Last night, among the rollicking crowd I was conscious of a deeper feeling that I pushed away all night until I was alone in my bed and the emotion broke over me. Despite my many friends, and loving, supportive family that I try so hard to consciously appreciate, I am lonely.
When I awake at the everlasting three of the clock, I stretch out an arm to the right side of my bed, but although a pillow lies waiting, no head rests upon it and no hand sleepily clasps mine.
I resent the loneliness: I know that being happy now will do much for my future, friends, family, lovers all. Unfortunately hearts only feel, they do not think, and although I prepare for my future with the organ that does, my heart's feelings makes some difference in the goodwill and enthusiasm of my actions.
It's also difficult to discuss this with anyone - my friends merely encourage me to fight the feelings and to dwell on the positive, and my family becomes exasperated with me, feeling that after 21 years of being 'difficult' I should just get over the loneliness - as if a feeling is something you can root out of your soul the same way you can dig a weed out of a garden.
So I come to this blog, so full of rambling and feelings and the odds and ends of emotion and inspiration, to purge myself of these words and hope that once they are written down, that I can settle to my work and life once more with a clean slate and renewed enthusiasm for the day.
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Monday, July 20, 2009
'allo?
Some of my favorite childhood memories involve sitting in front of the television with my parents watching britcoms. I rarely got to watch them when I started college, but now they show 'Allo 'Allo every weeknight at 11 pm, and several others show on Saturday nights.
One of my earliest favorites was Are You Being Served? - about a group of salespeople at a rather cheap department store in London always getting into scrapes over the cheapness of the administration and their personal agendas. I've grown out of it, but the slapstick still amuses me.
'Allo 'Allo is also very slapstick, but being that it's about incompetent Nazis in occupied France clashing with both the Communist and the regular French Resistance, with the Gestapo thrown in for good measure, I find it very entertaining. All these are tied together by Rene Artois, local cafe owner and philanderer, whose sole desire is to get out of the war alive, with plenty of money wheedled out of his customers' pockets and a chance to feel up the waitresses without his wife interrupting.
I understand it a great deal better at 21 than I did at 12, but any age can appreciate the glory of failed "silencing" attempts involving German officers dressing up as nurses and planting exploding bedpans in the hospital bed of patients who could get them in trouble with the Gestapo.
The last time I was in London with my family, some four or five years back, we spent a night in a comfortable hotel and found a new britcom to love: New Tricks.
New Tricks is the kind of television show that you will never find in America: it revolves around a new cold-case police unit comprised of 'retired' detectives who were crack minds in their day, an attractive lady detective boss in her forties who is constantly stressed between her detectives' rule-bending tendencies and an overbearing boss who expects miracles, and a young black sergeant who is in charge of all things technical.
It's brilliant, involves pathos and drama in solving all the cold cases, digging up past hurts and trying desperately to end the wrongs and set disrupted lives right. The detectives all have vastly amusing personal lives, one is a thrice-divorced womanizer, one has problems with his health and his wife is at the end of her tether dealing with his quirks, the lady detective is determined to break the proverbial glass ceiling, etc, etc.
And the characters involved with crimes provide all the other emotions and plotlines one could wish for: philandering mothers, double-crossing business partners, liars, opportunists, hopeless romantics, eternal optimists, soft-hearted family members, bullied friends and the easily swayed lovers.
New Tricks has actually started broadcasting in Orlando on Monday nights (Tuesday nights?) but it hasn't come to Gainesville yet.
I just wish America would look at the supreme mastery of mixing slapstick with true drama, pathos of lovers with the shrewd brashness of greed, inspirational desire to do right with base motives for personal gain. How can "reality" tv possibly compare?
My perceptions of good tv have changed a great deal since my childhood, watching PBS and sports and VHS tapes with my family around our sole television set. It's just lovely to escape into a world that I understand better than this Puritan one, with gentle reminders of the cultures I love and comedies that tickle my sense of humor.
One of my earliest favorites was Are You Being Served? - about a group of salespeople at a rather cheap department store in London always getting into scrapes over the cheapness of the administration and their personal agendas. I've grown out of it, but the slapstick still amuses me.
'Allo 'Allo is also very slapstick, but being that it's about incompetent Nazis in occupied France clashing with both the Communist and the regular French Resistance, with the Gestapo thrown in for good measure, I find it very entertaining. All these are tied together by Rene Artois, local cafe owner and philanderer, whose sole desire is to get out of the war alive, with plenty of money wheedled out of his customers' pockets and a chance to feel up the waitresses without his wife interrupting.
I understand it a great deal better at 21 than I did at 12, but any age can appreciate the glory of failed "silencing" attempts involving German officers dressing up as nurses and planting exploding bedpans in the hospital bed of patients who could get them in trouble with the Gestapo.
The last time I was in London with my family, some four or five years back, we spent a night in a comfortable hotel and found a new britcom to love: New Tricks.
New Tricks is the kind of television show that you will never find in America: it revolves around a new cold-case police unit comprised of 'retired' detectives who were crack minds in their day, an attractive lady detective boss in her forties who is constantly stressed between her detectives' rule-bending tendencies and an overbearing boss who expects miracles, and a young black sergeant who is in charge of all things technical.
It's brilliant, involves pathos and drama in solving all the cold cases, digging up past hurts and trying desperately to end the wrongs and set disrupted lives right. The detectives all have vastly amusing personal lives, one is a thrice-divorced womanizer, one has problems with his health and his wife is at the end of her tether dealing with his quirks, the lady detective is determined to break the proverbial glass ceiling, etc, etc.
And the characters involved with crimes provide all the other emotions and plotlines one could wish for: philandering mothers, double-crossing business partners, liars, opportunists, hopeless romantics, eternal optimists, soft-hearted family members, bullied friends and the easily swayed lovers.
New Tricks has actually started broadcasting in Orlando on Monday nights (Tuesday nights?) but it hasn't come to Gainesville yet.
I just wish America would look at the supreme mastery of mixing slapstick with true drama, pathos of lovers with the shrewd brashness of greed, inspirational desire to do right with base motives for personal gain. How can "reality" tv possibly compare?
My perceptions of good tv have changed a great deal since my childhood, watching PBS and sports and VHS tapes with my family around our sole television set. It's just lovely to escape into a world that I understand better than this Puritan one, with gentle reminders of the cultures I love and comedies that tickle my sense of humor.
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
I will follow
The weather has been capricious lately; soft sunrises drizzle into early morning gloom. The sun peeks through the clouds around noon, but she covers herself with thick and angry thunderclouds till evening descends on weak afternoon sunlight. Then the rain softly patters on windows shuttered against the night and the cycle begins again.
I watch the changing moods and respond by rumpling the covers on my bed as I scribble away in my notebook and ripping out pages and crushing them and throwing them at the wall. The outbursts of temper never help and I am slowly beginning to accept that I have to be in the mood to write, no matter how much I hate the writers' block.
A person walks by under my window, I crane to see, but it is a stranger, uninspiring and irrelevant to the quiet room in which I sit and dream. The world is shut out; none can come in and molest me, and I enjoy my happy solitude, knowing I can let the world in whenever I please.
I watch the changing moods and respond by rumpling the covers on my bed as I scribble away in my notebook and ripping out pages and crushing them and throwing them at the wall. The outbursts of temper never help and I am slowly beginning to accept that I have to be in the mood to write, no matter how much I hate the writers' block.
A person walks by under my window, I crane to see, but it is a stranger, uninspiring and irrelevant to the quiet room in which I sit and dream. The world is shut out; none can come in and molest me, and I enjoy my happy solitude, knowing I can let the world in whenever I please.
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
and she is leveled
A gust of wind may disarray hair, topple a tree, or whistle through reeds on a riverbank. What is it that topples people? Our conservative consciousness does battle with our flexible subconscious: humanity has a saving grace of flexibility and the tenacity to persevere despite our conscious apathy.
Profligate humanity, I am a daughter of Summer and I lie restlessly in her arms as she soothes me to sleep, and nightmares of the changing of the seasons flicker as her notes fade away.
My work is all done but one piece: I have reading to do, but my books lie untouched and my bedcovers are rumpled by my various attitudes.
I watch those around me, on buses, on campus, in shops. And my curiosity is piqued, wondering who, but for the saving vice of sloth, would have been the next Mozart, the next Casanova, the next Elizabeth Bathory. And my contacts with people knock me down, I lay gasping on the floor, groping for my sanity.
Then, slowly but surely my courage builds up and I find myself on my feet, not ready to face the day, but determined to do it anyway; I am the only obstacle of any note in my path to success and I will not impede myself on the way to glory.
Profligate humanity, I am a daughter of Summer and I lie restlessly in her arms as she soothes me to sleep, and nightmares of the changing of the seasons flicker as her notes fade away.
My work is all done but one piece: I have reading to do, but my books lie untouched and my bedcovers are rumpled by my various attitudes.
I watch those around me, on buses, on campus, in shops. And my curiosity is piqued, wondering who, but for the saving vice of sloth, would have been the next Mozart, the next Casanova, the next Elizabeth Bathory. And my contacts with people knock me down, I lay gasping on the floor, groping for my sanity.
Then, slowly but surely my courage builds up and I find myself on my feet, not ready to face the day, but determined to do it anyway; I am the only obstacle of any note in my path to success and I will not impede myself on the way to glory.
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