MOVING DAY IS HELL.

All joking aside, I am thrilled to be in my new home. And, yes – I did try to straighten my hair. No, it did not turn out well.

Awwww, yisssss. If it ain’t Baroque, don’t fix it, baby.

A fair at night.

I couldn’t tell you if I had showered or not that night; the humidity was so thick that my sweat matted my hair down against my neck – I waterlogged myself, if that’s possible. And in an open-air setting, I wondered if the people passing by could smell me. It’s easy enough to get lost in a crowd when you’re short and inoffensively unattractive, when you don’t feel particularly smart or capable or interesting, when you feel like you can barely speak English, let alone another language.

So I almost hoped you could smell me that night — that somewhere within the bouquet of sand, sweat, engine exhaust, and fried food, there was a whiff of something undeniably me.

I couldn’t tell you what we all talked about that night; it wasn’t because I was drunk or because I spent most of the day with my headphones jacked all the way up; rather, it was because the sound of the night drowned us out — so dense that it had its own smell, even. It was children screaming in delight, the groan of the little roller coaster, the crackling of sugary sodas and foaming cheep beer, endless radio stations blaring over endless conversations, and every hazy ghost of a vendor hawking blankets and sculptures and comics and bongs and cordels and bowls and CDs and DVDs— metallic and oily, sweet and yeasty, earthy and manufactured.

And I was nothing to look at — scabby knees, sunburned, wearing a worn sundress; but there was more than enough to enjoy besides the sight of me. Eight millions lights — street lamps, high beams, and the occasional firework shimmying into the sky. The whirlygigs, overhead strings of lanterns, and blinking carnival rides — hot greens, bloody reds, dirty yellows. Eight million lights, and all of them seemed to shine on us. And in one beery, endless moment, we were eight million colors without realizing it. When I turned and saw you, quivering and shimmering like a prism, I briefly wondered if we were something greater than just two people.

And then we stepped out into the street and made our way back to bed. And we were nothing but perspiration and silence, all nudes and greys and whites.

Notes on a Bed.

Shortly after Dad was gone, my mother forced me into the habit of posting written reminders at the foot of my bed. Imagine, please, my  handwriting in bright red ink on hot pink index cards - Did you plan out what you are wearing tomorrow? Did you remember to finish your math exercises? Did you take out the garbage? Did you say your prayers? Imagine, please, the notes taped on the bed frame with so many layers of scotch tape that the oak finish flakes off entirely in large patches. Imagine, please, falling asleep with words poking out in between your toes:

And alw  ys    re  mber  tha    e Lord  lov   s  you, Sa    h.

The notes were usually the last things I saw before I fell asleep. Sometimes I even dreamt about them – dreamt I was brushing my teeth for exactly three minutes, remembering to scrape my tongue at the end. Dreamt that I was making sure I woke up my brother if he was sleeping through our alarm. Dreamt that the Lord, whom I imagined was bearded and fat like Santa but with a bigger chip on his shoulder, was hovering directly above me as I slept.

I’m closing in on 30 and I still keep to this habit, as much as it embarrasses me to think about it; Oh, sure – in my more rebellious years, I started sleeping on my stomach to avoid the words. In college, I stopped writing the notes all together, worried about what my roommates would think and, more importantly, how much beer money I’d be charged for damaging university property.

But as soon as I moved back home, I fell into it like a child, rubbing the more cherished reminders I had kept on my bed throughout the years:

“But above all else, to thine own self be true.”  Hamlet

– from 8th grade, at a time when I thought I was a singularly brilliant child for liking Shakespeare.

“Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting;
   but a woman who fears the LORD is to be praised.” Proverbs 31:30

– from 9th grade, when I began to wonder if my brilliance was a sinful distraction.

“As a dog returns to its vomit, so a fool repeats his folly.” Proverbs 26:11

–from 11th grade, when I began to wonder if I took Proverbs too seriously.

That first night back home, I sat on my mattress and ran my hands over these odd tidbits, each barely legible after being worn down by my feet throughout the years. Peeling off the cards, I briefly wondered how many socks had I ruined in my childhood because of those notes.  How many times did I wake up with big toes the color of a Bic ballpoint pen?

I looked at the bare footboard and wrote my first reminder to myself as a newly minted adult:

Buy washable markers.

I ask myself if I continue to write notes because I’m still sleeping in the same house, in the same bed frame, making the same amount of money I made then (nothing), tiptoeing around my mother’s same unwaveringly erratic moods….

But I think it’s mostly because I need all the help I can get.

I think I’ve listened to every single version of this aria on YouTube and Spotify combined, this makes me melt so much. (THE LAST 30 SECONDS!) It’s a bit sick, but then again …

Leaving Aracaju

We are leaving Aracaju, and the only things that wave us goodbye on the long bus ride back home are the hills — as solitary as they are endless, dotted here and there by little white shacks with little tiled roofs. Less like homes and more like lost cattle or ghosts under the moonlight.  Along certain stretches of the highway, the brush growing up and down the hills becomes so dense, dry, and dark that the horizon disintegrates into the sky. The only thing that reminds you that there is a world outside inky nothingness and your heartbeat is the occasional passing car or dim rest stop. If you manage to catch a star poking through the night, it feels like a miracle.

I crack my window open and lean my cheek against the glass, the breeze blasting through the cracks between my teeth. I might be the only person awake on the entire bus, and this pleases me; even the bus driver seems to have drifted off, so rarely and so gently does he steer the wheel; The only thing that reminds you that you’re not on a bus filled with dead people is the music — the tinny forró coming from the radio, the misplaced soda bottles rolling on the floor, the lip smacking and shallow breathing of the other passengers.

I guess it’s a terrifying image — sitting on a bus to nowhere, passing by multitudes of nothing, with no one around to acknowledge that you exist. But I’m oddly happy that if the end of the world is anywhere, it’s here.

The bus turns sharply to the right — enough to knock someone into consciousness for a split second, enough to whack a dry cough out of someone’s chest, enough for the bus driver to squeak against the Naugahyde seat; it’s enough that the sky shifts in front of my eyes and suddenly fills with milky pinholes. Stars.

– miracles. Multitudes of miracles.

In little Sergipe.

 

 

Songs to dream to.

Celebrity Christmas Spectacular~*~

Happy Holidays, from one heathen to… you.

I got the hat and everything.

Whenever I start learning a song in a key far too hard for me to sing, I default to “Sarah Brightman voice”. Having just picked up on this tendency tonight, I am now working feverishly to crank out an entire Yuletide album by Wednesday.

Yes, this is maybe the most annoying thing in the world.

The girl in the lace collar.

I stopped shit-talking other people’s looks when I realized that a sad, little part of me could only dream of being so hideous.

 

Which do you think I am?

“My theory is that when it comes to important subjects, there are only two ways a person can answer. Which way they chose, tells you who that person is. For instance, there are only two kinds of people in the world: Beatles people and Elvis people. Now Beatles people can like Elvis and Elvis people can like the Beatles, but nobody likes them both equally. Somewhere you have to make a choice. And that choice, tells you who you are.”

Obsessive Man Seeks Female with Low-Self Esteem

I guess this is a footnote to last week’s post, since I’m starting to think I give off a “lady doth protest too much” vibe when I rip on Phantom.

Yes, that is Funfetti Cake Mix

 

In the words of Kurt Cobain, I hate myself and I want to die.

Music of the Night – or how I hear it in my head.

Thanks to a very generous bump from my dear Lindsay, this video managed to get 430-some hits within less than 20 hours. As an internet small-fry, this is both exciting and highly shameful. The best part of this whole thing are some of the comments people are leaving on YouTube in response. Also, I fervently pray this doesn’t make it’s way to that fandom, because its fans are fucking unyielding in their collective wrath.

I never thought I’d say this, but in it’s own fucked up way, the film version of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera might be one of the most brilliant things ever created. I didn’t think there was anything in this world that would make me long for the dulcet tones of Sarah Brightman and all of the hammy ham Degas ham of the stage production, but then this came out.

GUYS I AM SPENDING SO MUCH MONEY.

 

 

To me, one of the most annoying YouTube trends is the Shopping Haul video — which pretty consists of a person showing the world every single thing he or she bought during a major shopping trip. Most of the time, the YouTube member in question doesn’t even give a review of said reaped goodies, making the videos less of a helpful shopping tool and more of a consumer dick-waving contest.

Maybe I’m just angry because I am out of snacks.

Life is pain