Das Experiment

Yes, I know I am totally co-opting -- okay, out-and-out stealing Dave Eggers' idea here. The thing is, I don't care. All of a sudden I am writing like it is nothing, and I don't care if it sucks or divulges information that makes me uncomfortable. So here is what I have written in the last hour. Note: I am not nineteen and six months anymore. I am almost twenty-five.

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Tell me about yourself.

I am a girl, aged nineteen years and six months. My name is Marie. Both of my grandmothers are named Marie, although I have always assumed I was named after my father’s mother, who died when he was sixteen. I attend a highly selective college in the northeast. I am from New Jersey, although I only live there during holidays and summers now. Mostly I live in a halcyonic suburb of Pennsylvania –

Where is this suburb?

It’s called Carlisle. It’s in South Central Pennsylvania. Not to be confused, of course, with South Central LA. And I guess I have to point out here that it really isn’t halcyon at all. Maybe compared to my hometown.

What is your hometown like?

Northern New Jersey, very close to the city. It’s called South Orange, although I could never quite figure out why. Granted: East Orange, West Orange, and Orange are all towns that border mine or one another, following the appropriate geographical template of what should go where, of course – but there are no orange trees to be found anywhere. That always stumped me as a child. Especially when my father took my brother, Jesse, and I to the park once and materialized an orange from a tree.

Excuse me?

Sigh. I know where I am and I know you’re apt to think that everything I say or do is crazy, but bear with me here. I’m telling you what I know from that memory, which was cultivated in the mind of a child. Okay?

Okay.

My father took my brother and I to the park behind my old elementary school. I don’t know what the park’s real name is, but we always called it Tire Park. Because most everything there was constructed out of old tires. A tire cave, a tire swing, what have you. In inclement weather, the tires smelled awful. Stagnant water and bugs would pool up in the crevices of the tires laying vertically, and you’d be crawling around in one of the tire caves, slip, and suddenly your hand would be covered in sticky muck –

And? The oranges?

Hold on. I’m just trying to give you a clearer mental picture. Anyway, I remember we were wearing jackets, so it must have been cold. Which made the orange thing all the more improbable and fascinating to me at the time. Jesse said he was hungry as we were walking into the gate of the park. My father reached up his hand toward the tree above us – one with no leaves and boughs so low he could have reached them, if he really was picking an orange – and it appeared that he had, for all intents and purposes, picked a nice cold orange which he then placed in my little brother’s grateful palm.

Ah.

Yes, ah. It was all sleight-of-hand, of course, I realize that now. The orange must have been in his pocket, and he elaborated on the gesture to amuse his children. Understandable. Adding a bit of mysticism into the daily proceedings.

Did that make you bitter?

Bitter? No. Why would you say that? It only confused my orange difficulties some more, and led me to believe that there was at least one orange tree in my town, which grew oranges in the dead of winter, and that I couldn’t see them. I always looked for oranges in that tree, for years after. Now, in my advanced and less naïve age, I just assume we’re named after the Duke of Orange or something like that.

And, for the record? This is what I despise about therapists: confusing present bitterness with everything else, making no distinction between Now and Then.

Do you think that’s what I’m doing?

I know that’s what you’re doing. Mining the details of my life for some Grand Explanation to bring us on a course straight to today. To lead us directly to the events of Now.

Do you believe that is an irrational way of searching for an explanation?

Yes, yes I do. Because nothing ever makes that much sense. And, no offense, but if I can’t make sense of my own life, how are you supposed to do it? Especially because everything you hear is not firsthand, it comes through me, tainted and colored with my own particular brand of nostalgia or vitriol or delusion.

Do you believe everything you say is tainted?

That’s not what I mean. I mean to say that my opinion is clearly subjective, and therefore useless. I just told you I used to think oranges grew on trees in the winter in Northern New Jersey. What does that tell you?

It tells me you were once a child, and made naïve, childlike assumptions.

Hmph.

Where did you live growing up?

In South Orange, always South Orange. In a two-bedroom apartment building across from the police station, not far from Tire Park.

Two bedrooms?

Yes, just the two.

Did you and Jesse share a room?

Yes, we did, for most of the early part of my life. We finally got our own bedrooms when I was about thirteen and he was eleven. The next year we moved into the house we live in now. Three bedrooms.

Where did your parents sleep when you and Jesse got separate rooms?

They pulled their bed into the dining room. We didn’t really use it anyway. The dining room, that is.

Were you ever ashamed of your living situation?

Again, this question is evil because it assumes that I have something to be ashamed of. This question comes from the perspective of a capitalist, spoiled American. No offense, though, it’s not your fault. This sort of thing is ingrained in us all from an early age. That we need to spread out as much as possible, designate everything in its proper place.

You sound defensive.

Look, the only public school I ever attended in my early life was kindergarten. No one came over my house in kindergarten. Then I had six years of Catholic school. My best friend was a girl named Lauren who lived in an apartment on the border of Maplewood (twin suburb of South Orange) and Irvington (once a middle-class suburb, now a ghetto). She lived in Irvington. Have you ever seen that movie, Slums of Beverly Hills? That’s how it was for me and Lauren. Scraping by on the outskirts of the Charmed Life.

What was Lauren’s home like?

She lived with her divorced mother and her mother’s boyfriend, a kind of scary guy named Chris. She had her own bedroom, but it was small. Chris had a weird moustache and they had an autographed picture of Soupy Sales hanging in the kitchen. Lauren’s mother was originally from Cuba, escaped with her family on a boat when she was ten. No accent, though. She was an actress and a singer, but she was technically a waitress. Lauren was the only friend who ever came over my house in those years, and it was because my dad would pick us up from school and then Letty – that’s Lauren’s mom – would pick her up from my house. So she was there for about two hours after every school day.

Were you ever embarrassed that Lauren saw your house?

Lauren was weird in her own ways that helped me to not feel embarrassed about our situation. Chris wasn’t her father, and he wasn't very nice, and sometimes, when we were playing, he would randomly start screaming at us and chase us out of the house. It wasn’t an ideal situation. They were mostly poor and lived with everything piled up on top of one another, like us.

So Lauren was like you?

Kind of. She was blonde and pretty and gave the impression of being afraid of no one. In that way, we were opposites. I was brown-haired and awkward and scared of everything. She was very creative and didn’t give a shit about much. I was creative, too. Also, when her biological father got remarried and moved into a townhouse in Hoboken with his new baby and wife, she lived there. But that was after. Later they all moved to a huge Victorian in Upper Montclair, and Letty broke up with Chris and moved to Jersey City, where she eventually got married and had more babies, too. We kind of fell out of touch after middle school. We both left Catholic school in the seventh grade.

Did your other friends wonder why you never invited them over?

If we were in court, I wouldn’t be allowed to answer that question. How am I supposed to know what they thought? Our apartment was beautiful from the outside – a brick building with sculptures of lions out front and old-fashioned enclosed verandas made out of twisted iron. They didn’t have to know it wasn’t nice inside. They didn’t have to know I didn’t have my own bedroom, or that my parents slept in the dining room when I did.

You didn’t answer my question.

Okay. Here’s the thing. A lot of people in my town are wealthy. If not wealthy, they are at least middle class. They all seemed to have their own bedrooms. They even had indoor pools. They didn’t have anything to worry about on that front.

My friends weren’t wealthy. They were more like my family is now – middle-class. But they had nice, organized, simple houses. They didn’t share bedrooms unless it was two boys, or two girls. Their parents most certainly had their own bedrooms. Even my friends who had really dirty houses had at least that. I had no privacy, nowhere we could go and play or do anything without bothering anyone else. Also, my mother worked weird hours – incredibly long nursing shifts – and was very often passed out on the living room couch in the afternoons and evenings. That was the largest room in the house, and where we kept the only television. We didn’t have cable, by the way.

A lot of people didn’t have cable in the mid-eighties.

I know, I know. But look at it this way -- kids use each other for entertainment. I didn’t have a Nintendo. I didn’t even have cable. I didn’t have a place where we could go and tell secrets. Lauren was friends with Jesse, too, so we didn’t have to go anywhere else. We would just play in our room. I figured if I didn’t invite anybody over, they wouldn’t have to know I wasn’t normal. Let them think the apartment had three bedrooms. I used to tell people that. They would ask me what my room looked like, blatantly hinting that they wanted to see it – and I would construct an elaborate lie and tell them all about the canopy bed, the bassinette filled with dolls (that part was true), the pink flowered border on the walls, the posters of Johnny Depp, River Phoenix, and Christian Slater. That part was true, too.

Why did you lie?

The last thing kids want to feel is like they’re at a loss. I was already at a loss, reading at an early age, being teased mercilessly in Catholic school for my obedience and intelligence. I didn’t want to be saddled with the additional burden of being poor. Once I lied at girl scout camp about how rich we were, and then I got sick one day and my dad had to pick me up. The place was called The Oval. So it was a huge grass oval surrounded by woods and cabins. My dad’s rusty brown Monte Carlo chugged in around the oval, painfully slow, slow-motion even, and everyone could see how crappy the goddamned car was and I was humiliated. You see, I had told everyone he had a purple sportscar. I also lied about my talents. Even though I couldn’t sing, I told the other girl scouts that I had made a record with a group simply titled “KIDS!” and that we had been vetted, but not chosen, for Star Search.

The counselors always gave every kid a stupid award certificate at the end of the session. That session I was “Most Creative.” Which I know, even then I knew, is a euphemistic translation of “Unrepentant Liar.”

Did you ever have any friends besides Lauren who you didn’t feel you had to lie to?

I used to get irrationally excited whenever I went to a friend’s house that was screwed up or weird in some way. Take my friend Debbie, for instance. She lived with her divorced mother, her wild older sister, and a shitload of cats. The house was consistently filthy and always reeked of cat piss, which is a notoriously toxic odor. I loved it. I loved that her house was Wrong and Unacceptable, because it made me and mine less so. Debbie only wore turquoise and black clothes that were usually polyester or cheap poly-cotton blend. Her teeth were really stained and her hair always seemed dirty. Being with her made me feel better about myself. Not superior, but better. Like I wasn’t that bad anymore. Like Debbie could understand.
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I think eventually this might go somewhere, even simply as an exercise. Let me know what you think (especially you, Jesse!).

At first glance, the resulting accounts seem -- in spite of the frequent recurrence of common themes -- so divergent in basic functions and goals that the question arises whether any central core of shared meaning is represented by the pair of terms at all. On closer examination, however, we find a series of basic problems which recur in different contexts, and a series of core meanings which change through time under the pressure of specific influences.

excerpted from the introduction of Psyche and Soma - Physicians and Metaphysicians on the Mind-Body Problem from Antiquity to Enlightenment.

Tonight I saw two of the trippiest movies I've ever seen. Ever. Waking Life and Donnie Darko.

It's funny how watching these two movies together was such a synthesized experience. metaphysics, time travel, the ex boyfriend, art, writing, fear vs. laziness, fear vs. love, et al.

Basically, all I am going to say is rent them. Now.

All around me are familiar faces
Worn out places
Worn out faces
Bright and early for their daily races
Going nowhere
Going nowhere
Their tears are filling up their glasses
No expression
No expression
Hide my head I want to drown my sorrow
No tomorrow
No tomorrow

And I find it kind of funny
I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I'm dying
are the best I've ever had
I find it hard to tell you
'Cause I find it hard to take
When people run in circles
It's a very very
Mad world
Mad world
Mad world
Mad world

Children waiting for the day they feel good
Happy birthday
Happy birthday
Made to feel the way that every child should
Sit & listen
Sit & listen
Went to school and I was very nervous
No-one knew me
No-one knew me
Come on teacher tell me
What's my lesson
Look right through me
Look right through me

And I find it kind of funny
I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I'm dying
are the best I've ever had
I find it hard to tell you
'Cause I find it hard to take
When people run in circles
It's a very very
Mad world
Mad world
Mad world
Mad world

tears for fears. mad world.

I like to talk with Genius
even though he isn’t listening
When he claims to speak sophistry I smile
because he doesn’t know the meaning

You like to walk with Beauty
though her words couldn’t mean any less
“disingenous” has dual meanings now:
“naïve” and “ruthlessness”

We are aesthetics and mechanics
We are order and dischord
You say I’m one, and
I think you’re the other
And I think that we’re both wrong

You liked to talk with Genius
When she was on your side
You loved her as distant muse
And left her when she tried

I liked to walk with Beauty
In times of composite need
“love” has dual meanings now:
“safety” and “self-righteous greed”

We are aesthetics and mechanics
We are order and dischord
You say I’m one, and
I think you’re the other
And I think that we’re both wrong

Reposted avec additions

I started my new job today. Did I mention I have a new job? Hmm. There seems to be a lot I haven't mentioned.

Well.

I have been tutoring between 10-15 hours a week for the last month. The cool thing about it is, I make twice as much per hour tutoring as I ever have before in any job. Sometimes I get to critique and edit essays. College essays. High school papers. College and graduate papers. That is my favorite part of the job. As opposed to tutoring standardized tests, which I am even learning to love.

I blatantly say things to my students like, "mollify is a word you will never hear outside of the SATs. Seriously. It's a throwaway, non-conversational, purely-for-the-sake-of-use-in-analogies word." It's true. I mean, when the fuck was the last time you actually heard someone use that word? Didn't think so. And they love that shit. It's called honesty. When I tell them about things that are real, and relevant, my students get psyched. I tell them about the words they really need to know, after the SATs -- disingenuous, misanthrope, conundrum. I tell them overall GPA, involvement in activities, essay, recommendations -- in other words, The Total Package -- counts more to any college worth attending than just their SAT scores. I make them feel special. I make them feel smart. I explain that the SATs are constructed by humans, and can therefore be mastered by humans. I tell them to stifle their creativity while taking these tests, for all the answers are based on Pure Rational Reason. There is no Grey Area. I also tell them that once these tests are over, they can be creative free-thinkers again.

Until they take the GREs or LSATs, that is.

I love my tutorboss. For the sake of Internet Purity, I'll call her Stella. Stella is a sixtysomething Jewish lady who runs the tutoring place with her husband. She has really big eyes, tons of style, and looks like a ballerina. She's incredibly kind and down-to-earth, but also a tough-as-nails businesswoman. Stella calls me about six hundred thousand times a day. She's a character straight from the pages of my future book.

I love (some of) my coworkers. I love (ninety percent of) my students. I even love the coworkers and students I don't love, because they are so easy to make fun of. One of my (crazy, bug-eyed) female cotutors has even inspired some girl-serial-killer story ideas for me.

I decided that even though the $ @ Stella's is great, I needed to be occupied during the day. I needed to get paid more than once a month. Even if that once-a-month paycheck was a big, fat, paycheck.

So I sent my resume to a couple of ads seeking a secretary who would be available to work 20-25 hours per week. Within a few days, one responded. I had an interview. They told me I was perfect and would most definitely offer me the job after checking my references. Then they jetted to Paris for the week after offering me the job, and I got a follow-up from the other ad. I decided not to take the interview, though. I don't know why. I should have looked into it, I think, but whatever. The first job is in my town. It's convenient. I can walk to work (not that I do, only sometimes). It's also $17/hr, which is better than what I expected.

There are two other people at the place where I work. Two. Their names are M (guy, 40) and K (girl, 28-ish). M is the "marketer" and K is the "scientist." They're both refugees from the most recent LL Bean/J Crew catalog. And I mean that in the nicest way possible. When they "dress down," they look like they're lounging around the hamptons. Their jeans generally give the appearance of being ironed. They wear sweaters and shirts in colors like "raw heather," "bucolic celadon," and "pastoral puce." Okay, I'm making that up, too, but you get the idea.

It's taken me several days to figure out what the hell my new company does, exactly. The answer? They are Health Care Parasites. That's a term I learned from my mother, the nurse -- people who make mad money off of pharmaceuticals, etc. They are not actually involved in care. Anyway, my company is a "start-up" that imports active ingredients from India to sell to the Research & Development departments of other pharmaceutical companies who hope to market a generic version of drugs like Risperdal, Effexor, Prozac, et al, when their patents run out. In other words, when a generic form of a popular drug exists, it tends to cost a hell of a lot less. So what they are doing is a Good Thing.

Random fact: did you know that most pills are like, 99.9% cellulose, and .0000001% active ingredient?

The office is sparsely decorated, but what decoration there is is entirely spiritual and Indian in nature (we have an office in India, also, all of our suppliers are in India). Shiva and Krishna stare at us from the walls. Gorgeous tapestries are framed and hanging everywhere. A book on Indian deities is on K's bookshelf, casually tucked betwixt the Physician's Desk Reference and various pharmacopeia. A little wooden elephant is on my desk. On the conference room table, there's an ornate incense burner that was given to M at a wedding he attended in India some years ago.

"We need some incense for that," said K.

"Cone incense," I noted, pointing out the little round space where the incense would fit. "Maybe we can get some Nag Champa."

When I said "Nag Champa" they both looked at me like I had just dispersed some great and secret knowledge. Dood. Nag Champa is the ultimate Type A spiritual Indian incense.

"You know your incense," said M, impressed.

They are totally nice people. I am thankful for this. The first day of two jobs I was super exhausted, and not looking forward to tutoring that night as well. You see, SATs are this weekend, and PSATs are next, so I am working 20+ hours @ Stella's. The first day was tough, but the next was better, and yesterday better still. Tonight I have four appointments, tomorrow three, and four hours of work during the day (10-2, how much do i love those hours?). This Will Work For Me.

hell freezes over, and a poet makes the news

i'm not a huge fan of amiri baraka (aka leroi jones). but asking him to resign his position as poet laureate is ridiculous, even over a horribly wrong fact. i think that baraka is misguided and misinformed in his belief that israelis were somehow forewarned of the events of 9/11 and stayed home for that reason, but still. a lot of his poetry is equally misguided and misinformed. if you're going to ask him to resign, ask him to do so because he's way overrated and sucks, not because he's wrong for the thousandth time.

yet another reason to teach in a low-income district

it's a gas gas gas

today marks the second time in as many months that i have been blatantly hit on by a gas station attendant.

the first time i was slightly giddy and it was four o' clock in the morning. the attendant was a pakistani guy with glittery hazel eyes and a handsome face. i only occasionally go to his gas station -- usually at an insanely late hour -- and he always bats his eyelashes and smiles at me. only this time, as i was about to pull away, he uttered "come here again soon!" and not in the "y'all-come-back-now-ya-hear" kind of way you would expect an attendant to say such a thing to a customer. more like, "hey, sexy momma, come back here so i can "fill" your "tank" with "refined oil." "

today was the second time. i was driving home from an unusually dismal tutoring session, and decided to follow a's advice to take 280 home instead of my regular route through the streets of livingston, west orange, orange, and finally, my hometown. i realized before i got onto 280 that i had basically a negative amount o' gas, so i pulled over into an exxon station.

gas station guy (about 28, cute, tan) i like your steering wheel.

me um, thanks. (my steering wheel is covered in a fuzzy rainbow thing).

gas station guy you from around here?

me kind of. i work up the street.

gas station guy (smiling) come back here, okay?

me um, okay.

what is up with that? "come back here" is obviously gas station attendantese for "bow-chicka-wow-wow, sugar." now that i'm typing it, it does not seem so clear, but it was pretty obvious at the time. maybe i should just drive from gas station to gas station in new jersey (being the non-self-service state that it is) and weigh out all of my offers. maybe i should flirt with attendants on a regular basis to see how many of them ask me to "come back."

i guess "come back here" is the only thing they can say, being landlocked. they must see at least a hundred cars drive in and out, probably more. the chances of seeing someone again are fairly slim, i suppose, unless it is a Friendly Neighborhood Gas Station. which must be kind of sad. but it still amuses me that guys think i would actually come back so we could somehow further our relationship. i mean, what kind of scenario do they have in mind, exactly?

gas station attendant it's you again. i knew you would come back here like i told you to.

me (leaning forward in my strapless red cleavage-baring taffeta dress) do you still like my "steering wheel," baby?

gas station attendant oh yeah.

heh.