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Tracy's Face
They ought to make a binding clause that if you find God you get to
keep him.
written by Emily on February 1st, 2005
Why is life worth living? It's a very good question. Um...Well, There are certain things I guess that make it worthwhile. uh...Like what...okay...um...For me, uh... ooh... I would say ... what, Groucho Marx, to name one thing... uh...um... and Wilie Mays... and um ... the 2nd movement of the Jupiter Symphony ... and um... Louis Armstrong, recording of Potato Head Blues ... um ... Swedish movies, naturally ...Sentimental Education by Flaubert ... uh... Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra ... um ... those incredible Apples and Pears by Cezanne...uh...the crabs at Sam Wo's... uh... Tracy's face ...
-- Woody Allen, "Manhattan"
I've never really felt like I belonged here. That's not some cry for attention, or the opening statment of my web writing retirement notice. Its just a fact. As happy as I am of this site, and as much as I love the guys I'm on staff with I still feel, even after more than a year on the site, like I'm the black sheep. I'm not funny. Well, let me ammend that. I'm not good at writing things that are funny. I can't do what the guys do, just pick a topic, say, "okay, go" and make jokes come out. I don't honestly think I was ever intended for a site like this.
Despite this, I'm incredibly proud of the site, and everything we do here each week. I think constantly about ways we can grow, improve, make our little corner of the web more than a hobby. I wouldn't have gone back to college, or thought that I could ever really be a capital W Writer if not for being here. And, though it took a while, I'm finally able to let myself feel pride when someone tells me they like what I've done. Whereas, for a long time before, I just assumed I was being coddled or placated as the Token Vagina.
So this week, instead of asking that you remember the Alamo and by Alamo I really mean the Bearenstein Bears, or pointing out that Hilary Duff is more like Hilary Chuff, I just want to tell you some things. Ani Difranco has an oft-repeated quote that says something along the lines of, "art is why I wake up in the morning." Well, it might not mean much, but I'd like to show you guys my art. The things that make me want to write, direct, photograph, draw, paint, sew, sculpt, and peform. These are the things that allow me to live in this world in this day, stretch my fingers and toes, and then do a full-on Ricky Fitts crying at the plastic bag because I'm allowed to exist next to so many things that make me so fucking happy. I hope nobody thinks this is lame.
Amelie
It sounds completely trite, but watching Amelie honestly changed the way I wanted to live my life. I'm sure that sounds really silly to the "everything you like sucks" hipster set that are always trying to convince you that X thing that you favor makes you so incredibly lame that you deserve to be beaten and drug bleeding through the street, all while wearing an incredibly ironic And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead t-shirt. Luckily, most of those guys stopped reading my stuff long ago, so I think I'm free to wax philosophic about the cinematic merits of a sociopathic pixie and her candy colored life.
I've always been kind of socially inept, stranded somewhere between wanting everyone to like me and wanting to spend 75% of my time alone. I've also always had a bad habit of losing myself in whatever film/book/song/play has recently struck my fancy, imagining for myself new world worlds and shapes and people and lives considerably more interesting than the one I've made for myself, until the scent of stale laundry brings me down and I remember all the things that make a perennial day dreamer like myself want to jump off the tallest building and hope for the Elysian best.
In that sense, I kind of felt like Amelie was me. She was shy, introverted, more comfortable looking for fairies in tall grasses than talking to a stranger on the bus. The difference was that she got to live in this wonderful fantasy world full of glitter and glamour and enough poetic terrorism to make Titania herself jealous. It made me want more. To always be looking for bunnies in clouds or sticking my hands into things that seem like they'd be pleasant to touch. It sounds childish, I suppose, and maybe it is. But watching Amelie made me life a little more sparkly, and I'm pretty sure I needed that to avoid the tops of those tall buildings.
Greg
Greg Bottoms is my mentor. He doesn't know it, but he is, and has been since my second semester of my first attempt at college, in 2001. During that semester he, at different times, casually told me I was too good for the class I was taking (a small gift of confidence I kept hidden in a drawer lest it bloom into arrogance), and wryly noted that if I really wanted to be a writer I needed to make a habit out of alcoholism. The difference between the me of 2001 and 2005 is that the 18 year old version of me could say, "I really respect his work" and mean "I have a profound crush on my professor," but the 22 year old me can say the same but believe it. I really respect his work. His writing is like shattered glass. It's jagged and rough but really sort of sadly beautiful in it's way, but you're always just too aware that it could cut you without a second thought. On those rare days that are free of the all-too-tangible concepts of jobs and schools and bills and debts, I imagine myself packing a bag, driving off to some middle of nowehre place and waiting on a porch for Greg to come up behind me and say, "okay, you want to write? Listen up."
He really is my mentor, even if he doesn't know it yet.
American Dreaming
The early weeks and months of 2003 were a rather pathetic time in my life. I was living at home, working a directionless job I hated and which perenially exhausted, was very close to dropping out of my second college, and had become one of those sad girls that shows her boobs to lonely guys on the internet in exchange for empty validation. I just felt empty. Nothing in my life was of any substance. I wasn't good at anything, nothing filled me with any joy. Well, I take that back. I was, at the time, spending most of my 3 a.m.s copy editing early drafts of Seven Hill City, something which remains a source of deep pride to me. But the fact remains that I felt as if I were drowning in a bucket of gray paint, and no one cared. Not even me. Funny that a song could change all that.
By some strange happenstance I found myself one day at the website of a friend's older sister. It was more or less a personal space, with one page devoted to the band Dead Can Dance. Their albums were filled with references to Greek myths or old Irish hymns, things that would have fascinated me when I was about, say, twelve. My interest was piqued, so I downloaded some random tracks and put them on my winamp. I lit a scented candle for melodrama, and laid on my bed staring at the ceiling, while Brendan and Lisa floated through their melodies. The songs were all beautiful, I admit, if a bit too much like music that only seems apropriate when getting a massage.
Then "American Dreaming" started to play. It was different than the others. No odd world music composition. No arcane Latin phrasing. And none of Lisa Gerard's witchy, Falconetti-esque vocal stylings. Just Brendan, singing a song in his strange Bruce Springsteen meets Peter Murphy kind of way. I was hooked immediately. It's funny, as much as I love the song even to this day, if you read the lyrics they sound incredibly over-wrought. But on that day, at the time, it was perfect. I felt like nothing if not a "forlorn somnambulistic manical in the dark." Even if the tensing doesn't work, it fit me to a T. And it completely fucked me up. I wanted to exist permanently in that strange opium den of their music. Sadly, the closest I came was hanging out in Pier 1 too much, because in Parkersburg, West Virginia a Morroccan throw pillow and cobalt blue stemware are the closest one gets to esoteric futility. But that's beside the point. That one song managed to pull me out of the gray paint, make me feel like an adult, make me feel full of something.
Two years have passed and I don't know if I'm any more mature or full of life than I was then. But I don't show my boobs to guys on the internet anymore, and I think that's an important step.
Pamie.com
It must be strange, being famous on the internet. To have thousands of people read your words every day, adore you, idolize you, hang on every word you say, but still be able to walk down the street completely invisible, or get treated poorly by a Quizno's employee. The internet has created this odd new kind of apparition celebrite. I mean, who could pick, say, Matt Drudge out of a line up? Maddox? Seanbaby? Okay, Seanbaby I'll give you. But it's hard to miss a guy with neon blue hair and a Suicide Girl permenantly adhered to each arm.
Pamela Ribon is my internet hero. I stumbled onto her blog, Squishy, some time back in high school. I read a story about her cat. It made me sob. I read her site religiously until she got freaked out by having her life documented online, and took a year long break. I sobbed again. On the inside. Then she came back and all was right with the world. About a month ago Pamie got married to fellow famous blogger Stee, and reading about it made me all schmoopy and mush-faced again. It should be noted that Stee, in terms of internet heroism with regards to me personally, is the dangling participle to Pamie's warm paranthetical. I just made nerdy grammar euphamisms about people I claim to admire. I hope they never read this.
I'm such a liar. I'm totally sending this to them when I'm finished.
It's hard to describe why I enjoy Pamie.com so much. I think a large part of it has to do with the fact that during her tenure on the internet we've all watched her get continually more successful. When I started reading she lived in Austin, performed in a comedy troupe, and worked in a cubicle. Now she lives out in LA, she's selling scripts for TV and film, she's written a best selling novel, and she's about to perform at the US Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen. She's like, making it man. To a wannabe writer still stuck in college, making $6.50 and hour, and staring at a manuscript outline that's really nothing more than half-sentences and a long diatribe about how funny it would be if I made Gene Snitsky a character in my book, that's completely awesome. It gives me, as a considerably more meager internet writer, some glimmer of hope that there really is a future in this. Even if I do live in the cultural dead zone of central Virginia, and even if I did start this piece out by talking about how unfunny and ill fitting I am.
So. . .thumbs up to you, Pamie. For giving me inspiration, and for writing about your cat. It really means a lot.
Two or Three Things I Know For Sure
I've never been a fan of any literary work that corners itself in as SOUTHERN. That entire world full of noble suffering blue collar folk, piss poor and mostly drunk, it's never seemed real to me. I'm pretty Southern, but I grew up in the suburbs and got a car for Christmas when I was 17. Is there no artistic spirit born of middle class mediocrity? Should I hang it up if I wasn't abused or struggling? Where's my Faulkner, where's my Flannery O'Conner? I've been giving people that speech for a while, the frustrated musings of girl who can't see any of herself in a story full of sweaty farmers and ragged children. Then, just by chance, I was assigned "Two Or Thrre Things I know For Sure" for a class.
"Let me tell you a story."
That's how she begins it. Dorothy Allison wants to tell us a story. She wants to tell us a lot of stories. She's a true blue storyteller, that cultural artifact, that word we can say but never see anymore. The dirt faced wanderer, the shaking grandmother, the collector of children's eyes, that's what Allison want to be for us. A teller of stories. Her story. She wants to spread it out like a quilt, so we can run our hands over the seams and try to find where the threads match our own.
It's difficult to describe how I felt reading this piece. When I realized, about 1/3 of the way in, that I was completely enamoured, I wanted to be finished immediately. I wanted to devour every single syllable, and bask in the power of having it inside me. Then when I was finished I wanted immediately to stand on a corner and read it aloud to anyone who walked by, so they could hear and feel and absorb all the same things I did. I could feel myself adrift in her words. I've never been abused, I've never really even been poor. But this work, this book, this collection of stories, I walked right into it, and for the first (and only) time, it was so real. The act of reading Allison's writing was like absorbing another person's soul, and then not being sure if you want it to stay or not. I've rambled into inane blather here, but I just can't descibe it. It was pulling back the curtain, I suppose, finally seeing why the Faulkners of the world had to write what they wrote. Because those are the stories.
"Beauty is a hard thing. Beauty is a mean story. Beauty is slender girls who die young, fine-featured delicate creatures about whom men write poems. Beauty, my first girlfriend said to me, is that inner quality often associated with great amounts of leisure time. And I love her for that.
We were not Beautiful. We were hard and ugly and trying to be proud of it. The poor are plain, virtuous if humble and hardworking, but mostly ugly. Almost always ugly."
God damn.
emily
AIM: Roxymoron87
imsophiapetrillo@yahoo.com
