome" to once again be a very specific, flattering compliment, not a synonym for the generic "cool, dude!"


Got it? Good (not awesome).







* Sure, it costs more. Sure, sometimes, you're in a hurry, and... Sure, sometimes (like now), you have zero groceries at home. I did say when you can help it.

∴ love in silence

When I was eight, I found the six differences between two illustrations in the Sunday paper and sent it in for a prize: The Little Prince on tape. I wonder what happened to that tape; I loved the sad music someone chose as the soundtrack. I wonder what happened to my sister's Hans Christian Andersen picture books that she received when she was in the hospital for a severe case of mumps. The Matchstick Girl and The Little Mermaid were the saddest stories I read as a child. I think I read them before I was old enough to find out life isn't fair. Or maybe it's never too early to know this. I miss the smell of my mom's cooking. I miss the smell of the year's first summer night when suddenly, I can smell trees in a concrete jungle of 2.6 million. I miss sitting in the front of an 8-chair row in a class of 35 or 40 and being the only person who gets my teacher's sarcasm. I am proud of the girl I was when I was 17. I think that year, I was the bravest, most driven person I have ever been. Most stubborn, too. That was the year I lived in the same house with dad without saying a word to him for 11 months. It would have gone on longer, but I needed him to fill out the financial aid forms to apply to school in the US. That, and I felt guilty for making mom miserable for my stubbornness. It was the day after my birthday. Since then, I have learned to find peace in silence. The ultimate sign of true friendship for me is being able to spend time with someone in silence without the need to fill it. When I lost the first person I could love in silence to the whims of a long distance relationship, I put idiotic walls around my feelings. In each succeeding relationship, I would occasionally test myself with "If this person dumped you today, would you be all right?" and make sure the answer was always a resounding "Yes." Maybe all I ever wanted from love was to feel consumed by it without actually being consumed. Love is something different now. Love and I have found strength in vulnerability. We wrestle, bear our teeth, bite and show no pain even when we're hurt because we have finally fessed up that fuck it, we actually enjoy the battle. We lie in bed showing each other our battle scars, kissing each other's battle scars, biting around each other's battle scars. We imprint barely legible words on each other's body just by thinking them, and Love traces these words across my skin as it turns a darker shade of brown in the long awaited summer sun.

Isabel Allende

I am listening to/watching a lecture by Isabel Allende (thanks, David).


She says:

"Nice people with common sense do not make interesting characters. They only make good former spouses."







Daaaaaaaaaaaaaamn.

This post could use some love.

(If you're reading this, you are among my trusted friends. And you can show your love with comments or a phone call.)

—I am in the process of becoming single.
Fucking shit up.
Making waves.
Taking a break.
Breaking up.
Breaking a heart.
Prioritizing.
False advertising.
Fantasizing.
Calculating "mathematical possibilities."




—Why?
Because I'm happy and things are fucking great, and I want them (well, it: sex) to be fucking amazing instead.
Because I'm selfish.
Demanding.
Difficult.
Overcommitted.
Overwhelmed.
Undersexed.
Curious.
Socialized.
Deviant.
. . .
Because New York.


—What's next?