Carpe Diem

Today in my Irish Lit class, the professor said something that kind of smacked me in the face a little. She said that several Irish authors write about characters who remember their "glorious past" (even if their past wasn't so glorious), and they dream about their "glorious future," but they live in a very "unglorious present."

It made me think. I write a lot about a nostaglic past -- whether it's my own past or somebody else's. I dream about my glorious future, often making it unrealistic. But I live in a real present. One that time hasn't had the luxury of altering. One that can be just as glorious as my past and my future.

And I like my real present. I love it, actually. I'm thankful for my present life. But I know that I don't do everything I can to live it as fully as I'd like to. I know that I'm a person that always thinks about where I'm going next instead of enjoying the present. I know that.

It's really difficult to change your mentality. Much harder than changing your physical appearance and your outward achievements. But I'm aware of the need to change this mentality. And I'm gonna work on it.

I blame the need to look ahead on our upbringing. We're always preparing for the next step in our lives. Preschool to elementary school to middle school to high school to college to grad school. Forget all that preparation for the "real world." When does life ever really start? Life is just fine right here, right now.

In unrelated news, GrapeNuts sound great. But they are sick. Pure roughage. Blech.

How cute are they?

So it's been official for a while now, and I'm not exactly sure why I picked today to blog about this, but my little brother Parker is getting married on May 19.

He's marrying Melanie and, without getting too sentimental, I just want to say that I am really happy for Melanie to be joining our family. Parker's made an awesome choice, and I'm really glad that he found somebody so great for him.

Here are Melanie, Parker, and Oxford.



Also, I want to congratulate Kasey for getting engaged, too! June 2, she'll be walking down the aisle. Crazy. Glad you're so happy, KC!

And to the rest of you (us): Keep on keepin' on. :)

I have laughed more this week than I have in a really long time. And for that, I am grateful.

Attention! Attention!

Look-a-there. It's Brigham. But here's the deal. The video that Lexia and Brigham made is on Paste's website. See, you watch the video, rate it, and the winners are selected that way. I don't know what they get for winning besides, I guess, notoriety and fame. So go watch this video and rate it. Seriously.

(The only downside is that you have to install DivX to watch it. But c'mon, it's worth it. Do it for a friend.)



Here's the link.


C'mon. For a friend.

Look at our cozy home!

Cute, huh? Look at Sara's perfect jack-o-lantern.

(So maybe it isn't exactly cold enough outside to build a fire, but we live in Georgia. 40-ish degrees outside is cold enough, right?)

Egg Salad Recalled Over Possible Contamination

Hahahahaha.

Egg salad.

Here's the article.

(Okay. I just read the article, and it's not so funny anymore. This bacteria can do some serious damage.)

In other (but related) news, eating chicken tikka masala for lunch right before class is also not a good idea...

Q: Why, oh why, did I just watch Speed 2 until 1AM on a Saturday night?

Dreams

I've had some crazy dreams lately. The night before last, I dreamed about a dead, decaying peacock. (I was trying to figure out what kind of bird it was. First, I thought it was a crow or a vulture. But then I saw the plumes.) I can still see it.

Vanitas

Yeah, this is long, and maybe depressing, and totally selfish of me to post. (Because it's so long for y'all to read, and I'm posting it in the hopes of getting some feedback. Yes, I realize that I've been writing for me and not the reader of this blog lately, and I apologize. But I can't promise to rectify that any time soon because everything I'm writing is for class these days.) Sooo. Without further ado...


The sepia tones fade to yellow at the edges. The left corner has been bent and smoothed back down, leaving a crease. The bend occurred in 1972 when the photo slid out of its designated place in the album and was folded by the force of the spine.

The faces are shadowed by the noon sun, giving the appearance of skulls on fully clothed bodies, like vanitas paintings. Reminders of mortality. They’re dead now, the faces in the photo. Long dead. Decomposed like leaves.

The whitewashed stone house behind them has been bulldozed. The horse in the field back there was shot when he got the bloat. The son in the white dress being held by his mother? Died the year after the photo was taken from malnourishment (and the complications of a weakened immune system). But this irrelevant piece of paper remains. This paper and the Sperrin Mountains that rise beyond the house. The Emerald Isle turned sepia.

They are my blood.

That child there standing beside the sheepdog is my great-great-grandfather.

When I saw this picture for the first time, I was six and I cried. I realized that little boys grew up, died, and became people’s dead great-great-grandfathers. And I realized that little boys grew up, died, and were remembered by great-great-granddaughters as sepia-toned, skull-faced strangers on paper. I realized that I would die. One day. And soon, in the general scheme of things.

At six, I understood heaven better than I do now. But heaven has never soothed me.


I was there last summer, in the Sperrin Mountains. Drove through them actually – couldn’t stop. This picture was taken in a pub in Derry. Fifty-six miles away from the bulldozed whitewashed stone cottage. How many kilometers is that? Fifty-six miles from the church in Dungannon, where my blood was christened, where my blood was married, where my blood died. Fifty-six miles from the landscape walked daily by my blood.

In this photo, I’m holding up a pint of Guinness, toasting the picture-taker. It’s a close-up of my face – too close. The flash of the camera made my eyes red. But I Photoshopped that out. So I’m just a smiling American tourist. Just another Irish-American tourist making a pilgrimage to the motherland. But I’m not in the motherland – I’m fifty-six miles away. And, here, with my smiling face and pint of Guinness, I feel farther away from my blood than I did when I was across the Atlantic.

When I saw this picture for the first time, I was twenty-four and I cried. I realized why I felt distanced by the proximity of being in that land. I realized that my motherland was the land of my birth, not the land of my ancestors. I realized that my blood was not in Ireland. It was in my bones. I realized that smiling girls in pubs grew up, died, and were remembered by great-great-granddaughters as digitized, big-faced strangers on paper.

After the house fire, I found the photo album soaked through. What remained, I was certain, would be sopping bits of pulp – gloss here, matte there. But I found these two photographs – the one of my ancestors in Ireland, the one of me in the pub – stuck together. Faces close. Past kissing present. Present kissing past. And when I split them, there were two photographs in my hands, each carrying the same double-exposed image of my smiling face over their home, their faces, their Sperrin Mountains. Each photograph destroyed and beautifully altered.

A Home

This room was the playroom. There was a chalkboard right here against the wall. I used to pretend I was a teacher and write math problems on the board. I would use the square root sign before I knew what it was because it made me feel smart and older. The chalk was always that crappy kind that didn’t write well. Probably the RoseArt brand instead of Crayola. Or maybe it was old chalk. Or maybe it’d gotten wet at some point, chewed on by my younger cousins. Or maybe it was the chalkboard itself. It was a little too slick and the chalk could never get enough friction to write well.

There was an old Barbie Doll house that must’ve been from the early seventies. But it was the early eighties at that point, so it wasn’t that old. I didn’t really ever like to play Barbies because I didn’t like the inevitable soap opera stories that resulted from playing with dolls with boobs. So I usually just stuck to teaching.

There was one of those pretend, plastic ovens in the corner over there. It was the same one that my aunts coaxed my uncle into when he was about four. Then they taped the door shut. ‘Round and ‘round the oven with Scotch tape, snickering the whole time, I bet. I never liked the plastic oven because I always helped my mama bake real food. I turned the plastic knob to set the temperature on the plastic oven one time. The oven didn’t get hot, and the knob was plastic. An oven can’t be plastic. It would melt.

There was a pool table in the middle of the playroom. My uncles would play pool when I was trying to be a teacher, and they were always too loud. Not good students. Unruly. I usually would give up and go outside when they came into the room.

In this room here, the family room, at about four o’clock in the afternoon, the sun lands riiiight… here. Comes in from the windows on the west. Kind of makes a glare when you’re trying to watch TV, but it makes the room nice and warm in the winter. There were two overstuffed leather couches right here that I would sink down in and never be able to get out of. My feet didn’t touch the floor and I could never get enough leverage. There were two paintings on that wall there. Huge red flowers in brown vases. And right there, standing behind the couch by the stained glass chandelier, my father hugged my pregnant aunt as she said, This one will never know her. By “this one,” she meant the baby in her belly. By “her,” she meant my great-grandmother Mamie who died when I was five.

The sounds. The sounds of aluminum chairs echoing in the carport, of splashing in the swimming pool, of jokes being told and football being discussed. And the smell of the house. It’s still there sometimes, in my nose and my memories. The smell of Mamie’s baking yeast rolls, Grandmommie’s perfume, and the chalk that was always on my hands.

Relationships are Scary, so Buy a New Album Instead

Have you ever bought an album and become so completely enamoured with it that you listen to it for days on end? I mean, it's kind of like a new relationship. Here are the parallels.



Step 1: The Flirt
You think you might like a certain artist. You think over buying one of their albums. When you're at the music store, you pick up a CD of theirs, decide you don't have the money to buy it this week, and put it back on the shelf.
=
You see a person that looks interesting to you from afar. You wonder what they're like. You actually make eye contact a couple of times. Maybe you even talk to them briefly. But you never really make it to the next step -- buying.

Step 2: The Wait
You finally make an effort to not eat out one night and, instead, designate the money you saved by not eating to buying said album. You go to the record store and -- wait. They don't have it! Don't panic. You order it from the record label online. It's on the way.
=
You finally make an effort to talk to the person you've been eyeing and wondering about. You make your move. You say the things you'd planned out the night before in your head and the conversation flows relatively well. He asks for your number. But wait! He doesn't call for a week.

Step 3: The Expectation
The album arrives in the mail. You are excited to find that the record label also sent you a free compilation of the folks on their label. And a button with the label's logo on it. But you're more excited to hear what you've been waiting to hear. You really hope it meets all of your high expectations.
=
He calls you. It's a date. You get all gussied up, check your hair one last time before you walk out the door. He meets you at the restaurant. Your palms are sweaty as you drive to meet him. You really hope he's as awesome in real life as he is in your head.

Step 4: The Consummation
You put the CD in the CD player and the beautiful tunes spiral into your head. It's everything you hoped it would be.
=
You listen to words come out of his mouth that have never sounded so good. Words like: kids, compassion, football, art, Kierkegaard, and travel. He's everything you hoped he would be. (What did you think I meant by consummation?)

Step 5: The Dance
You listen to the album non-stop. You find out everything about the artist you can. You learn the lyrics. You sit there one night listening to the whole album, listening to the lyrics, the shifts from verse to chorus to bridge. You're in love.
=
You want to be with that person non-stop. You find out everything you can about that person. (You get your information directly from them, of course. No creepy stalking. Maybe the occasional googling, but that's it.) You talk until the wee hours of the morning, on the phone or in person. You learn who that person is -- their idiosyncrasies, beliefs, reactions. You're in love.


* Sometimes things work out, sometimes they don't. Sometimes you will become obsessed with an album and put so much time into listening to it, that you become burned out and tired of it. Sometimes you know when to quit listening to the album before such burn out occurs -- a preemptive dismissal. Such a dismissal is not always bad, and sometimes leads to a friendship later on down the road with that album. And maybe -- if you're lucky -- this will be the album that stays with you. The one that makes the cut and fulfills you for the rest of your life. (Though I'm only guessing that that can happen, as I have not yet found an album that has made such a cut.)

(Liz Janes's Done Gone Fire is amazing.)

Orson Welles made Citizen Kane when he was 24. Man. To be accomplished at 24. Must be nice. I'm still working on my undergrad.

Nirvana?

I'm writing this because it's not like I have three tests this week I should be studying for right now. (I do.)

Tonight I was driving to Atlanta from Wedowee, AL. (I dog-sat this weekend for my parents.) I had my iPod on shuffle and, apparently, it had this conspiracy going to only play the saddest songs on there. Or songs that had strong memories attached to them. So I spent most of my drive fast-forwarding to the next song.

Until I reached Nirvana. That's right. I landed on "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?" and I belted it out at the top (and I mean TOP) of my lungs. It felt so good to sing really loud (yeah, it was dark outside when I was driving), and to remember all of the words, and to remember when Kurt takes a breath. (Okay, yeah, no doubt about it. I was obsessed with Nirvana when I was younger. But I wasn't one of those kids who wore the Kurt Cobain t-shirts or cried over his death. I did read his biography, though.)

So I listened to Nirvana the rest of the ride home. And it was really interesting to me to think of how I've changed since I used to listen to them so much. I've liked Nirvana since I was in the 6th grade. 1994. Twelve years. I thought of all the things I had done since then -- places I had been, people I had met, ways I have changed -- over those twelve years. I thought of how I hadn't changed, how I maybe should've changed. I thought of events in my life that haven't happened yet, and I wondered if I will still like Nirvana when and if those events ever do occur.

I mean, I know it's an odd way to think of the past and the future -- through a band. But songs have such strong memories for me. I can remember riding the ferry from Seattle to Bainbridge Island, watching the Puget Sound go by, as I sat in the car and listened to Nevermind. Twelve years ago. Man. What will I be doing twelve years from now? What will you be doing?