--> [26 Feb 2009|01:03pm] Late February and the freeways are empty abandoned like paths cleared by modern war tanks in some other hemisphere. Still, I drive the speed limit in all the clear. Our sister’s breath fogs the windshield and I obsess my mouth on a piece of gum like a sergeant exercising his jaw for a heavy drill. When we arrive your wife greets us with polite silence her body language as impermeable as Morse code in a foreign language I greet her with a limp salute a girlish, timid wave. And then I see you seated at your new couch the one you didn’t realize you owned until you came home last week. I didn’t realize how combat could change a face and limbs until you reach for me and cloak me with your massive arms strong as sterilized metal. Your profile’s hardened into some noble visage like one stamped on coins or medals. We sit and talk about decades that came before this moment And before this war that at this moment seems to belong to no one except you and others bearing this like you. Later, after you’ve returned to duty I sit in the kitchen watching TV and an explosion goes off. In me, a detonation has been ticking since you first left (the chemicals waiting for a spark to ignite the stagnant scorching innerness.) It is the realization that every day you are forced awake a wide-eyed alive, to possibly bow out of this beating art, while I sit in this particular hemisphere hardly hearing the trill of my heart. -on leave. rocio anica. 2 ♥ ?

[31 Oct 2008|05:34pm] Today the universe is splendid-- Without death, without hope, without brides, We are grooms of a horse drunk on wine, Galloping beaneath this divine iron sky. Like two angels who scrub an implacable stain from Morning's blue crystalline sky: That which follows the mirage follows until its logical end. We are delicately balanced on the blade Of an intelligent turbine or A delirious prallel circuit, but you, My love, swaying from side to side, know We are without rest, endlessly without rest, And close to the paradise of my dreams. -charles baudelaire. lovers' wine.

[01 Oct 2008|10:10pm] I HEART TRAISTER. (And I'll always be bitter for Clinton.)

[06 Jul 2008|10:00pm] Pepperberg, who is fifty-nine years old, has imposing cheekbones and an abundance of long, dark hair; she wears smoky eye makeup, short skirts, and an armful of silver bangles. In Wheaton, she quietly worked the crowd into a pleasurable state of shared outrage. At one point, she said that colleagues had admonished her, “Birds can’t do what you say he can do. They just don’t have the brainpower.” Linnea Faris, a woman from Michigan who was wearing a “Remember Alex” T-shirt, shook her head in disbelief. Faris told me, “My husband doesn’t really understand it. I can’t fully explain it myself. But I’ve spent hours crying over that damn bird.” She went on, “People used to think birds weren’t intelligent. Well, they used to think women weren’t intelligent, either. They talked about the smaller circumference of our skulls as though it made us inferior to men! You know what? They were wrong on both counts.” -margaret talbot. birdbrain.

i'm sure you've already seen this, j-man. [13 May 2008|07:36pm] [ mood | todaytodaytodaytodaylastday ]

[08 May 2008|04:31pm] Two people dying I assumed with no more preparedness than I, recently and by accident said how they'd like to go. For each a party and for one, people wearing balloons on their heads in the shapes of sheep or famous buildings and for the other, everyone with kazoos all at once buzzing like mosquitoes have put on weight and cerebellums and for both, the old, the resurrected freedom with drugs and booze and sex in alcoves and if not in a house with alcoves, builders at the party who are fast and alcove wise. What a strange thing, I thought, to plan while alive the festivities of being dead. But these sounded like such hootenannies that I wanted my friends to drink more and drive more, to jump better from bridges and get on with the crossing over so I could miss them drunkenly, tenderly, with off-key singing to bagpipes that show up at wakes in these parts with the potato salad. On a day when I've had two bananas and decided because of this head start that whoever eats the most bananas lives the longest, I'm sure I'll be the last to go and no one will come to my party except people who cry for a living. So I'm taking pictures of you and you and having them blown up to the size of your actual hips and looking strange with your hair parted in the middle, and recording you and you saying how great I smelled and "here's to you, man" while looking out the back window at the shirtless clothesline, and this looking sounds like nothing on the tape, like air talking to itself, but I hear how wistful that nothing is every night when I play how much you'll miss me under my pillow to my left ear, which is still afraid of the bottomless hole of sleep. -bob hicok. the most bananas.

[08 May 2008|04:15pm] i better get an A plusplusplus :)

[25 Apr 2008|04:01am] 1. We’ll say, late at night, or just before it is dawn: If only God knew how awful it is we’ll feel, surely, then, God wouldn’t make us suffer as horribly as this. Though, perhaps, after all, God doesn’t know the whole of our tale. Or, perhaps, after all, God is powerless, too, or, perhaps, God is simply the God deep within us . . . Yes, so deep within us, God is what it is we’ll suffer, as well. 2. Brecht wrote, in old age, a little poem about happiness, which, he confessed, had eluded him all of his life. And so he stated wryly, if pitifully: It had better hurry up, at last, if happiness, you know, is ever to be mine, because, you see, so little time, of course, is left. -robert mazzocco. cronus.

[14 Apr 2008|10:39am] yup.

[11 Apr 2008|11:11am] One of the reasons the series was such a big hit was that it accurately reflected the vertiginous gobbling--of cocktails, of clothing, of sex--that was the status quo for American women of means by the turn of the millennium. Carrie sailed around town with shopping bags on her arm, a condom in her purse, and a little gold Playboy bunny pendant twinkling on her neck. The ethos of the show was all about women getting themselves the best and the most, sexually and materially. They were unapologetically selfish, and civic-mindedness was scoffed at. Carrie didn't vote; in one episode Samantha told another character, "I don't believe in the Republican party or the Democratic party... I just believe in parties." The only time in the series Carrie was confronted with the prospect of doing something for charity, she dismissed the idea as ludicrous. (A do-gooder asked if Carrie would consider teaching writing to disadvantaged students and Carrie snapped, "I write about sex. Is that something they'd like to learn, these kids, writing about blow jobs?") Sex and the City's idea of giving back was more in line with the Bush Administration's prescription to the nation after 9/11: The best thing you can do for your fellow man and your country is to shop till you drop. ...The protagonist of Sex and the City often thought more about the way she was experienced than about what she was experiencing. She usually "couldn't help but wonder" what was going on in the head of the man she was seeing, and rarely evaluated her own happiness as such. In an early episode she said, "I actually catch myself posing" around her love interest, Mr. Big; "it's exhausting." The idea of women measuring men's interest instead of thinking about their own satisfaction lived on after Sex and the City went off the air in a best-selling self-help book called He's Just Not That Into You (2004), authored by a former writer and consultant of the show. This book, which Oprah Winfrey called "true liberation" and felt "should be on every woman's night table," displayed in its very title a prioritizing of mind-reading over feeling. "Many women have said to me, 'Greg, men rule the world,'" writes author Greg Behrendt. "Wow. That makes us sound pretty capable. So tell me, why would you think we were incapable of something as simple as picking up the phone and asking you out? You seem to think at times that we're 'too shy' or we 'just got out of something.' Let me remind you: Men find it very satisfying to get what they want. (Particularly after a difficult day of running the world.) If we want you, we will find you." Women generally find it pretty satisfying to get what they want too, but He's Just Not That Into You is not about what women want. (And somehow that is true women's liberation.) Sex and the City was great entertainment, but it was a flawed guide to empowerment, which is how many women viewed it. -ariel levy. female chauvinist pigs: women and the rise of raunch culture.

[10 Apr 2008|03:45pm] It was the beginning of April, when the primroses are in bloom, and a warm wind blows over the flower- beds newly turned, and the gardens, like women, seem to be getting ready for the summer fêtes. Through the bars of the arbour and away beyond, the river seen in the fields, meandering through the grass in wandering curves. The evening vapours rose between the leafless poplars, touching their outlines with a violet tint, paler and more transparent than a subtle gauze caught athwart their branches. In the distance cattle moved about; neither their steps nor their lowing could be heard; and the bell, still ringing through the air, kept up its peaceful lamentation. With this repeated tinkling the thoughts of the young woman lost themselves in old memories of her youth and school-days. She remembered the great candlesticks that rose above the vases full of flowers on the altar, and the tabernacle with its small columns. She would have liked to be once more lost in the long line of white veils, marked off here and there by the stuff black hoods of the good sisters bending over their prie-Dieu. At mass on Sundays, when she looked up, she saw the gentle face of the Virgin amid the blue smoke of the rising incense. Then she was moved; she felt herself weak and quite deserted, like the down of a bird whirled by the tempest, and it was unconsciously that she went towards the church, included to no matter what devotions, so that her soul was absorbed and all existence lost in it. -gustave flaubert. madame bovary. But what interests me most in "Madame Bovary" is the heroine's fondness for reading. She dies because she has attempted to make her life into a novel -- and it is the foolishness of that quest that Flaubert's clinical style mocks. A novelist mocking a heroine besotted by novels? Then this must be a writer mocking himself! And indeed, Flaubert memorably said that he had drawn Madame Bovary from life -- and after himself. "I have dissected myself to the quick," he wrote. Emma Bovary is deluded by literature. Because she is in search of ecstasy and transcendence, she falls madly in love with a cad, then with a coward, ignoring the plodding husband and child who both adore her. She is looking for a higher, more spiritual life than the one available to her as the wife of a bourgeois country doctor, and in this quest she finds only self-destruction. We identify with her because we too look to fantasy for salvation. If Emma Bovary, with all her self-delusion, still stirs our hearts, it is because she wants something authentic and important: for her life to have meaning, for her life to bring transcendence. "In 'Madame Bovary,'" says Vargas-Llosa, "we see the first signs of alienation that a century later will take hold of men and women in industrial societies (the women above all, owing to the life they are obliged to live): consumption as an outlet for anxiety, the attempt to people with objects the emptiness that modern life has made a permanent feature of the existence of the individual. Emma's drama is the gap between illusion and reality, the distance between desire and its fulfillment. On two occasions she is persuaded that adultery can give her the splendid life that her imagination strains toward, and both times she is left feeling 'bitterly disappointed.'" -erica jong. fiction victim.

[07 Apr 2008|12:11am] As months and years accumulate, I miss you more and more. Forgetting where I put the key, I sometimes find a door and other times feel stunned and lost, though living in my own body and life, presumably, bewildered and alone as the knight, kidnapped and released to a dim world, who said And I awoke and found me here on the cold hill side. -rachel hadas. the cold hill side.

[03 Apr 2008|11:06pm] After the world wars, the powers-that-be got it in their heads that everything had to be pristine white to instill a sense of cleanliness in the minds and hearts of those in the United States. Whitewash covered every part of society, from uniforms and clothing, to architectural structures, to modern conveniences and appliances, right down to the foods we eat. Across the board, white was right, and brown caused a frown.  Manufacturers of grains and sugars also began bleaching and polishing their foods to make them appear better and healthier to consumers, in addition to giving them a slightly longer shelf life. In the process, they stripped items such as flour, rice, and sugar of their vital nutrients, fiber, and bran, all of which made these foods beneficial in some way to our diet. No nutritional benefits were added during all this bleaching and refining, only negatives.  We need bran, fiber, and other naturally present nutrients. Our insides are color-blind and don't care if a product is white or brown in color, just that it is wholesome and gives us the fuel we need to keep us up and running like a well-oiled machine. -beverly lynn bennet & ray sammartano. the complete idiot's guide to vegan living.

[02 Apr 2008|08:18am] [ mood | pressed ] I am in awe of what I feel about you if I let myself feel. I have no argument with it. I want to go on with this marvel of not having to disguise a thing: I’ve gotten wise, they used to say in my parents’ generation in another style, as wise moved along over time getting smaller and smaller, farther outside, and outsized. Like the music I used to run from the room from as soon as it started to wail from the hi-fi before I was ever in love, eager for the outside opinion. Desires change over time, and myself, I am in awe, and disguise one thing. -elizabeth macklin. wise.

[30 Mar 2008|12:17pm] i will bike down the street hard and fast and sweaty. i will stick my thumb out and jump in when something happens because of it. today was a good day, a good crystalline, washed day that i probably won't think about ever again for the rest of my life. nothing happened except that i led myself around quietly, angrily, longingly, you know, like i always do, and everything went unnoticed. everything always goes unnoticed with me, except the past. i'm always in my head, my head only holds what's already happened. it should, probably, hold solutions and possibilites, goals and optimism, but it doesn't. someday, soon, i'll turn to my soulmate and tell him he's just that. he can't be my soulmate currently because my head doesn't, or can't, hold him, as he wasn't my soulmate BEFORE and therefore needs to be specially accomodated. thank god i make sense today. -a neurotic, in love. rocio anica.

[30 Mar 2008|12:01pm] The death and uncertainty that await me as they await all men, the shadows evaluating me because it can take time to destroy a human being, the element of suspense needs to be preserved— On Sundays I walk my neighbor’s dog so she can go to church to pray for her sick mother. The dog waits for me in the doorway. Summer and winter we walk the same road, early morning, at the base of the escarpment. Sometimes the dog gets away from me—for a moment or two, I can’t see him behind some trees. He’s very proud of this, this trick he brings out occasionally, and gives up again as a favor to me— Afterward, I go back to my house to gather firewood. I keep in my mind images from each walk: monarda growing by the roadside; in early spring, the dog chasing the little gray mice so for a while it seems possible not to think of the hold of the body weakening, the ratio of the body to the void shifting, and the prayers becoming prayers for the dead. Midday, the church bells finished. Light in excess: still, fog blankets the meadow, so you can’t see the mountain in the distance, covered with snow and ice. When it appears again, my neighbor thinks her prayers are answered. So much light she can’t control her happiness— it has to burst out in language. Hello, she yells, as though that is her best translation. She believes in the Virgin the way I believe in the mountain, though in one case the fog never lifts. But each person stores his hope in a different place. I make my soup, I pour my glass of wine. I’m tense, like a child approaching adolescence. Soon it will be decided for certain what you are, one thing, a boy or girl. Not both any longer. And the child thinks: I want to have a say in what happens. But the child has no say whatsoever. When I was a child, I did not foresee this. Later, the sun sets, the shadows gather, rustling the low bushes like animals just awake for the night. Inside, there’s only firelight. It fades slowly; now only the heaviest wood’s still flickering across the shelves of instruments. I hear music coming from them sometimes, even locked in their cases. When I was a bird, I believed I would be a man. That’s the flute. And the horn answers, When I was a man, I cried out to be a bird. Then the music vanishes. And the secret it confides in me vanishes also. In the window, the moon is hanging over the earth, meaningless but full of messages. It’s dead, it’s always been dead, but it pretends to be something else, burning like a star, and convincingly, so that you feel sometimes it could actually make something grow on earth. If there’s an image of the soul, I think that’s what it is. I move through the dark as though it were natural to me, as though I were already a factor in it. Tranquil and still, the day dawns. On market day, I go to the market with my lettuces. -louise glück. a village life.

[13 Mar 2008|01:22am] Thus, bower building provides a comprehensive test of male genes. It’s as if women put each of their suitors in sequence through a weight-lifting contest, sewing contest, chess tournament, eye test, and boxing tournament, and finally went to bed with the winner. By comparison with bowerbirds, our efforts to identify mates with good genes are pathetic. We grasp at external bagatelles like facial features and earlobe lengths, or sex appeal and Porsche ownership, which tell nothing about intrinsic genetic worth. Think of all the human suffering caused by the sad truth that beautiful, sexy women or handsome, Porsche-owning men often prove to have miserable genes for other traits. It’s no wonder that so many marriages end in divorce, as we belatedly realize how badly we chose and how flimsy our criteria were. How did bowerbirds evolve to use art so cleverly for such important purposes? Most male birds woo females by advertising their colorful bodies, songs, displays, or offerings of food as dim indicators of good genes. Males of two groups of birds of paradise in New Guinea go one step further by clearing areas on the jungle floor, as bowerbirds do, to enhance their displays and show off their fancy plumage. Males of one of those birds of paradise have gone still further by decorating their cleared areas with objects useful to a nesting female: pieces of snakeskin to line her nest, pieces of chalk or mammal feces to eat for their minerals, and fruits to eat for their calories. Finally, bowerbirds have learned that decorative objects useless in themselves may nevertheless be useful indicators of good genes, if the objects are ones that were difficult to acquire and keep. We can easily relate to that concept. Just think of all those ads showing handsome men presenting diamond rings to seemingly fertile young women. You can’t eat a diamond ring, but a woman knows that the gift of such a ring tells far more about the resources that her suitor commands (and might devote to her offspring and herself) than a gift of a box of chocolates would tell. Yes, chocolates provide a few useful calories, but they’re quickly gone and any jerk can afford to buy them. In contrast, the man who can afford that inedible diamond ring has money to support the woman and her kids, and also has whatever genes (for intelligence, persistence, energy, etc.) that it took to acquire or hold on to the money. Thus, in the course of bowerbird evolution the female’s attention has been lured from ornaments that are permanent parts of the male’s body to ornaments that the male gathers. Whereas sexual selection in most species has produced differences between males and females in their bodily ornaments, in bowerbirds it has shifted toward causing males to emphasize collected ornaments separate from their bodies. From this perspective, bowerbirds are rather human. We, too, rarely court (or at least rarely initiate courtship) by displaying the beauties of our unadorned naked bodies. Instead, we swathe ourselves in colored cloths, spray or daub ourselves with perfumes, paints and powders, and augment our beauty with decorations ranging from jewels to sports cars. The parallel between bowerbirds and humans may be even closer if, as friends of mine who are into sports cars assure me, duller young men tend to decorate themselves with fancier sports cars. -jared diamond. the third chimpanzee.

[07 Mar 2008|12:02pm] From Dove Cottage, I sloped out through the side gate and climbed the corpse road past the coffin stone, then curved through a mixed copse to a scree path scored by rainwater into the hill’s back. I was hauled upward by a borrowed dog on a makeshift leash, a yellow Labrador, busy for every birdcall and blown leaf. Over a hand-stacked wall, in the next fold, under the driftwood bones of an old elm, a red deer had dropped down from the high fell with morning beaconed in its flaming horns. With dawn-light cradled in its branching crown. I stood in some blind spot of its dark eye, and deer and dog were still and unaware and stayed that way, divided by the wall, wild stag and hunting hound in separate worlds, before the deer pushed on through tinder thickets, igniting the next wold. And the dog yawned. Then I hacked up the ghyll to higher ground, toward the hill’s bare head, counting the dead and the hikers striding along the ridge, thinking of taking a drink from the tarn, thinking of adding a new stone to the cairn. -simon armitage. the candlelighter.

[27 Feb 2008|08:13am] [ mood | :( ] It's little I care what path I take, And where it leads it's little I care; But out of this house, lest my heart break, I must go, and off somewhere. It's little I know what's in my heart, What's in my mind it's little I know, But there's that in me must up and start, And it's little I care where my feet go. I wish I could walk for a day and a night, And find me at dawn in a desolate place With never the rut of a road in sight, Nor the roof of a house, nor the eyes of a face. -edna st. vincent millay. departure.

[26 Feb 2008|06:52pm] [ mood | hopeful ] Today I pass the time reading a favorite haiku, saying the few words over and over. It feels like eating the same small, perfect grape again and again. I walk through the house reciting it and leave its letters falling through the air of every room. I stand by the big silence of the piano and say it. I say it in front of a painting of the sea. I tap out its rhythm on an empty shelf. I listen to myself saying it, then I say it without listening, then I hear it without saying it. And when the dog looks up at me, I kneel down on the floor and whisper it into each of his long white ears. It's the one about the one-ton temple bell with the moth sleeping on its surface, and every time I say it, I feel the excruciating pressure of the moth on the surface of the iron bell. When I say it at the window, the bell is the world and I am the moth resting there. When I say it at the mirror, I am the heavy bell and the moth is life with its papery wings. And later, when I say it to you in the dark, you are the bell, and I am the tongue of the bell, ringing you, and the moth has flown from its line and moves like a hinge in the air above our bed. -billy collins. japan.

i nominate him for president, among other things. [24 Feb 2008|12:16am] [ mood | almost too in awe ]

[18 Feb 2008|10:12pm] Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. --f. scott fitzgerald. the great gasby.

[13 Feb 2008|09:16pm] My love is a big love It extends itself from this confused hemisphere to the next tucking itself beneath the edges of oceans and seas I do not pledge allegiance to the republic of human nature ruling over a mound of dirt sand and dust witless of the many who’ve foot-stepped it but my love embraces embankments and minerals and elements and is more than happy to wash the feet of those who enter her home My love bows generous bows when it encounters women and men passing by with colorless parrots and fuchsia parrots on each shoulder which mimic each other lively frozen undone I was born with this love. I was not born with this rage which contains itself in a cage that snaps open and shut through no fault of my own and lets fly this wrath which flaps its wings even out of this atmosphere to watch from above the worried hole in the ozone biting its lip hearing the language shredded into shrapnel shooting from the mouths of millenarian men who insist on breaking bone over something started centuries too soon enough Some hide the women beneath fabric and underneath fabrics of insecurity which are laundered timidly with soap from some forgotten factory in which all are happy for the receipt of a daily penny. My rabid animal of feeling sits atop buildings and watches concrete shatter into powder and people in uniform with wide wet eyes running to or from something It seethes when it sees talking heads singing in the opera of cacophony in which all the heroes are taking a feverish itchy nap. Someday soon a wedding will occur and everyone will wear their best harmonious to watch my love kiss my rage into action into something other than passion to show it a reason to fight. -a lovely rage. rocio anica.

[11 Feb 2008|11:04pm] I think it will be winter when he comes. From the unbearable whiteness of the road a dot will emerge, so black that eyes will blur, and it will be approaching for a long, long time, making his absence commensurate with his coming, and for a long, long time it will remain a dot. A speck of dust? A burning in the eye? And snow, there will be nothing else but snow, and for a long, long while there will be nothing, and he will pull away the snowy curtain, he will acquire size and three dimensions, he will keep coming closer, closer . . . This is the limit, he cannot get closer. But he keeps approaching, now too vast to measure . . . —— If there is something to desire, there will be something to regret. If there is something to regret, there will be something to recall. If there is something to recall, there was nothing to regret. If there was nothing to regret, there was nothing to desire. —— Let us touch each other while we still have hands, palms, forearms, elbows . . . Let us love each other for misery, torture each other, torment, disfigure, maim, to remember better, to part with less pain. —— We are rich: we have nothing to lose. We are old: we have nowhere to rush. We shall fluff the pillows of the past, poke the embers of the days to come, talk about what means the most, as the indolent daylight fades. We shall lay to rest our undying dead: I shall bury you, you will bury me. -vera pavlova. four poems.

--> [30 Jan 2008|03:39pm] I. At my birth women had yet to be flung over shoulders of weaponed men with warrior temperature I was pounded out on lips of elders They worshipped deities with hands cupping clay When I was a toddler they moved me East and West at the same time and before long my names carried with them every sound an orchestra of the tongue music so fluid I gave my name to all These days you take me and wash me in the dull water of your generation’s shallow well II. At my birth I came out shrieking and never stopped Sometimes still I shriek a music an orchestra of the eyes and ears music so livid I could boil my tears with it could stream-clean my heart When I was a toddler I tried on my mother’s plastic heels wearing my father’s polyester pants and then turned to flashing music and TV screens These days you can take me and hold me to the sky pinning me to your laundry line to bask in the sun -what poetry said, and i replied. rocio anica. ?

[27 Jan 2008|09:16pm] on a clear january morning, jose javier drove his happy, devoted wife and all of his daughters through the hills of gavilan. the views from the worn, generous curves of back road, sketched around lake mathews, drew their breaths as jose javier elegantly maneuvered the swoop of the winding, altitudinous road. because of the massive rains, all of the incoming, westward fog, usually trapped into the inland valley by the mountains, had diseappeared, leaving a stunning image of clarity in which even the offensively repetetive and cheap architecture of the foreground could not affect the dignity of the background: the tall, laqcuered mountains, the brazen clouds and light. this is what drew their breaths. the oldest of the daughters watched all of this majesty from the backseat, making note of all the greenery that hadn't existed before. there was greenery now everywhere; on even the furthest hills, barely visible to the eye, were layers of grass shying out of the brown dirt. she knew how thick the green had become, having driven herself past each band of once-barren hills scattered throughout this city. she had observed that she could not remember grass ever growing on any of them. this city, built within a vast race-track, too, had grown overnight. what metaphorical symmetry, she mused. later, after they arrived at the local farm, she would sit with her family, tasting the locally-vinted wine and listening to the musicians settled by one corner of the pond, and she would continue expanding this parallel. the shocking, miserable rain showers, which had kept her indoors for days straight, had been able to coax the arid, stubborn dirt into elegance. she could think of other things that were shocking, miserable and kept her indoors for days straight. would they, she wondered, provocate something stunning? she marveled. there was only one answer.

[04 Jan 2008|10:46pm] for the longest time, i was under the impression that there were alot of people in the world. i would gather this foggy, aloof, noncommittal number through passing data: a newscaster would proclaim that for every one of 2 million cars in los angeles, there were two people; new york is the most dense population in the US, and at 8.something, that's a whole lot of dense; i would hear that india, second populous country, has a third of the world's poverty, etc. i figured, ok, LA's got some millions in her pocket, but New York is, clearly, the high roller at 8.something, and india is working the janitor shift, apparently, but, you know, if nobody's in antartica or canada, most of the people have to be in india. yeah, i know, there's london, milan, paris, tokyo and all the other places my shoes come from when they don't cost two dollars to produce, like places in china and latin america. but then i would just multipy each of those cities by new york's number, and i'd leave it at that. so nothing prepared me for the number i discovered was the actual total global population. the number i thought was probably-alot-of-people turned out to be so-many-i-can't-even-fit-it-in-my-mouth-to-say. i'd thought that if you were ever to add everybody who'd ever been alive plus the people who are living now you'd get half of the total GP of 6.6 billion people. and the only reason that stunned me was that, fuck the fact that i'm stupid, it completely alters everything i'd ever been told about everybody in the universe. 1/3 of the world's poverty suddenly becomes something to sit down and evaluate and feel really _____ about. and U.S.'s really,like,um,reallydenselypopulated city doesn't seem like a thing worth mentioning after all. i mean, the only times i ever came across the word 'billion' were in terms of money. some billionaires here, some billions spent in Iraq, etc. and though the context of money would seem to some like the only time to ever mention anything, it shocks me that even with all the enlightening information about the world out there to be digested, processed, and worked-upon, there is still that thing that reflects just how much we value a dollar more than the person next to us. and, i guess, i'm intellectually-convulsing because i didn't even know there were that many people next to us/me. i mean, even, you, i didn't know you were alive. and, then, just think about all the people next to me/you/us who are going to get married. and have babies. so, you know, what i did upon receipt of this disturbing, liberating news: i celebrated the glamour of my life through a lengthy destruction of myself and everything i've ever touched. i went on a month-and-a-half-long campaign to double the size of my shoe and bag collection. i sent a big, hearty fuck-you to the ozone as i took to the most interesting parts of southern california. i ate alot of animal DNA-mignon. i drank bottle after bottle of Moët & Chandon, until i became sick and sad like i knew i would, and, like i knew, i will never do that shit with a straight face ever again. i just needed to stay in the bubble for a second longer before i, finally, finally let myself begin to start to think about possibly someday soon growing up. i don't mean to say i felt bad for driving all those vast, verdant spaces of well-paved road that connect one urban area to the next gentrified urban area (i'm thinking orange county, angelenos); because all i wanted was to nod my head to others, to say 'hey. i know you are here, and it's kind of rare to see you, and those fat, happy squirrels and clean trashcans with my own eyes, when you think about how, statistically speaking, if you were to divide me by 6.6 billion and then count the odds against the real me actully ending up back here again, this whole experience might be labeled something short of a miracle. so, hey.' walking into a chloé or chanel and actually being treated like i belong there by simply flashing my watch was just something i had to try at least once, right? shut up, if you're saying no; you're probably a guy. ok, well, i'm probably trying to justify now, but i did mean to document a genuine catharsis here. something has arrived here, embraced me, and let me let go. but it's not that love thing, though. i can't seem to fucking shake it.

--> [10 Dec 2007|01:41pm] Today I felt it with my mouth— a covert hope It was the longest sentence It bedded my tongue I took it out of my mouth To feel it with a trembling hand I moved my fingers over its young skin Willing it to whisper back in the dim The shape of what you and I are trying not to say is like a number that finds its physicality on the negative line It exists yet doesn’t I could chart it on a graph an ignorant slope that dips itself into a happy smile that knows not yet it is a frown -the shape of a hope. rocio anica. ?

--> [02 Apr 2007|12:51pm] My lips are moving lips. They take what you say press it between themselves and give you back something darker bitter better. My lips are imperial lips. whatever fruit they see they besiege and keep for ransom until the memory of the sweetness belongs to me. My lips are kissing lips. when they see you they curve into a curl like a fingering beckoning you closer like a girl arching her back on a velvet bed. -my lips. rocio anica. ?

[09 Feb 2007|09:26pm] universe, hello--again. very quickly, here to relay a painfully recent conversation i had with one st. m.f. valentine. act I. scene I. dark guest bedroom, 1:30 a.m. rocio: wh-whyy??? (pause) have you no shame? at this very difficult time in my life? i really wish that you would get out of my face. m.f.v.: listen, lady, take a goddamned number. why won't people stop affixing their misery to me; i've got two teenaged kids, medical bills up the wazoo, my girlfriend wants me to leave my wife, and people forget that i got picked for this job only because the catholic church made me bleed to death for being a chrustian, so don't make things harder on the both of us just because yyyour-- rocio: ohno, you almost di'int. m.f.v.: i'm just saying, is all. you really have your whole gorgeous life ahead of you. 21! you shouldn't cry so hard over someone who wouldn't give you what you really needed. you've been crying about this for months now. rocio: well. (sniffle) ...i am pretty gorgeous, aren't i? m.f.v.: not right now, you aren't, no. (smiling, rocio slumps down under the bedcovers completely. a long, meditative silence follows.) m.f.v.: one word, little lady. cathexis. rocio: cathexis. m.f.v.: cathexis. think of all forms of grief like the disengagement of cathexis; you're gonna be ok. rocio: so, okay, but, where does that leave me wednesday night, then? m.f.v.: about wednesday, i think you should become a lakers fan. that'll solve that problem. rocio: and, the rest of my life? m.f.v.: well, you know what they say. living well is the best revenge. (blackout)

[27 Nov 2006|08:06pm] In a place that is somewhere between my unreliable brain and my leaky heart, I contain a language only I speak. Sometimes I utter it in fragments when I'm by myself, or it comes out in the form of blood on a bitten lip. I contort my face to express it; I whistle, hum, or sing it; other times, I just curl up into a ball and cry it out. This is what I've been doing lately. It is what I'm doing now. I do it in spite of my mother, who told me crying is for pussies. I do it because, after I've calmed down, I feel like I ran a marathon or orgasmed. I do it because it is self-indulgent and human. And 'cuz I'm scared for the future and the apocalypse that will take us all down in the form of artificially intelligent advertisements and stubborn medication and, for sure, Republicans will be involved somehow in the fell swoop that will show the empty space succeeding us exactly what we were capable of. And I'm repentant for every bad thing I ever done when I'm down on m'knees, like, when I ignore my well-meaning family or am bitchy to waiters who inform me they HAVE no fruit in the kitchen. And I pour it all out, like I'm dying, for the cracks of human imperfection I see in the eyes and words belonging to the people I love. And the people surrounding them. And finally, me. The thing to do next is to make some sort of decision, and be done with it. I like to think that even though I sometimes suck and am unstable, as pointed out by people who have seen me naked, I deserve love? To feel loved and affection? Like the feel-good-kind of connection that is so tangible you can decorate it with chocolate frosting? Do I wait and hope it'll come from Mr. X, who wants to show-me-da-loving but "can't right now" even though I'm "the love of [his] life", or do I start all over again with someone I haven't yet met? My friends tell me I should R-U-N? Any decision, my friends, will give me peace for now, but: my off-key heart is very, very blind. In other news, S. Korea plans to kill cats and dogs to prevent a mass bird flu epidemic, in spite of the fact that no one knows if they can spread it. Yeah. I cried for this, too.

--> [31 Oct 2006|11:03pm] i've always kept an on-going list of novels/short stories/poems/essays i've read, but only recently have i found it necessary to make a list of books-&-stuff i've read and hate a lot. i need evidence my critical, arrogant eye is doing its glorious work. since i really should have started this list a long time ago i'll just start wherever the hell i want and continue in unchronological order. :( girl's guide to hunting and fishing by melissa bank the lovely bones by alice sebold tender buttons by gertrude stein envy by kathryn chetkovich the nanny diaries by two very talentless women who obviously never read jane eyre i really want to put a man on that list but i've got too much homework right now. sorry, ladies. next time. ?

[25 Oct 2006|09:12pm] i bought the beyonce album online. gradually, i am shifting my attentions to the lowbrow from the obscurebrow, in order to achieve an unprecedented level of everythingbrow. but, anyway, so i bought the b'day album because, of all the nuanced degrees on the continuum of human emotions, everything she sings belongs to a combination of her being happy and confident or not happy and confident. she is never ironic or confused about what she wants or feeling meaningless or even wondering where she's gonna live next. if she loves someone, she aims to give her all, no fronting, and is happy; if a man does her wrong she says 'you're so replaceable, get the hell out' because she's bootylicious and knows it, so that's kinda nice and absolute and not at all subtle. my only problem is that i don't exactly know which of those songs i should be making into my anthems right now. i don't think i'm ready, actually, for this jelly. last night, while slouched low in my chair out in the patio of pete's cafe, tapping, with the toe of my highheel, the one leg of the little table holding my wine glass, puffing cigarette smoke up into the orange street-lamp glow, i felt it. the streets and the facades of their buildings were clean and fake-looking, as if we weren't all a block away from skid-row; i thought, so this is the old bank district in downtown, on the west coast, of america, during the first decade of the new millenium, during wartime. i live here. i write. i am growing up, exponentially. this person across the table is my good friend. i have several other good friends. i ask questions. i've opinions. my voice gets clearer and less hesitant. my emotions are unreined horses; stallions, specifically. my wrists are thin, they carry dozens and dozens of silverish bangles; a shimmery, noisy unit of many, which i call 'my life force.' my responsibility is to stay true, to love the people in my life. get rid of anyone who doesn't treat you well. get well. more well, still. what is more fragile than the present moment? the fine line between disappointment and regret. the way to avoid regret is to treat the present moment like a last chance: ohhhp! last chance to smile at someone!, last chance to firmly shake hands, last chance to sneak in that juicy kiss MUAH, last chance to say 'good night, mi amor', uhoh! last chance to ask for that internship, yuck last chance to admit i'm wrong, last chance to work a little bit longer, and eeeep! last chance to email my brother in Iraq, last chance to edit that story an extra bit more, last chance to tell someone i love them, etc. i can't change other people's emotions, i can't make anyone want to rebuild an old friendship, but i can certainly do what it takes to live life out so that i may feel nothing worse than disappointment when the fine line presents itself. i am getting closer and closer to knowing what i want, and i'm developing a plan that will help me get there. the world is moving and changing so fast, and life is so much shorter than we ever thought it would be, as we played it out in scenarios on the playground (ok, this is the fire, and you have to rescue the baby who is trapped, up there on the monkey bars); my point is, i don't want to play it safe, not in this crazy, senseless world. it's all too fleeting to not risk more, to not ask more of myself. that's all for now :)

[18 Jul 2006|06:15pm] Being young and green, I said in love's despite: Never in the world will I to living wight Give over, air my mind To anyone, Hang out its ancient secrets in the strong wind To be shredded and faded.... Oh, me, invaded And sacked by the wind and the sun! -edna st. vincent millay. being young and green.

[14 Jul 2006|04:04pm] i'm gonna tell you some things and i need you to stay with me. ok, so, i have that rare ability to graciously tolerate unpleasant company the way most people can't. i have a sense of humor but i take things very literally so it often appears like i don't have a good sense of humor or like i'm a stupid person. i wish i could re-wire my brain so that i may catch sarcasm the way most people can or interpret things more easily but i can't and, thus, conversations are incredibly painful. conversations i engage in are painful, conversations i overhear are painful, and those that exist without my physical presence are most painful of all. my imagination cannot handle the burden of imagining what people are really like when i'm not around, that's all. i mention this because last night was one of those rare moments when i desperately wished the person i was speaking to was pulling my leg. what happened was this: i got into an argument with an older man about the film and book "the hours". he claimed both works sucked and were about absolutely nothing, and insisted the godfather trilogy was way better, specifically, because it was more universal. i told him that a man does not win a pulitzer for writing about nothing, but i agreed the godfather movies were very good and i respected his opinion of them. however, the themes found in godfather, such as family and stuff, are as universal as the struggle for individual expression and creativity, which i believe "the hours" was about. this sparked a heated debate, because he felt a movie should only be considered great art if it captures the human condition beautifully. i did not say it aloud, but i realized that because "the hours" did not feature straight men shooting guns at each other he was incapable of caring about the female/homosexual struggle that is so, um, relevant to the human experience. i did say the following, however: women, as half of the human species, are kinda, sorta, you know, important, kinda. so it is crucial to remember that, since women tend to not shoot each other in the face because of socialization and other tricky things that keep us in our place, female narratives are different than male narratives. it took me five minutes to convince him. but then he offered me this gem: "you women won!" we got suffrage and property and independence, so, you know (shrug). after trying to persuade him that we still have a long way to go before we can all truly treat each other equally (thereby winning the fight for equality), i tried to get the last word before dinner by stating that women are simply still oppressed underneath all the pretty, shiny laws that state otherwise, and are a minority. he countered that there are more women than men, and more women in college than men so, technically, men are the minority. "as a sociological term, you're wrong," i repeated. he cried, lies! in the year 2006, no one is oppressed! oppression is a myth! i almost cried. bitter tears. but, you know what, after the conversation, i still liked the man. he's alright by me, you know; refer to the second sentence of this entry. the real reason i'm writing this down is because, for the remainder of the night, due to my brain wiring, literal interpretation of things, and my gracious, well-meaning seriousness, i actually questioned my position on things. not that i'm always right, but i'm all shook up because, for a second, things got crazy in my head. i was all, if most believe in myths, then i probably do too. are things really more equal than i think? who fed me this shit? who fed Old Man his shit? have i eaten more than he? was my plate more nutritious or am i fattening up on empty carbs? where's the damned menu? can i please have an order of objective salad, hold the crazy? they don't make that? where's the beef troof? bring me the strongest nightcap you have, stat, i want to blackout till closing time because i see now there's a fork in my hand, everybody around me has a fork in their hand, there are no entrees made with truth, just beef, and i don't see any exit signs. once, when we were tiny, we were spoon-fed by bigger hands until we could handle our own silverware, but that was a long time ago for me. i should've thrown my fork down and violently rubbed my face in the food, like those people at that table, or used my hands like those people over there. some people refuse to eat, like those at the bar, staring at the television. fuck. who brought me here to Chez Terre? i can't undo any of this; not my past meals or all the calories or digestion or bathroom breaks, the food poisonings, alcohol consumption, and chocolate; not the fingers down my throat or moments of pure gluttony and, least of all, my bowed head and the prayers composed over steamy plates of food. i know eating is good, but some people eat the wrong things. i'd hate to be one of them. anyway, that was yesterday. today, i'm better and back to normal: i'm sure again that life and the world still suck ass in the same way as before and that, yet, somehow, both are alot of fun. you know, life and the world are kinda like unpleasant company; i dislike them in many ways yet i still find virtue in them every day.

[06 Jul 2006|07:15pm] "You're really, really, really sure this will help me?" she said. "You're really super certain this is the best thing for me?" "I 'guarantee' it," Hibbard said with a wink. "What does 'optimize' mean, though?" Enid said. "You'll feel emotionally more resilient," Hibbard said. "More flexible, more confident, happier with yourself. Your anxiety and oversensitivity will disappear, as will any morbid concern about the opinion of others. Anything you're ashamed of now--" "Yes," Enid said. "Yes." "'If it comes up, I'll talk about it; if not why mention it?' That will be your attitude. The vicious bipolarity of shame, that rapid cycling between confession and concealment-- this is a complaint of yours?" "I think you understand me." "Chemicals in your brain, Elaine. A strong urge to confess, a strong urge to conceal: What's a strong urge? A chemical change! Or maybe a structural change, but guess what. Structures are made of proteins! And what are proteins made of? Amines!" Enid had the dim worry that her church taught otherwise-- something abut Christ being both a hunk of flesh hanging from a cross and also the Son of God-- but questions of doctrine had always seemed to her forbiddenly complex, and Reverend Anderson at their church had such a kindly face and often in his sermons told jokes or quoted New Yorker cartoons or secular writers like John Updike, and he never did anything disturbing like telling the congregation that it was damned, which would have been absurd because everyone at the church was so friendly and nice, and then, too, Alfred had always pooh-poohed her faith and it was easier just to stop believing (if in fact she ever had believed) than to try to beat Alfred in a philosophical argument. Now Enid believed that when you were dead you were really dead, and Dr. Hibbard's account of things was making sense to her. Nevertheless, being a tough shopper, she said: "I'm just a dumb old midwesterner, so, but changing your personality doesn't sound right to me." She made her face long and sour to be sure her disapproval wasn't overlooked. "What's wrong with change?" Hibbard said. "Are you happy with the way you feel right now?" "Well, no, but if I'm a different person after I take this pill, if I'm different, that can't be right, and--" "Edwina, I'm completely sympathetic. We all have irrational attachments to the particular chemical coordinates of our character and temperament. It's a version of the fear of death, right? I don't know what it will be like not to be me anymore. But guess what. If 'I'm' not around to tell the difference, then what do 'I' really care? Being dead's only a problem if you know you're dead, which you never do because you're dead!" -jonathan franzen. the corrections.

[16 Jun 2006|08:19am] The older I grew the more things there were to worry about. Religion was then as important as politics are now. Would I insist on knowing more about Catholicism or would I stick to the English church? There was the business of black, white, not to say coloured. Had I ever really thought about it? Was my wariness justified? Or was my feeling 'this is not fair, not fair' nearer the truth? So as soon as I could I lost myself in the immense world of books, and tried to blot out the real world which was so puzzling to me. Even then I had a vague, persistent feeling that I'd always be lost in it, defeated. However books too were all about the same thing, I discovered, but in a different way. I could accept it in books and from books (fatally) I gradually got most of my ideas and beliefs. The old Victoria Memorial Library had been pulled down and there was a new Carnegie Library in its place. It was very pleasant, usually empty. Sitting in a rocking-chair on the veranda, lost in what I thought was the real world, no one could have been happier than I was. My one ambition was to plunge into it and forget everything else. No one ever advised me what to read or forbade me to read something. I even looked at the rare and curious shelf but I don't remember any of it making much impression. I liked books about prostitutes, there were a good many then, and vividly recollect a novel called The Sands of Pleasure written by a man named Filson Young. It must have been well written otherwise I would never have remembered it so perfectly to this day. It was about an Englishman's love affair with an expensive demi-mondaine in Paris. I seem to brought up willy-nilly against the two sides of a question. Sometimes I ask myself if I am the only one who is; for after all, who knows or cares if there are two sides? -jean rhys. smile please: an unfinished autobiography.

[30 May 2006|11:19am] Shall I wake her up and listen to the things she says, whispers, in darkness. Not by day. 'I never wished to live before I knew you. I always thought it would be better if I died. Such a long time to wait before it's over.' 'And did you ever tell anyone this?' 'There was no one to tell, no one to listen. Oh you can't imagine Coulibri.' 'But after Coulibri?' 'After Coulibri it was too late. I did not change.' All day she'd be like any other girl, smile at herself in her looking glass (do you like this scent?), try to teach me her songs, for they haunted me. Adieu foulard, adieu madras, or Ma belle ka di maman li. My beautiful girl said to her mother (No it is not like that. Now listen. It is this way). She'd be silent, or angry for no reason, and chatter to Christophine in patois. 'Why do you hug and kiss Christophine?' I'd say. 'Why not?' 'I wouldn't hug and kiss them,' I'd say, 'I couldn't.' At this she'd laugh for a long time and never tell me why she laughed. But at night how different, even her voice was changed. Always this talk of death. (Is she trying to tell me that is the secret of this place? That there is no other way? She knows. She knows.) 'Why did you make me want to live? Why did you do that to me?' 'Because I wished it. Isn't that enough?' 'Yes, it is enough. But if one day you didn't wish it. What should I do then? Suppose you took this happiness away when I wasn't looking...' 'And lose my own? Who'd be so foolish?' 'I am not used to happiness,' she said. 'It makes me afraid.' 'Never be afraid. Or if you are tell no one.' 'I understand. But trying does not help me.' 'What would?' She did not answer that, then one night whispered, 'If I could die. Now, when I am happy. Would you do that? You wouldn't have to kill me. Say die and I will die. You don't believe me? Then try, try, say die and watch me die.' 'Die then! Die!' I watched her die many times. In my way, not in hers. In sunlight, in shadow, by moonlight, by candlelight. In the long afternoons when the house was empty. Only the sun was there to keep us company. We shut him out. And why not? Very soon she was as eager for what's called loving as I was-- more lost and drowned afterwards. -jean rhys. wide sargasso sea.

[24 Apr 2006|09:03pm] She was already questioning marriage on ethical grounds. "For me a choice is never made, it is always being made... The horror of the definitive choice, is that it engages not only the self of today, but that of tomorrow which is why basically marriage is immoral." By the age of twenty, Simone de Beauvoir had chosen a path that she increasingly realized would condemn her to loneliness. "I can't get rid of this idea that I am alone, in a world apart, being present at the other as at a spectacle," she wrote in her journal. "This morning...I passionately wished to be the girl who takes communion at morning mass and walks in a serene certainty...The Catholicism of Mauriac, of Claudel,... how it's marked me, and what place there is in me for it! And yet... I do not wish to believe: an act of faith is the most despairing act there is and I want my despair to at least keep its lucidity. I do not want to lie to myself." She sensed that for women love came at a cost, and that there was part of her that no man was ever likely to accept. "I speak mystically of love, I know the price," she wrote. "I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only myself." -hazel rowley. tete-a-tete: simone de beauvoir and jean-paul sartre.

[03 Apr 2006|10:05pm] To what purpose, April, do you return again? Beauty is not enough. You can no longer quiet me with the redness Of little leaves opening stickily. I know what I know. The sun is hot on my neck as I observe The spikes of the crocus. The smell of the earth is good. It is apparent that there is no death. But what does that signify? Not only under ground are the brains of men Eaten by maggots. Life in itself Is nothing, An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs. It is not enough that yearly, down this hill, April Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers. -edna st. vincent millay. spring. ♥ And what are you that, wanting you, I should be kept awake As many nights as there are days With weeping for your sake? And what are you that, missing you, As many days as crawl I should be listening to the wind And looking at the wall? I know a man that's a braver man And twenty men as kind, And what are you, that you should be The one man in my mind? Yet women's ways are witless ways, As any sage will tell,— And what am I, that I should love So wisely and so well? -edna st. vincent millay. the philosopher.

[28 Mar 2006|03:20pm] The U.S. media write as if a "Latina" anything can't possibly be good enough to just be herself, an artist with no ethnic qualifier, no white (or black) mainstream comparison... The woman in these articles is nothing like me. So this is how history gets made. Reporters do self-therapy with people like me as their backdrop and the world as their witness and the words, however false, stick permanently, available for harvest by countless generations of historians to come. None of us knows the truth of what came before us, ever, or even of what happens now. It's all filtered through reporters and historians. I feel sick. Furious. In other words, I feel inspired to write. -alisa valdes-rodriguez. the dirty girls social club.

[25 Mar 2006|01:34pm] Being on the roof, it turned out, was a serious thing. If he jumped would the singing become dancing? Would it? What would jumping stop? Yearningly, Ozzie wished he could rip open the sky, plunge his hands through, and pull out the sun; and on the sun, like a coin, would be stamped JUMP or DON'T JUMP. -philip roth. the conversion of the jews.

[24 Mar 2006|04:28am] "...I wasn't meaning to ask you about that," said the doctor. "What I want to know is whether you are fond of gay company, whether you have a good time. Now then, are you leading a melancholy sort of life, or a gay one?" "Dr. Rutenspitz. I..." "H-m, what I'm saying," interrupted the doctor, "is that you must radically reform your whole life, and in a sense change your character completely." Dr. Rutenspitz strongly emphasized the word 'change', and paused for a moment with a highly significant look. "Don't fight shy of gay life," he continued. "Go to theatres, go to a club, and in any case don't be afraid of an occasional glass. It's no use staying at home. You simply mustn't." "I like peace and quiet," said Mr. Golyadkin, throwing a meaning glance at the doctor, and obviously seeking the words that would best render his thoughts. "There's no one at my place except myself and Petrushka--I mean my man, Doctor. What I mean is, Doctor, I go my own way, my own peculiar way, Doctor. I keep to myself, and so far as I can see am not dependent on anyone. Also, I go for walks, Doctor." "What's that?... Yes. But there's not much pleasure in that at the moment. The weather is terrible." "Yes, Doctor. But as I believe I have already had the honour of explaining, although I am a quiet sort of person, my path is separate from other people's. The road of life is a broad, Doctor... What I mean, what I mean to say is... Forgive me, Doctor, I have no gift for fine phrases." "M-m-m, you were saying..." "I say you must forgive me, Doctor, for having so far as I can see no gift for fine phrases," said Mr. Golyadkin in a half-offended tone, now a little lost and perplexed. "In this respect, Doctor, I am not as other people," he added with a peculiar sort of smile. "I am not a great talker. I haven't learnt to embellish what I say. But to make up for it, I'm a man of action, a man of action, Doctor." "M-m-m...What's that?... So you're a man of action," responded the doctor. Then for a moment there was silence, while the doctor stared in a strange and incredulous way at Mr. Golyadkin, and the latter, in turn, looked incredulously askance at the doctor. "Peace is what I like, Doctor, not the tumult of society," continued Mr. Golyadkin, still in his former tone, a little exasperated and bewildered by the doctor's stubborn silence. "With most people--in society, I mean--you have to know how to bow and scrape." (Here Mr. Golyadkin did a bow.) "That's expected of you in society. You're asked to make puns, too, if you please, pay scented compliments, that's what's expected of you. But I haven't learned to do this, Doctor-- I haven't learned all these cunning ways, I've had no time for them. I'm a plain simple man. There's no outward show about me. On this point, Doctor, I lay down my arms--or to continue the metaphor, I surrender." All of this, of course, was delivered in a manner that made it quite clear that our hero had no regrets about his metaphorical surrender and his inability to require cunning ways, but entirely the reverse. While listening to him, the doctor, his face unpleasantly grimaced, kept his eyes upon the floor, as if preoccupied with a presentiment of some sort. Mr. Golyadkin's tirade was followed by a rather long and significant silence. At length, in a low voice, the doctor said: "You seem to have wandered a little off the subject. I confess I have not quite followed you." "I'm not one for fine phrases, Doctor," said Mr. Golyadkin, this time in an abrupt incisive tone. "I am not, as I have already had the honour of informing you, Doctor, one for fine phrases." "H-m-m!" "Dr. Rutenspitz, when I came in, I began by apologizing. Now I repeat what I said before, and again ask your indulgence for a time." Mr. Golyadkin began once more in a low taut expressive voice, that dwelt upon every point, and had a solemn ring about it. "Dr. Rutenspitz, I have nothing to conceal from you. I am a little man, you know that yourself. But fortunately I have no regrets about being a little man. Quite the contrary, Doctor, and to be completely frank, I'm even proud of being a little man and not a big one. Not being an intriguer-- that's something else I'm proud of. I don't do things on the quiet, but openly, without a lot of artifice, and though I could do my share of harm, and do it very well too, and though I even know whom to harm and how to do it, I don't sully myself with these things, I wash my hands of them Doctor. I wash my hands of them, Doctor!" For a moment Mr. Golyadkin relapsed into an expressive silence. He had been speaking with mild enthusiasm. "I go about straight and openly," he continued suddenly. "I don't go beating about the bush, because that's a way of doing things I scorn, and leave to others. I don't go trying to humiliate those who maybe are better than you or I... That is, better than I, I didn't mean to say 'better than you,' Doctor. I don't like odd words here and there, miserable double-dealing I can't stand, slander and gossip I abominate. The only time I put on a mask is when I go to a masquerade, I don't go about in front of people in one every day. I will merely ask, Doctor, how you would take revenge on your worst enemy, or him you regarded as such?" concluded Mr. Golyadkin, glancing defiantly at Dr. Rutenspitz. But though Mr. Golyadkin had spoken through with the utmost clarity, precision and assurance, weighing his words and relying on those calculated to produce the best effect, he was now looking at the doctor with evergrowing uneasiness. He was all attention, timidly awaiting the doctor's reply with a sick uneasy feeling of impatience. But Dr. Rutenspitz, to Mr. Golyadkin's surprise and utter consternation, muttered something under his breath, pulled his chair up to the table, observed dryly, but none the less politely, something to the effect that his time was of value to him, and that somehow he did not quite follow; he was prepared to be of assistance so far as lay in his power, and to the extent of his abilities, but beyond that, into matters of no concern to him, he would not venture. At this point he took his pen, drew towards him a sheet of paper from which he cut a strip the size of a doctor's prescription, and announced that he would prescribe what was appropriate. "No, Dr. Rutenspitz, it's not appropriate! It's not appropriate at all!" said Mr. Golyadkin rising from his seat and seizing the doctor's right hand. "There's no need for that at all in this case!" While he was speaking, a peculiar change came over Mr. Golyadkin. His grey eyes flashed with a strange fire, his lips trembled, all his muscles and features twitched and disarranged themselves. His whole body shook violently. Having followed his first impulse in arresting the doctor's hand, Mr. Golyadkin now stood stock-still as though lacking self-assurance, and awaiting inspiration for further action. -fyodor dostoevsky. the double.

[17 Mar 2006|01:46pm] [ mood | sad ] Once, my dad took time out of his Sunday to drive me and my brother to a Latino Book Fair in San Bernardino. I was happy he'd kept his promise, but I mused on the fact that the problem was never that he didn’t deliver his promises. We simply never made any. When we got there, they handed us plastic bags decorated with Edward James Olmos' face, and the bags were filled with brochures detailing the foundation’s mission of spreading literacy. We stayed for hours sorting through books in Spanish and crafts of glass and feathers and bright paint and baked clay. I inspected a brilliant Aztec calendar carefully. We saw girls dance in traditional flocorico dresses, boys in snake-skin boots and vaquero hats play instruments. I asked my father why we didn’t get to see these kinds of things more often, but he only replied with the promise that we'd come back next year. At one of the many overflowing bookshelves he found his favorite novel, which he’d read over and over during his formative years in Mexico; he bought it for me, along with two extremely crucial poetry collections by Neruda. To be read in "the way he wrote them," my dad said. I made a promise to myself I'd take the books with me everywhere. Later, my dad made conversation with a polite, soft-spoken cartoonist handling a quiet booth where little kids had been decorating paper doorknob hangers. Dad watched as Alcaraz drew a smiling Dave and smiling Rocio on separate white hangers with a sharpie. I liked Dave's hanger the most; his pale, little-boy face was already starting to thin-out, but Alcaraz had just locked what was left of Dave’s soft features on a piece of white paper forever. When I bought a tall candle enclosed in a beautiful blue glass, the decorative sticker on it read "The Struggle For Indigenous Rights Has Not Ended!!!", and Dad said my eight dollars would be spent on bullets. My mind registered an image of high, foggy mountains of deep green and faceless people carrying the dead-weight of other faceless people. I didn't know what to do with my candle anymore. Dave bought a children's book written for six-year-olds titled "Dave, No!", which I read aloud in a voice impersonating my mom. My dad’s eyes looked wet with amusement. The three of us remained at the fair until the booth keepers started packing up, and there was nothing left for us to stuff into our bags. I remember how hard we were laughing when we walked back to our car, laughing and, for once, speaking in Spanish. Once in the car, we pulled out of the parking lot and noticed a group of people across the street holding banners and posters. One banner read: "Edward James Olmos is a racist full of self-hatred." Alongside it was another in Spanish; a poster declaring the fair was handled by Eurocentric sellouts. We drove past the people as they started chanting and raising their signs toward us. Out of the corner of my eye I read the words Ethnocide, Anahuac, Mestizo/Indian Myths. We stayed quiet the whole way home.

--> [27 Jan 2006|01:58am] i did not cut my hair in the summer of 2005. before that mexican summer ended, i stood at the side of some flattened road, where the grass had humbled itself into the ground, and i slid into a bus packed with chickens. my grandmother made every meal with pieces of her aged heart, and so, yes, i got fat, fatter, the fattest, and my hair went untreated, further defiant of everything voguish and smart back home. i sat, barefoot and angry, outside on a foldout chair every night i was there, wondering why i'd exhausted previous days by being. there was so much more than thinking and breathing. the bus packed with chickens would take us into the city, where we bought bags of vegetables out of plastic carts. we sat at the corner bakery, looking out at the traffic as we imagined our slow taking of hot chocolate at the end of the day. it occurred to me that things could change upon going home, but the hope passed and returned only briefly once back in america; i was staring at a mirror. and i saw i was myself again, overrated and flimsy, saying things that dripped with color, wearing ideas formed not by me. i should've eaten more heart. -the wanted summer of 2005. rocio anica. ?

[16 Jan 2006|12:49am] [ mood | STUPID ] THIS IS WAY OUT OF CONTROL. if i'm a double agent, the CIA stands for Completely In Agony. just kidding, it stands for Cruisin' Is Awesome. i told my mom today that i am most certainly an agent who lost her bracelet in the carribean, while on a secret mission to, you guessed it: be awesome. i told her that it happened while on a snorkeling adventure that the clasp went undone, and now there won't ever, ever be a chance of me wearing it again. who finds a bracelet sent to the ocean floor? afterward, i fidgeted around the house for a couple of hours, hoping she would see the genius of my allegory and buy me a car. finally, she walked by and i yelled that THE BRACELET STANDS FOR MY CHRISTIAN FAITH MOM DON'T YOU GET IT. she sat down and said i should pray so i could please find my bracelet. i stared at her for five minutes. MOM IF I PRAYED ABOUT IT, IT WOULD BE LIKE DIALING SOME RANDOM NUMBER AND SAYING HELLO, CAN YOU GIVE ME BACK MY BRACELET I KNOW YOU FOUND IT ON THE OCEAN FLOOR. she nodded and then hid behind a newspaper. thanks alot, mom. i lost the love of my life, the least you could do is help me find my bracelet. that's ok though. i don't even like expensive jewelry.

[07 Oct 2005|01:02pm] last month, we went out for fine dining and the theatre. we saw dead end at the ahmanson. i wore a theory dress and my diamond earrings. later, we hopped into separate cars and raced to his place. we ended the night with the breaking of his bed. on tuesday, i made him shrimp bisque, walnut-crusted red snapper, and a birthday almond-chocolate souffle torte. we had a talk. i sang happy birthday. he blew out his candles. i cried alittle because i have a boyfriend who sees all the good underneath the neurosis and insecurities. he makes me less crazy when he's not driving me insane. this month, we will see romance by david mamet. i have my eye on a carmen marc valvo dress. i also hope to start writing post-it notes and leaving them everywhere: "[Happiness and Misery] are things you see on the stage or the screen or the printed pages, they never really happen to you in life. -F.S. Fitzgerald" or "Writing is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none. -J. Renard." the best one is "be happy, dammit. -everyone." last week, i realized that i may seem cold, distant, or unfriendly to some people. others may simply hear those things. i don't know the best way to handle the situation. maybe it doesn't matter, if i don't want it to matter. but i guess if it doesn't matter to me at all, maybe i AM cold and distant. this is starting to make my head hurt. so today, i decided that the best way to survive this lifetime is to decorate my place in blues and golds. i'm going to pack up things i've unhealthily refused to let go, and move on. pictures of my place in a week. now, ciao.

--> a rocio summer, part I [10 Aug 2005|11:20pm] "You're wrong. She is a phony. But on the other hand you're right. She isn't a phony because she's a REAL phony. She believes all this crap she believes. You can't talk her out of it. I've tried with tears running down my cheeks. Benny Polan, respected everywhere, Benny Polan tried. Benny had it in his mind to marry her, she don't go for it, Benny spent maybe thousands sending her to head-shrinkers. Even the famous one, the one can only speak German, boy, did he throw in the towel. You can't talk her out of these"--he made a fist, as though to crush an intangible--"ideas. Try it sometime. Get her to tell you some of the stuff she believes. Mind you," he said, "I like the kid. I'm sensitive, that's why. You've got to be sensitive to appreciate her: a streak of the poet. But I'll tell you the truth. You can beat your brains out for her, and she'll hand you horse-shit on a platter. To give an example--who is she like you see her today? She's strictly a girl you'll read where she ends up at the bottom of a bottle of Seconals. I've seen it happen more times than you've got toes: and those kids, they weren't even nuts. She's nuts." --truman capote, breakfast at tiffany's 5 ♥ ?

[28 Apr 2005|05:13pm] Abstract: This paper will explore the November holiday known as Dia De Los Muertos as celebrated by Mexican-Americans of this generation in the US. Taking the stance that here it is a focused gathering less about remembrances of loved ones and more about getting in touch with Mexican and indigenous roots, I will describe the differences between the still-practiced Mexican rituals, what we have now north of the border, and how this tells us that the rapid migration and assimilation of Latinos in an America (in relation to previous immigrant assimilation patterns) leads to a struggle to maintain an integrated sense of cultural identity. Celebrating Day of the Dead in the US might just reflect the need to belong to a community much more than it is a direct identification with the Aztec and eventually Mexican view of death. Celebrating Across the Border In the fall of my thirteenth year, I stood at the corner of the middle school gymnasium with my bad posture and a can of generic soda, watching people hurry from candy-ridden table to table. At some of these set-ups of orange and black streamers and plastic spiders, were overly-excited adults, counting the number of apples soaked in pre-adolescent spit in baskets below, and making sure any attempts to pin the nose on the jack-o-lantern were directed to and only to the jack-o-lantern. I was somewhat used to these enthusiastic procedures by now, almost like a normal pre-teen; I’d tried my hand at trick-or-treating, I’d done my share of candy-sorting. While it wasn’t a holiday I looked forward to like others, I was aware of how Halloween worked; aware of what made it special, and sometimes, when I allowed myself the pleasure of daydreaming, I imagined being able to celebrate Halloween the way everyone else does. It mainly came down to the problem of my parents. My parents had no idea what, or, rather, why Halloween was. “What is being celebrated?” they would ask, before firmly refusing to fund a stunning costume. “We don’t know! Or care,” my siblings and I maintained until we finally resigned ourselves to a Halloween night spent at home, with a scary movie and maybe some fast-food. We would find out for ourselves the semi-delights of Halloween vicariously through others, each on our own, as we quickly moved from elementary school to junior high to high school. Before my parents, married in Mexico and forced to separate while my dad found work in the US, found themselves in America together at last in the mid-eighties, they spent the first twenty years of their lives in a little village nestled two and a half hours from Mexico City. Here, they lived like any other citizen, in modest but sturdy little houses made of cement, dirt, wood, and aluminum. And it was here they celebrated el Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead, a time in which they remembered their loved ones and playfully poked fun at their own mortality. It was these days they celebrated, and not Halloween. El Dia de los Muertos, Up-close Though the term el Dia de Los Muertos is not plural, the phrase actually refers to the stretch of days from October 31 to November 2, encompassing the two key days of the Mexican tradition; el Dia de Todos Santos (All Saint’s Day) which always falls on November 1st, and el Dia de Animas (Souls’ Day), which falls on the 2nd (unless the day lands on a Sunday, in which case it is observed on the 3rd). They say these two days find the more urban parts of Mexico in a festive spirit; the streets are filled with vendors selling candy skulls of colored, gilded sugar, street shop windows invite one in with elaborate displays of decorated marzipan and nuts, cookies, but mostly sculpted skulls, skeletons, and caskets, lined with trimmings on the solid sugar. Anita Brenner describes the spectacle with beautiful detail in an extract of her book Idols Behind Altars, first published in 1929 and reproduced in an extract in an anthology edited by Chloe Sayer. Brenner writes: “All Saint’s Day is all adult ghosts’ day, and All Souls’ Day belongs to the children. The spirits return according to their ages, on the first and second eve, to dine with their living relatives. The table is set on an altar. There are beans, chili, tortillas, rice, fruit, other daily dishes, and the specialties of the season: pumpkins baked with sugar-cane, pulque or a bluish maize-brew with a delicate sugar film, and (pan de Muertos, or bread of the dead). For the children, candy skulls, pastry coffins, ribs and thigh-bones made of chocolate and frosted sugar, tombstones, wreath, and pretentious funerals” (32). The presence of the type of food prepared and eaten during el Dia de Los Muertos is significantly both irreverent and playful. The sweetness of the majority of dishes served during the holiday seems to reinforce the relaxed nature of it, almost as if poking fun at any notion of solemnity because those same dishes often present an image of, or are shaped like, the calavera, the key symbol of death. These candies also usually have the name of its owner written across the front of the calavera. A calavera literally means skull, or skeleton, and, in fact, the figure shows up everywhere, from the traditional food of the day, pan de muerto, sweet bread baked in the shape of a skull usually containing a plastic skull inside, to artisan clay art and rectangular sections of paper (depicting skeletal figurines) called papel picado. Just as important to both days is the creation of the ofrenda, little altars dedicated to deceased loved ones. The ofrenda, aesthetically composed and deliciously ornate with edible and non-edible offerings, has not changed in centuries. On a table placed against a wall, are pictures of family members who’ve passed on, surrounded by what were their favorite foods and vices. If one had loved cigars, a bowl of cigars would sit among plates of their favorite entree, and among bowls of bread, cheese, stewed pumpkin, boiled sweet potatoes, oranges, almonds, bottles of wine, bouquets of the traditional flower, the marigold, bright wax candles, and other prized possessions. The celebrations go far into the night, moving from the home to the cemetery. The many scatters of dogs, both stray and domestic, are muzzled to prevent disturbing the dead. And by the tombstones of their loved ones, the living wait up all night, as if at a wake in which the deceased are believed to be up and among them. Brenner, again, writes in exquisite detail of the midnight feasts: “—a Mexican wake; singing, praying, drinking, making a little love. And it is a wake, except that the prayers are said not for the dead, but to them. Everybody ‘weeps the bone’ picnicking in the graveyards. The tombs are turned into banquets tables similar to those at home. The food is put upon them, on banks of flowers, heavy purple wild blossoms and the yellow pungent cempoalxochitl, ancient and sacred bloom…. One’s respected relatives, who ‘have moved their sleeping mats,’ come to call. They must be treated courteously. A ceremonious gaiety is the proper tone” (4). This shift from the home to the cemetery marks the moment the ritual becomes more communal than personal without all together releasing any individual energy or meaning. In other words, like Clifford Geertz elaborates on Erving Goffman’s idea of a ‘focused gathering,’ it becomes “a set of persons engrossed in a common flow of activity and relating to one another in terms of that flow” (373). While the people in a specific village may know each other and remember their loved ones amongst their respective families in the one cemetery of their locale, they are not all collectively remembering just one particular person, but rather those who were close to the family, and in this way they relate. Another way the idea of focused gathering applies is in the composition of the ‘prayers’ Brenner mentioned; playful limericks or brief and witty epitaphs written to poke fun of friends and notable living figures. Called calaveras, like the literal translation of the word ‘skulls’ which is also used to call several sweet dishes of the holiday, as described before, these circulations on sheets provide an opportunity for playful jest, commentary, and political satire. These sheets are passed around and expanded on, becoming a light-hearted way to express their awareness and acceptance of their own fleeting mortality. Between el Dia de los Muertos and the Day of the Dead If both my parents, raised in Villa de las Flores for the first twenty years of their lives, held these traditions until they left, then the generational gap is enormous; they observed it every year before they moved; their children only heard echoes of echoes, brief descriptions of the celebrations down south. This particular assimilation process is not unusual in the Mexican-American communities. Melanie Wallendorf and Michael Reilly sum up the assimilation model’s main components as such: cultural assimilation (changes in behavior patterns that include food, dress, and language), structural assimilation (entry into primary groups such as clubs, cliques, or organizations), marital assimilation (which occurs after the first two components are achieved at some level), identificational assimilation (occurring when there is a sense of identity based solely on the dominant society), attitude receptional assimilation, behavior receptional assimilation (both of which occur when the host society neither feels prejudice nor discriminates against the minority), and civic assimilation (achieved when there is no value or power conflict between the host society and the minority). (3) As it stands, Mexican-Americans are not fully assimilated but, as most assimilation theorists agree, Mexican-Americans show an abnormally rapid progress in achieving the above components, because, as Wallendorf and Reilly admit, even the first component, cultural assimilation, may take generations to occur. They continue further by elaborating the two mechanisms that stimulate the changes in behavior necessary for fulfilling that first component; that is, motivation and structure, as impacted by the dominant culture of residence. They write: “…the individual is motivated to comply voluntarily with the behavior patterns which reflect the values and beliefs of the culture. Secondly, the individual may begin to reflect the patterns of the culture of residence because of structural constraints that force compliance” (3). Since the observance of Halloween is not mandatory, we can properly assume that any observance of Halloween by Mexican-Americans is strictly self-motivational. However, as reporter Jose Cardenas quotes from Miguel Dominguez, a professor of Spanish at Cal State Dominguez Hills, in an article in the LA Times, “The origins of the Day of the Dead stretch back to folklore practices of central Mexico about 2,000 years ago. In the United States, assimilation had nearly erased the holiday from Mexican American culture until the Chicano movement of the 1960s. In many ways, Americanization was de-Mexicanization. We realized we were getting rid of something that was very beautiful." He is not the only one who feels this way, as evidenced by the increasing number of Day of the Dead celebrations north of the border. The increasing number of Day of Dead celebrations in the States has become more of a recent thing, but, as it stands, is not yet as magnificent or independent like in Mexico. Though many endeavors to invite and welcome the general public are made by Latino artists literate in the tradition of the Day of the Dead, there are significant differences between the celebrations in the two nations. To begin with, there is the absence of the cemetery feasts. Gil Villagran, a lecturer of social work at San Jose State University agrees that it is different in America, saying, "If we were in Mexico and we were in a cemetery, there would be thousands of people having a picnic around the graves.” Regulations in America do not allow for midnight cemetery pilgrimages, so the nighttime observances are strictly a Mexican tradition, as Valerie Menard reminds us in her charming Latino holiday book. This difference would make it difficult to determine the number of Day of the Dead celebrators who celebrate in private, and difficult to gauge how many Day of the Dead participators would be as active and festive in America as in Mexico. There is also the issue of acculturation. Sanchez Edgar Sanchez, the organizer of the Dia de los Muertos parade and dance held by the Teatro Familia Aztlán in San Jose says the festival in San Jose is different than in Mexico because of the diverse cultures coming to celebrate. Namely, Halloween and el Dia de Los Muertos. This phenomenon is brought up by Albor Ruiz in his reporting. Speaking for the Latino community in New York, he says that with the rapid entry of Mexican immigrants in recent years, the celebration of the Day of the Dead is spilling over the borders of their people and reaching out to the whole city. “This year, for the second time, the city's Halloween Parade will have a little bit of hot Mexican sabor (flavor).” Mayra García, of Mano a Mano, a Mexican cultural organization in New York, through Ruiz, stresses the significance of this collaboration, saying that, for her, “it's very important to join the Halloween parade, and contribute our own traditions. It is like a mission to rescue el Día de los Muertos, so it won't be lost for the community of Mexicans who live here." This sentiment echoes Dominguez’s wistfulness. It almost seems to go unsaid that voluntary observation of one holiday is like an involuntary rejection of the other. Ultimately leading to the main difference between the celebrations up north and the ones down south; the difference in reasons behind each focused gathering. It is true, the amount of observances up north are multiplying, and interest (minority or otherwise) is tripling, but, as he quotes Turner and Jasper’s assertion of the implementation of Day of the Dead, Brandes writes, “Mexican-derived Day of the Dead traditions are currently enjoying immense popularity in galleries and museums north of the border” (21). This means that while Mexico is remembering her loved ones in homes and in front of tombstones, America has us scrambling to remember our roots, our ancestors; we are focused in our gathering, mainly through efforts by cultural awareness groups, to identify and define an integrated sense of self. For now, north of the border, we are operating out of museums and galleries, but perhaps soon, there will the staggering spectacles for which the Mexican is so respectfully, and cheerfully proud. As quoted from Juanita Garciagodoy’s Ph.D. thesis through Stanley Brandes’s article, Garciagodoy writes: I cannot count how many informants have answered my questions as to the meaning of Dias de muertos for them, their reasons for performing this or that aspect of it, their reason(s), for that matter, to celebrate it at all by saying, “Es muy mexicano,” “It’s very Mexican,” or, “Porque somos mexicanos,” “Because we’re Mexican ” (15). Being a Latina herself, she supports the attitude, saying that there is a certain degree of patriotism assigned, either way. Part of it is because the Mexican view of death is seen as unique in the world, and “our way of relating to death and the dead—and by implication, to life” sets Mexicans apart (if not a little bit above) from everyone else. “We are mas machos, braver, and we have mas corazon, more heart, than other cultures.” It would be that my parents, whom were raised in a culture that did not fear or ignore the dead during the days of late October/early November, could not relate to the custom of aggressively begging for candy in exchange for not harming the giver, nor could they understand why one would want to dress in gore and frighten. I’ll admit here that I’ve not yet engaged in a proper Dia de los Muertos celebration, but I see the poetry of it and can’t wait; the beauty of the Mexican mentality not only allures, it makes me wish I tried to drag it out of my parents, instead of being the wallflower at C. Middle School’s Halloween Fest 2001. And while celebrating Day of the Dead in the US might just reflect the need to belong to a community far more than it reveals a direct identification with the Aztec and eventually Mexican view of death, it is certainly an enthusiastic, fevered start. Works Cited: Brandes, Stanley. “The Day of the Dead, Halloween, and the Quest for Mexican National Identity.” The Journal of American Folklore Vol. 111 No. 442. (Autumn 1998): 359-380. . JSTOR. USC Libraries. 24 Feb. 2005 <http://www.jstor.org/> Brandes, Stanley. “Iconography in Mexico's Day of the Dead: Origins and Meaning.” Ethnohistory Vol. 45 No. 2. (Spring 1998):181-218. . JSTOR. USC Libraries. 24 Feb. 2005 < http://www.jstor.org> Brandes, Stanley. “Sugar, Colonialism, and Death: On the Origins of Mexico's Day of the Dead (in Ritual Power).” Comparative Studies in Society and History Vol. 39 No. 2. (Apr. 1997): 270-299. JSTOR. USC Libraries. 24 Feb. 2005 <http://www.jstor.org> Cardenas, Jose. “Altar Ego; Non-Latinos in L.A. Give Day of the Dead Celebration an American Twist” Los Angeles Times 31 Oct. 1997, Valley Ed.: B1. Proquest. USC Libraries. 27 Feb. 2005 <http://proquest.umi.com> Geertz, Clifford. “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight.” Ways of Reading (6th Edition). Eds. David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2002. 305-342. Menard, Valerie. The Latino Holiday Book: from Cinco de Mayo to Dia de los Muertos—the celebrations and traditions of Hispanic-Americans. New York: Marlowe & Co., 2000. Ruiz, Albor. “Mexicans Revive Day of the Dead.” Daily News New York 28 Oct. 2004, Sports Final Ed.: Suburban 4. LexisNexis. USC Libraries. 10 March 2005 <http://lexisnexis.com/> Sayer, Chloe. The Mexican Day of the Dead: an anthology. Boston: Shambhala Redstone Editions, 1994. Seli, Kenneth. “Many Mexicans to Celebrate Annual ‘Day of the Dead.” Spartan Daily Nov. 2004, online edition. LexisNexis. USC Libraries. 10 March 2005 <http://lexisnexis.com> -celebrating across the border. rocio anica.

[08 Apr 2005|01:18am] seven pages due in nine hours, and i'm a girl who needs sleep. if i've given the impression that i'm unhappy, i've done a bad job of highlighting the weather. the weather has been, divinely, holding my hand. a person could die happy. but i do fall into these relapses, or muted tantrums, and i disappoint myself. i'm over it, though, and so is my perfect verse. i'll just do it, and by it i mean life, crookedly or freshly, walking it blindly but at least heading somewhere. if you can imagine how i haven't even told colin that i'm falling for him, imagine all the things i haven't said to others. but everyone i know wants things that i don't want. i want things people my age shouldn't be thinking about. and if i'm pretty close to getting alot of those things, it's paid off being a stuttering, compulsively pensive vagrant. i hate the adjective 'weird' because there are some 27,000 other substitutes, but i understand, i'd use it too, maybe, if i didn't consciously avoid the word. it doesn't matter though, laying on my couch with him, whispering, weaving stories i thought up over my morning coffee, bike ride. the world seems attainable, like i belong in it. i'm through with this entry, i just wanted to say bye april 7th. hi writ-340 paper.

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