An older friend of the family, M, was suffering from the ravages of ovarian cancer (currently in remission, thankfully) when another lady (who had gone through a health crisis of her own) told her, "Let people love you. Don't fight them." M proclaimed this to be one of the most important pieces of advice she had ever received. While these words resonated with something inside of me when she told them to me so many months ago, I certainly have not followed them. I'm not sure I know how. For future crises, I hope I learn.

I finally got a collection of Dorothy Parker's short stories (thanks Santa) and have been reading them the past couple of days. I had never read her stuff before. It's lovely. The stories are sometimes a little too narrow in their concerns, and sometimes lack a little polish, but boy do I envy the sharp and concise and brutal quality of her prose. And she has a morbid and slightly despairing sensibility which I understand quite well (although I still retain some youthful idealism to temper this in myself). I read "Big Blonde" first, and it's definitely the strongest of the stories I've read so far. "Here's mud in your eye."

I saw the film Cold Mountain a couple of days ago, which I absolutely, passionately adored. (Then again I'm a sucker for epic historical romances...I similarly swooned for The English Patient, another film directed by Minghella, which many of my friends despised). I spent the first few minutes of the film scrutinizing Nicole Kidman's face for the evidence of plastic surgery (which was very apparent in the piece-of-shit trailer for the Stepford Wives remake), but soon abandoned that habit as I lost myself in the story, the characters, the images. I've muchly liked Jude Law in everything I've seen him in so far, and he doesn't disappoint in this film...he was achingly beautiful, tragic, wonderful. I'm relieved that he, and not Tom Cruise, ended up playing the part of Inman. Nicole Kidman (although her Southern accent was less than convincing) and Renee Zellweger were also damn good. Jack White's cameo wasn't as distracting or laughable as I thought it might be (although it was strange to think that he and Renee were dating at the time the film was made, and that he subsequently broke up with her while she was filming the sequel to Bridget Jones' Diary, possibly due to her weight gain or her "conventional" lifestyle during the film). But as often happens when he appears in a film, Philip Seymour Hoffman stole my heart as the slutty minister. I once proclaimed his hotness to a college friend a few years ago (probably after seeing him in a Paul Thomas Anderson film or something of that ilk), and he rolled his eyes and scrunched up his face in disbelief as he spat out his horror at my girlish confession, presumably because he could not imagine that I would be into a guy who was so unattractive by conventional standards.

So, attractiveness. Virtually all of my friends (especially the gay male ones) have strict physical standards, with few or no exceptions. The guy in question must be thin and/or muscular. If a guy is fat, he is automatically not worth consideration. He must also be very young, or young-looking. He must be stylish and dress well and have good hair which indicates knowledge of hair products. He must have a pretty face with no feature too off-kilter, no aspect too unappealing to their aesthetic sensibility. My female friends are also particularly concerned with height; above six feet tall is preferable. Some friends, disturbingly enough, are only attracted to men of certain races.

I judge male beauty as carefully as anyone else does (and am probably even more exacting in my standards than many of my friends are...I don't see the physical appeal of Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Richard Gere, Colin Farrell, Tom Cruise, Orlando Bloom, or many other supposed heartthrobs, although I may like some of their films), and dammit I do enjoy looking at pretty boys (such as the just-mentioned Jude Law, and Gael García Bernal of the movie Y Tu Mama Tambien). But I'd like to think that, for me, a guy's appearance is not the main measure of his worth. My friends make fun of me when I cluck my tongue at their judgments of "pretty" or "ugly," and when I say, partly tongue-in-cheek but also partly with genuine feeling, that the beauty of a person's soul is far more important than the beauty of a person's body. (Well, I could examine this perhaps artificial and antiquated division between body and soul, but I'll save that for another post, after I've read more philosophy about that subject). I just hate that so many people, especially people whom I love and respect, judge other people's worth by such superficial standards. Ever since I was a teenager, I've mistrusted what was force-fed to me by the media about what was and what wasn't beautiful, and it still astonishes me that others don't see how arbitrary their standards of attractiveness are, and how little effort they have put into redefining those standards for themselves. It seems so silly, but whenever one of my friends expresses disgust over the ugliness of a person who is overweight, I think about Jeremy, who is indeed a fictional character but is also the kind of person whom I would date and love without question. Why would anyone deny herself the chance to be with someone who is such a lovely person, just because he's fat? I don't know...perhaps I'm naive, or perhaps I'm a hypocrite and not as immune to the pull of conventional standards as I'd like to think.

I love makeover shows, such as Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, but I'm not sure that I agree with the concept of making a straight guy more "acceptable" by making him look more like a supposed ideal. In the end, aren't they taking all these different guys who showcase their individual quirks through their very different appearances, and making them all look the same, i.e. exactly like the guys who are engineering the makeovers (actually, makeover shows seem like a curious method of self-reproduction or cloning)? I remember sitting in a subway train in New York a long time ago, and examining the vast diversity of people seated in the train with me. Very few of them were conventionally good-looking in the movie star way, but they all had a sort of beauty to them. They were all like character actors. And I thought how dreadfully boring it would be if we were all movie stars and none of us were character actors...even though we're all supposed to envy and strive to be like the movie stars. Is it fair that some enjoy the privileges that come with conventional attractiveness, and should those privileges be denied to those who are conventionally unattractive? No, I'm not saying that. But I love diversity, and I strive to not be the person who gives a conventionally attractive person privileges over a conventionally unattractive person. Although I'm probably unconsciously guilty of doing this as well.

So. Philip Seymour Hoffman. Incredibly hot, even with a sweatshirt-covered potbelly and greasy hair and thick-rimmed glasses as he appeared on In the Actor's Studio the other day. A character actor par excellence, and someone I'd quite happily fuck, if his wife didn't mind.

On Thursday morning, as I was driving to the hospital at about 7:50 am, the sky was so striking that I could barely keep my eyes on the road and almost crashed several times. The clouds partially obscured the sun, so that half of it was glowy white and the other half was smoky gray. It looked kind of like a pearl that was half white and half black, and each half had unfurled rays of its own color. Some distance away from the sun, there was a smear of a rainbow, as if someone had dabbed a part of the sky with a giant paintbrush which had been dipped in every color of one of those cheap kindergarten watercolor palettes. It's so difficult to describe; I wish I had been able to take a picture, or that I could paint a picture, to properly illustrate how beautiful and bizarre it was. It was one of those early mornings where I was barely awake after pulling an all-nighter and wasn't sure how much I was hallucinating what I was seeing, or how much the bleariness of my eyes contributed to the melty glowy blurry lights and darks of my vision.

I'm not sure why I'm so interested in scatalogical matters. Not sexually, certainly. *shudder* Not that I judge those who are turned on by such behaviors. Truly. It's, um, just not for me. (Okay, I'll stop.) But it is an element which seems to reappear in my stories...part of it is the desire to probe subjects which are considered taboo, to shock myself and others. Which is a bit adolescent (residual teenage rebellion bullshit). But then, a lot about a character can be illustrated by how he or she pisses or shits: what she thinks about as she sits on the toilet, how he shakes himself of stray drops in order to minimize staining his underwear. I'm fascinated by people who are fearful of pissing or shitting in public bathrooms. I knew a guy in college who would wait until the shared bathroom was empty of others before he allowed himself to shit. Poor guy. These strange little games we play with ourselves.

At one point I decided that since I knew of no female writers who used toilet or gross-out humor, I was going to change that by writing a full novel of it, dammit! But that idea lasted about as long as my decision to become Durham's resident mime.

As I was doing my dishes today I listened to this weekend's installment of "This American Life" and was surprised to hear a story read by Truman Capote. Ira Glass commented that he sounded eerily like David Sedaris, and I agree. It was a Christmas story about friendship and loss and the rural South, and like most of Capote's writing, it was evocative, incisive, and taut with emotion. Tears pricked my eyes at his final image of broken kites drifting up towards the heavens. I first became interested in Capote when I saw a film by Almodovar called All About My Mother, which I absolutely adored. The first Esteban in the story (who was insanely beautiful...*sigh*) received Capote's Music for Chameleons as a gift from his mother, and read the forward out loud, where Capote describes how self-flagellation is a necessary part of a writer's existence. And then I knew I had to have that book. I'm not sure, but I think Joe might have given it to me. Capote has a reputation as a "gossipy" writer, because of his famed exposes of Marlon Brando and other celebrities, but his talent went far beyond that. (Although I did enjoy his gossipy anecdote about Errol Flynn playing "You are My Sunshine" on the piano with his penis). His story about Marilyn Monroe, "A Beautiful Child," was one of the most lovingly poignant portraits I've ever read. The final story in that collection is a conversation with himself which unfolds an astonishing spiritual revelation; I still shiver when I remember how I felt as I read it...a "profound expansion of being," as an author (her name escapes me) of a fiction story in The New Yorker once said. He gives me hope that one day I'll be warmly enveloped with the blanket of a spirituality of my own, which will soothe me to sleep. Somehow I need to construct it, discover it, find it.

Capote did what Nan Goldin did through her photographs: reveal the vulnerability and the beauty and the humanity of a multitude of people he knew and loved, but through his exquisitely written stories. When I went to Montreal earlier this year, trying to figure out what the hell to do with my life since medicine no longer seemed like the answer, there was an exhibition of Nan Goldin's work in the Musee de L'Art Contemporain. One of the highlights was a slide show of her work set to a hymn sung by Bjork, and I bawled quite embarrassingly over the insane beauty of it all. But it then struck me that this was what I wanted to do with my life. Those people were all so brave, to expose themselves and their vulnerabilities, to share themselves so completely with others. And Nan Goldin not only showcased her friends and lovers; she also turned the camera on herself. I want to be that brave, I want to be that vulnerable, I want to share the beauty and vulnerability of others. But I just haven't decided which medium would work best for me to do this. My writing and my art are not accomplished enough, and I'm not sure that I have enough raw talent that I could ever create much that is worthwhile. Is it possible in medicine? I don't know. I'm working in an oncology clinic and it's been surprisingly satisfying. Most med students want to shy away from dealing with death or with terminally ill patients, but I appreciate how introspective these patients are, and the newfound perspective that they have. They're forced to truly evaluate their lives, given the lack of time they likely have left, and most are comfortable enough to share their thoughts with me. Given the threat to my own mortality earlier this year, I can relate just a tiny bit (although of course what I went through is nothing compared to the certainty of their approaching deaths). And the oncologist with whom I work is just fabulous. I adore her, and she is certainly the kind of physician I'd like to be, if I do end up becoming one. She truly knows her patients and cares deeply for them. But is medicine really what I should be doing? And so I obsess and obsess and obsess some more...

I made the bold move of using a sugar substitute for my coffee, for the first time ever. Con: the diarrhea I suffered later in the evening, which I suspect was caused by it. Pro: As watery shit gushed out of my ass, I was struck by inspiration and began to sing "Here Comes the Sun" by the Beatles, changing the word "sun" to "runs" (and "comes" to "come" to be grammatically correct). A potential new song for the student faculty show? It could explore the differential diagnosis of diarrhea. Oh and another song idea...that old jazzy song, "fever," as in a fever of unknown origin.

I also made the unfortunate decision to stop by Kroger to pick up a quartet of bananas. Within the span of two hours, I devoured three of them, each bite dipped into Nutella. I'm such an addict, ugh. I need help.

Please, please, let Saddam's capture not guarantee the re-election of Bush. Somehow. Please?

It is so lovely to fold freshly done laundry in my toasty warm bedroom, with Ryan Adams' Heartbreaker playing from my computer, as the rain taps on the edges of my apartment building, at 4 am on a Saturday night.

Yikes. I read on a messageboard about a site with accurate name analysis, and the skeptic in me of course said, "Oh pshaw." But then I succumbed to my curiosity and entered my name on the site, and this was the result: "Your name of Elizabeth gives you a very idealistic but passive outlook on life. You appreciate music, drama, and the arts and could excel in these fields. You desire culture and all the comforts of life but you are inclined to daydream and not bring your ideas to fulfilment. Although you would like to do many things, procrastination undermines your accomplishment and success in life because of insecurity. You do not like to create issues and will do anything to avoid conflicts. Making decisions is difficult for you without the support and approval of others. This name gives you a very sensitive nature, making you feel much that you do not understand." Which is pretty much a dead-on description of me. All my main faults contained within: passivity, procrastination, lack of fulfillment, insecurity, indecisiveness. Eep. I mean, obviously there are lots of people who share my first name but have completely different personalities. But for whatever reason this description of me is pretty accurate.

I just tried typing "Wings in her Spine" into Google and this was the first hit. Here's the excerpt from Google: "On Silver Wings. ... Shivers of pure ecstasy rippled along her spine as he murmured words of love against her hair and lightly caressed the nape of her neck." Oh, and it gets worse, much worse. It's kind of nice to be randomly associated with crappy Celtic romance novels. And my insecurity about the worth of my writing? Temporarily relieved after reading a few lines of On Silver Wings by Elfie Leddy (the author's name, I'm not shitting you). Yes, I'm bitchy today. It'll pass soon.

Awhile ago, the guy I was seeing at the time (no longer, thankfully) asked me what my porn star name would be. I responded with "Pussy Lo Mein." Yeah. I know.

I hate motherfucker acquaintances who don't have the decency to look at you as they walk by. Granted I've been guilty of the same offense in the past, but usually when I'm not certain if the other person remembers me. A few days ago I saw a surgeon who was my attending during a surgery subrotation (I'll call him "Dr.Peel") walking down a corridor towards me. As we approached each other, Dr.Peel turned his head away from me, stared blankly into space, and walked past me. Given all the shit that I went through while working with him, I can't imagine that he forgot me. Ugh. Fucker motherfucking fuckity fuck fuck. I thought that my bitterness and anger from my time working with him had gotten better...but perhaps not. I hate surgeons. Except for ENT surgeons. The rest of them can go to hell.

I've been thinking recently about muses. Although I discovered a passion for art at a young age, I never cared for the oft-encountered concept of the female muse, whose beauty inspires the the male artist to create his work. It seemed that she was often no more than a body who aroused the emotion or lust which fueled his creative prowess, "an object subjected to the male gaze" as I learned in many an art class and feminist theory class in college. I don't dare to consider myself a true artist, although I have desperately wished I could be...but in any case, from my mid-teens, I wanted to reverse this established relationship between the female muse and the male artist. I looked for male muses to inspire my own art, as unaccomplished as it may be, and I found them. They were not traditional muses; I didn't respond to their physical selves, really. No objectification on my part. (Heh). I just sensed that they would appreciate the part of me which I feared to share with others, my philosophical ramblings and leaps of imagination and word experiments. But alas, it seems that muse relationships are not long for this world...things have apparently just ended between my latest muse and me.

Anyway, I need to stop looking for muses. I need to nurture and push myself to write and make art, not to rely on others to spur me on. I don't need to look for another muse. Looking for friends, for lovers? Of course. But not another muse. I only need myself to unleash the beauty, the imagination, the wild reckless spirit which reside in every person.

Sometimes I wish I could be more like Bruno.

I chopped off my hair today. Well, that sentence is not entirely accurate. I paid somebody else to chop off my hair, and this occurred about 12 hours ago, which was technically yesterday. My hair tickled my elbows when I brushed my teeth this morning; now the ends curve around my earlobes, gracing the angle of my mandible. It kind of looks like ass, but thankfully I don't really care. I had brought a picture of myself with a superimposed shorter 'do (the wonders of the internet) in order to guide her, and of course my hair looks nothing like that picture at all. Strangely enough, the hairdresser looked rather uncomfortable when I told her how short I wanted to cut it. She kept asking me how long I had thought about it and whether I was sure I wanted to do it. I wasn't the least bit conflicted. I associate long overgrown hair with depression. I look back at photos of myself, and inevitably, my hair was longest during those episodes when I was most depressed...my high school graduation, my college graduation, etc. And as I ease myself out of depression, I always chop off my hair in a symbolic gesture of cutting myself free from the bonds of the past. Or starting anew. I haven't been truly depressed for awhile now, but it still feels liberating to get rid of that thick long messy burden of hair, although it was definitely more flattering than my current haircut. Mais n'importe quoi. Hair grows back. Wounds heal. Seasons change. Turn, turn, turn.

I told my mother about my haircut and she asked whether I had saved the hair. I replied in the negative and she cried out, "But I told you to save it!" I had no recollection of this. Apparently there is some kid with cancer in my hometown and she wanted to donate my hair to him or her. Ah well. Instead those six or so inches have been swept up from the floor of the salon and are likely in a garbage bag chillin' with rubber bands and sponges and tissues. I'm sure the kid would want prettier, less obnoxious hair than mine anyway. If she had a choice.

Milquetoast. Heh.

I did some volunteer work earlier tonight, and had a blast playing with the kids, especially one adorable little girl who leaped onto me and tenaciously gripped me with her legs as I spun her 'round and 'round until we became so dizzy that we needed to stop. Her mother asked me if I had any brothers or sisters, presumably (I hope) because I seemed to be comfortable with kids, and I responded that I had one brother. She asked whether he was older or younger, and how old he was; when I told her that he was younger and 22, her eyes bugged and she exclaimed "What? How old are you?" I responded, "Twenty-four," and she shook her head in disbelief, saying, "You don't look 24! You look a lot younger!" Well, gee, thanks. She then asked me what college I went to, and I chickened out and said "I went to college up in Connecticut." I felt guilty because in a way it is condescending to not provide a direct answer, but there have just been too many uncomfortable experiences with people who respond with either hushed awe or embarrassed insecurity. And I want to tell them, "Please, Yale is so overrated, and in any case, I'm no better than you are just because I went there," but that also sounds stupid and elitist and condescending.

I'll never forget when I took a painting class in New York City at the Arts Student League, and there was a monstrous bitch of a wommon (she looked like a bored rich wife, with a shiny blonde pageboy haircut and multicolored silk scarf around her neck and expensive black suit, who passed time by painting shitty canvases) there who began to verbally abuse the model. If I recall correctly, she was irritated because the model wasn't perfectly still as she posed, or her resumed pose after her break was slightly different than the original pose. Something like that. The model defended herself in a calm and polite manner, but this evil monster bitch (who clearly had other issues; maybe she recently found hubby in the arms of vapid young model? Or is that too cliche?) then said something like, "I pay you to pose, not talk back at me. Shut your mouth" in an exceedingly condescending and degrading fashion. I was furious and immediately told this wommon that she had absolutely no right to treat the model as if she were just a body and not a person. The wommon responded that she would file a complaint so that the model would lose her job. The model then asked me to speak on her behalf to the powers that be, and I did. Afterward, the model was grateful, and asked me some questions to get to know me a little better. I told her that I had just graduated from Yale and was going to attend medical school in the fall. She then had that look of hushed awe and seemed to withdraw into herself. She suddenly became much more conscious of her speech, and spoke slowly and with extreme attention to grammar (although she still made mistakes) and enunciation. She kept saying, "Wow, you must be really smart...wow." And in the mean time she visibly seemed to think shit about herself, which made me feel ill, and I realized that I had lost chance of making a real connection with this person, a friendship even, because she was intimidated. I suppose that's not my fault, but still, I feel like it was a loss which could have been prevented.

The moon was eerie tonight. It was full, or nearly full: a bright white egg in the black sky which was full of diaphanous speckles of clouds. It actually looked like one of those great blue whales, with all those white spots on its chin and belly, and a big white eye glowing through the inky ocean waters. Around the moon and melting through the nearby cloud smudges there was a beautiful grayish rainbow, like the interior of an oyster shell or an oil puddle in a parking lot. Sometimes I wonder if this year would have been better if I had remembered, as is Korean custom, to make my wishes on the first new moon of the year. I had missed the first new moon; I think I was on my surgery rotation, or some shit like that. But then, it's always easy to think these things in retrospect.

I've eaten nothing today but a few spoonfuls of rice and chicken, and a Cookout Reese's peanut butter cup milkshake. Ah, the joy of letting my seven-year-old-self operate the controls of this 24-year-old body. She's very pleased, because of course Mom would not have let her get away with this back when she only had her 7-year-old body to work with, and had to rely on Mom to drive to the milkshake provider and purchase said milkshake. I'm a much weaker soul, and she knows it.

Am I a total dork for reading Chomsky while doing my forty minutes on the elliptical today? Well, maybe not, since I only got through four pages of Language and the Mind: Present...not because the material was difficult or dense, but because it was difficult to get the book into a position which made it readable while I was using those arm things. I haven't had much luck with my issues of The New Yorker, either. Someone needs to design an elliptical which is more conducive to reading. Please?

I saw a performance of Handel's Messiah in the chapel over the weekend. It was gorgeous; I coveted the mezzo soprano's voice (especially her rendition of "He Shall Feed his Flock"...which pricked my eyes with tears). I was reminded of how much I love singing...it used to be such a release for me. It sounds vaguely disturbing, but during my freshman year of college, whenever I felt depressed, I would climb to the roof of the tower in my residential college and sing my heart out, as the wind whipped my hair against my cheek, with only the moon as my audience. Somehow, someway, I should get my tired ass back into a chorus of some sort. Or maybe find a new tower with a roof to provide a platform for cathartic singing. Hmmm...maybe I need to stalk people with access to the chapel.

Inertia is so frustrating. Sometimes I feel like I'm one of those dogs who perpetually chase their tails, not realizing that what seems so delicious and just out of reach is actually attached to its own ass. Well, I'm not sure that analogy is so apt...I wanted to convey a sense of aimlessly running in a circle and not getting anywhere. Which is not technically inertia. *sigh* OK, I'm fucking up my metaphors tonight.

I go through periods where I'm cruising along in myopic fashion, taking care of all the little things of immediate concern, but intermittently am jolted out of my routine by something--a traumatic experience, travel to a new place, etc. Something which leads to resensitization to my environment, something which forces me to think critically about my life and what I'm doing. And I have all sorts of epiphanies about what I'm doing wrong, what I need to do in order to make my life better, to take charge of things for once instead of passively letting my life float by...and end up doing little or nothing in the end, and return to my routine, as if nothing had happened. So, so frustrating. Aaaaaaaaargh.

Song of the evening: Jill Sobule's "One of These Days." Another example of a song which perfectly speaks for me, almost to a disturbing degree. Well, it doesn't speak so much for me now (I'm much more functional and productive at the moment, although my uncertain future looms large, and my apartment is still a horrifying mess..."One of these days, and it'll be real soon, gonna kick some ass, I'm gonna clean my room, sometime soon..."), as it did when I first heard it, while making the long drive back to school this past September. I was driving through New Jersey and listening to 90.5 FM The Night (the successor to my high school radio station of choice, the dearly departed 106.3 FM, which had "Mandatory Morrissey" every night at 10 PM). Jill Sobule had visited the station and performed an acoustic version of "One of These Days" and I had one of those wonderful car moments where I hear a song which coincides perfectly with my thoughts as I'm driving, and I have a big goofy grin on my face and bop my head, full of wonder as I realize that I'm not totally alone...because, at least at the time she wrote the song, Jill Sobule was my twin.

Oh, and another thing about The Wings of Desire, the movie I mentioned a few posts ago. Marion's dancing has to be seen to be believed. It's just hilarious and so European, with the vague swaying and twitching of limbs. I could watch her in a loop for hours and still feel on the cusp of bursting into laughter at any second. I would love to dress as her, in that strange tight red dress (so 80's) and big curly hair, as well as imitate her dance moves, but virtually no one would get the reference. I dressed up as Neil Gaiman's Death for Halloween this year and no one had any idea who the hell I was supposed to be. I even did a big ass tinfoil ankh and the black eyeliner squiggle and everything. *sigh* It was kind of funny to hear responses from drunken partygoers after my explanation of my costume, e.g. "That is awesome dude, like, I love comic books! I totally dig them, man. That is really cool, what are you again? Oh yeah, comics, cool."

I got myself a new Fig Apricot fragrance by Fresh, and it's wonderful--very ripe and summery, a much-needed escape from the cold and the rain outside. *sniffs wrist* Mmmmmmm.

Oh, and for some reason I've become addicted to eating bananas smeared with Nutella. Could somebody stop me, please? I should have known that it was a bad, bad idea to purchase a big-ass jar of Nutella for the open microphone event I set up a couple of weeks ago. It sits there on my kitchen counter, mocking me, knowing my weakness, conquering my sad attempt to deny myself the indescribable joy of dipping my spoon into its creamy brown contents and smearing the stuff all over a banana before taking a big bite and smushing the two flavors together against my tastebuds. Damn. It's a good thing I'm out of bananas.

I can't even begin to express how much I love green tea with mint, my newest Kroger discovery. Mmmmmm. I've been trying to stop taking sugar with my tea, and the mint gives it an extra kick which more than compensates for the lack of sugar.

I was working in the ED for most of the day; at one point a family member of a patient asked a nurse for the doctor who had seen them earlier. "It's the Oriental one," she said co-conspiratorially. Ugh. If I do end up becoming a physician, I wonder what my distinguishing characteristic will be? The kinda-Oriental kinda-Hispanic kinda-Native American looking one? The short female one? I understand that most people use race as a distinguishing characteristic of strangers, because it's what they first notice, what first registers in their brains...but what to do with someone who may be racially ambiguous like myself? I wonder if they'll still grope blindly after a plausible racial identity they could assign for me, or whether they'll choose another default characteristic (as they might choose with a white person, who of course does not register as having a race...does anyone say "I want to see that white doctor over there?" No, they'll say, "the guy with a mustache" or "the real tall guy" or "the blond girl"). I know I may be overly sensitive about this sort of thing, but it still bugs. I'm still surprised by how often I hear the word "Oriental"...I suppose those who don't regularly interact with Asians wouldn't realize how offensive it can be.

Oh, and in the spirit of AIDS awareness day (well, it's over here on the east coast, but hey, it's still going on in other parts of the world), I was definitely forced to confront my own thoughts about the disease. I watched a VH1 special earlier (I'm apparently all about VH1 tonight) about AIDS, and I still felt myself become furious when it described Reagan's lack of response to the crisis back in the 80's. So many people could have been saved if action had been taken earlier to educate people about AIDS, and to fund research into and treatment of the disease. It still makes me sick to think about the right wing labeling it a disease of gays and drug users, and all those assholes who believed it was God's vengeance against "sinners" and "human filth." Ugh.

I remember my all-consuming obsession with Keith Haring in the early nineties and how I cried buckets when he passed. His golden three panel alterpiece, with soaring and falling angels in a depiction of the life of Christ, currently displayed at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine close to Columbia University in NYC, is one of the most intensely spiritual and emotional works of art I've ever experienced. I also remember how much I loved Pedro Zamorra on the Real World San Francisco on MTV, and how I was depressed for weeks after he passed away. Even before I met Joe and through him became enamored of gay culture and most things (and people) gay, I was so deeply touched by this intelligent young man who decided to dedicate his life to educating others about his disease, rather than spending the rest of his days in comfort and trying to forget his illness. Just seeing him on television or thinking about him starts up the tears. I know it's dopey to feel this profoundly affected by someone only known through a crappy TV show like The Real World, but he was special. I remember watching Pedro kiss his boyfriend Sean, and thinking to myself, "This should be disgusting, this should strike me as wrong, but it's not. It's beautiful. These are just two wonderful guys who have found love and are expressing it. There's nothing wrong with this."

Since then, as those who know me can attest, I've become about as gay-friendly as any straight chick I've ever known (well, maybe other than Margaret Cho, whom I love). I won't claim to know what it's like to be gay, or to speak on behalf of gay people, but I do relate to a lot of gay guys and girls that I've met. There are a myriad of reasons for this, but I will cite Joe's influence as paramount, as well as my own alienation from American mainstream culture. I much prefer to talk to people who don't follow rigid yet arbitary notions of "right and wrong" which have been spoon-fed to them without reflection on their part. And most LGTB people who accept this aspect of themselves and are comfortably "out" have had to redefine what they had previously learned as "right" or "wrong," and thus question established norms. Questioning established norms? A good thing in this chickie's opinion.

So I went over to my aunt's house for Thanksgiving where we had a big family gathering. As expected, kimchee was served along with turkey and cranberry sauce and yams. *disgusted shudder* After eating dinner, my aunt turned on her karaoke machine, and grabbed my hand and forced me to sing. I looked through the book of songs and commented on the inclusion of "Ma Vie en Rose," that song made famous by Edith Piaf, and my aunt immediately programmed for that song to play and shoved a microphone in front of my face. I started singing and apparently impressed the hell out of the rest of my family members, although the key was way too high for me. My mother told me afterward, "I didn't know you could sing like that! You should take voice lessons. You could be the next Britney Spears!" I was a bit flabbergasted. Yes, Korean mothers are always consumed by tantalizing fantasies of their children's glory, but this was a bit much.

Song of the moment: Ron Sexsmith's "Riverbed." His voice soars and embraces you warmly, and casts its spell so that you start to see inside rather than outside yourself, even if your eyes are wide open (not the best song for driving, but I manage). It's rare that I see or hear evidence of another person reacting to his or her environment exactly as I would, but the lyrics to this song almost perfectly coincide with my thoughts and movements in similar places, such as along the Seine while I was in Paris. I frequently sat down on the cobbled surface along the edge of the river, to gaze at the wide pearly sky as the sun warmed my face, then lay back and closed my eyes and let dreams and stories and ideas stream through my head in a river of its own. I saw a cascade of red and green dots of light, appearing and disappearing, on the inky blackness behind my eyelids. When I occasionally opened my eyes, I became hyperaware of detail: the colors and crevices of the stones by my feet, the curled wrapper of the beer bottle which had been smashed by the trash can, the specks of vegetable or animal matter in the gently lapping river. Occasionally I'd hear passersby say something of interest and make sure to jot their words in the book I carried everywhere with me. Never did I write as much as I did while I was in Paris. Never was I as aware of every aspect of my environment as I was in Paris. Resensitization in an unfamiliar environment, I suppose.

"Riverbed" is from Sexsmith's album Whereabouts. I bought the album because it was recommended by one of the employees of the local record store, but also because of its cover. It features a man (whom I presume to be Mr. Sexsmith) seated at a green picnic table, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, holding a bright yellow leaf in his hand. His arms are positioned across his body as if he is shielding himself. His head is turned slightly to the side and down, but he looks up at us through his shaggy bangs. Something about his somber and vulnerable-but-protected expression reminds me of a college friend of mine. They only mildly resemble each other physically; it's that expression of his face and body which just captures who he was when we were at Yale together. I haven't seen him enough since to know how well this image represents his current self.

I rewatched one of my favorite movies last night, The Wings of Desire, and my breath caught at the moment when Bruno Ganz (his angel name escapes me at the moment) touches Marion's bare shoulder after she has unzipped her circus costume. So gorgeous. This movie is so ridiculously me, with its numerous philosophical and historical ruminations via oodles of voice-over and dreamy montages. It's a fluid visual poem, with its sing-song German phrases and circus imagery (I'll always associate this film with Paris, where I first saw it, and where I became captivated by Cirque Plume). Weirdly enough, whenever I watch it, I yearn to be like the angels...to hear the secret thoughts of passersby, to get a taste of the inner workings of minds other than my own. I've always felt imprisoned by the confines of my own body. At times I've been truly desperate to break free from myself, to release all the stuff (emotional and spiritual and intellectual and otherwise) that seems trapped inside of my physical being. Although I generally am unimpressed with Lord Byron's poetry, I do feel a twinge of sympathy whenever he describes (with palpable anguish) his violent desire to break free from the lowly earthly prison of his body and take flight into the heavens. There are so many limits to human existence: time, place, discrete physical selfhood (biology, physics, etc). These are the same things that the angels in the film, especially Bruno Ganz's character, wish so desperately to experience. I would much rather be light of step and to melt in and out and between space and time, and to feel true empathy and a sense of connection with all these strangers swarming around me, who seem so alien to me right now. I find it so strange when Marion comments that she is at last alone when she finally finds her "man." I suppose she means that he is part of her, and thus she maintains the integrity of her selfhood, since it encompasses him. Is one more alone if she can physically exist and interact with other people but with exposure only to their external selves, or if she can hear their innermost thoughts and spiritual yearnings while not having a physical presence for interaction? I would vote for the former, but of course, that's the only option I've actually experienced.

While driving back from home today I heard an ad on NPR for a new Horatio Hornblower miniseries. I've never read the books or seen the TV movies, but "Horatio Hornblower" sounds like an elegant porn star name, if such a thing can exist.

Since I'm in the mood to talk about movies, I also caught The Opposite of Sex recently on television, and eagerly waited for the scene with one of the worst movie lines ever written, uttered by Lyle Lovett as Carl the police officer who woos Lisa Kudrow's Lucia: "Say the point of sex isn't recreation or procreation or any of that stuff. Say it's concentration. Say it's supposed to focus your attention on the person you're sleeping with, like a biological highlighter. Otherwise there's just too many people in the world." I remember watching this movie when it was first released in a tiny artsy movie theater in New Haven, and groaning painfully after that simile. I'm sorry, but sex as biological highlighter is just about the most laughably dopey image I've ever encountered. I do give props to whoever wrote it for taking the risk to write something like that. As a writer of occasional cheezy over-the-top similes and metaphors myself, I'm the last one who should be casting stones. But still...biological highlighter? Gah.

The color of this background is so purty. I'm amazed I even figured out how to make the background this color, given my complete lack of familiarity with anything html. Anyway, this color is a slightly yellowed version of my favorite Crayola crayon from childhood, sea green. Whenever my five-year-old self drew pictures of princesses and villainesses, the princesses would always be at least partly colored with that particular crayon to showcase their goodness. I don't remember which crayon was the evil counterpart...burnt sienna perhaps?

Not long ago I saw a movie called Judy Berlin. Before renting it, I had remembered vaguely that it was praised in reviews as a less ironic and more gentle take on suburban life than that of American Beauty. It took several tries for me to get past the first ten minutes of the film (which were incredibly slow...and the black and white photography did not help the soporific effect), but once I did, I fell under its spell. Edie Falco (who I have yet to see in the Sopranos) as Judy Berlin was just so bright that she really lit up this suburban town with its depressed ghostly inhabitants. She was one of those people who draws you towards her, because she is so spontaneous and unaffected and determined to follow her dreams, no matter what anyone else says. One of those people who "takes a licking and keeps on ticking." While I was jolted by her energetic presence, I much more identified with the lethargic and subdued David Gold. He lost faith in his dreams...he still continues to dream, of making a documentary about his hometown and the beauty he sees in it, but lacks the conviction in order to make his dream happen. He's a pessimist, frankly. When he tried to discourage Judy from going to California, attempting to crush her spirit, my heart ached; he was trying to crush her spirit like his own had been crushed. But she would not listen to him, because she knew what she wanted to do, and refused to even acknowledge the possibility of failure. Beyond that, I was eerily touched by David's mom, who was kind of a suburban Blanche Dubois, clearly teetering on the edge of crazy with her frequent cry of "moon explorers" (I also liked the sci fi twilight zone music that accompanied this segment), but with occasional flashes of insight into how unfulfilling and sad her life was, before she disappeared again into fantasy. Judy's mom struck me as one of those manipulative borderline cases (like one of the patients with whom I spent so much time on the psych ward), and provoked immediate revulsion in me, although perhaps she was just another lost soul looking for comfort in her coworker. Anyway, James Berardinelli did a really fantastic job in his review about the central theme of the movie: "Judy Berlin is about the paralyzing power of inertia. With the exception of the title character, everyone in this movie is trapped - and they all know it. They have small moments of rebellion, but they mostly survive to the end of every day by relying on two timeless methods: self-delusion and rigorous adherence to a soul-sapping routine. Sue and Arthur find a moment's respite by confiding in one another, but they lack the innate courage to move further. Alice takes refuge in a fantasy land as a way of ignoring the basic facts of her life - that her son pities her and her husband no longer loves her. Meanwhile David looks on in horror at the people around him and recognizes that he will share their fate. Then there's Judy, who has the energy and courage to get out of Babylon to make a life for herself - if not as a actress, then as something else. Failure brought David back; we sense that the same will not be true of Judy. In a town full of zombies, she is the only animate being, and her glow is like that of a too-bright light bulb in an otherwise dark, murky room."

God, can I relate with the non-Judys. Each time I feel like something (epiphany after epiphany after epiphany) pushes me away from being David to Judy, I seem to fall right back into David. Like a ball trying to roll out of a deep pit, but always falling back into to the nadir. I don't want to be Principal Gold when I'm in my fifties.

Oh, for more on the phenomenon that is Neutral Milk Hotel (and more about other people who have fallen under their spell and cry into their pillows at night about Jeff Mangum's willful disappearing act), there's a nice article on salon.com. I'll have to check out the Decembrists sometime.

So, yeah. I'm Liz. These are thoughts of mine. I'll try to keep the pretension to a minimum. But just to warn you, I have spent so much of my life completely in my head that my writing style can be a tad self-conscious and self-absorbed. Okay, maybe more than "a tad."

The title of this blog refers to recurring images in Neutral Milk Hotel's "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea," one of the most intense and gorgeous and life-changing albums ever made. If you haven't heard it yet, procure it immediately and prepare yourself for the turbulent emotional journey which will inevitably follow. Usually I can convince myself that I'm doing just fine without love, until I hear any part of this album or read John Donne's love poems. And then there's that ache that eats me up from the inside. Dammit. Out, out, damn thought, damn dream. Come back to me, numbness and denial and distraction by intellectual playthings. Ahhhh. Thank you, old friends.

And...sleep.