Friday, December 29, 2006

For the past three days in a row my mom and I have frequented the local Megaplex, smuggling in our contraband sodas and snacks, standing in line, resolved to spend the holiday break soaking up a series of cinematic blockbusters.
Usually, I plan to arrive at a movie precisely on time, not so early that I end up sitting in a empty theater waiting for the screen to alight and not so late that I miss the coming attractions (I confess to loving them as they appeal to my slightly ADD sensibilities)
My mom, however, enjoys arriving early…very early, early enough to give me plenty of opportunity to observe native Connecticut High Schoolers in their natural habitat. The result was a veritable parade of Abercrombie mini skirts, Ugg boots, polar fleece, straight hair and glittery lip-gloss. Needless to say, I found myself out of place.
I spent the majority of my high school years shuttling myself back and forth between Northfield Mount Hermon and the barn, with occasional stops at my mom and dad’s respective residences. Sitting in the Branford movie theater, watching high schoolers do what I presume “normal” teenagers do, I found myself wondering: had my family and I stayed in Connecticut so many years ago, rather than move to New Hampshire, would I myself have been a typical teenager? Would the Saturday nights I spent cooling out horses have been replaced by straightening my hair, applying glittery eye shadow and scheming a “coincidental” bump into my crush at the seven o’clock movie?
I don’t really mean to paint my teenage self as abnormal, I wasn’t, nor was I an inordinate nerd. But I also wasn’t one of the crowd. I didn’t date in high school, nor did I spend any measure of time online, on AIM, at the mall and so forth. I read a lot, worked hard and took AP courses. But mostly, I rode. I suppose some people’s mall is another’s barn…and such is a matter of one’s nature, not their location. So although it seems that every high school student in Branford Connecticut is out and contributing to the sexual tension existent at the theater on any given Saturday, there are also kids at the local barn, hot walking their best friend after an evening of training, or seated around a circular table at Game World, painting their pieces and preparing for battle…or even curled up in the classics section at the local Barnes and Noble, spending long hours reading ahead just because they feel like it. In my younger years, I was pretty embarrassed by my nerdy sensibilities. But upon surveying the social scene of typical high school life with older, wiser eyes, I find the knowledge of dissimilarity refreshing. In a world supplied endlessly with jean mini skirts, cell phones and hair straighteners, all of which have been branded normal and desirable, a little variation is refreshing.
For My Dad~

In a moment
Her layers are stripped away and she faces his stroke stricken form.
She, fearful and frantic-
A shrieking skin surrounding a body

From an outsider’s stance
This is life-
And there is no time to waste

Sirens are muted
Shrieking ceased
Life is afloat in a sea of happenstance
A hysterical twist of too little time
And nobody gives a damn about misplaced brake pads

“How is your heart”, you ask me,
And I wonder, how is yours?
Peaceful warriors, you and I,
Living our lives by the contents of our collective hearts

And the shrieking, stroking, pounding pulse of this life.

Saturday, December 23, 2006

I soaked last night in a good tub,
Joni Mitchell singing For Free,
And I, looking out the window at a white light lit Christmas tree,
Standing alone in somebody else’s yard.

It was there, amongst the suds and in between bubbles,
That I found myself changed,
Felt myself fully a well-timed woman,
Something I had never been before.

And it came to me then,
Amongst the suds, and in between bars, thighs, and folded skin,
Where I could find my ever-elusive heart.

Before I knew, I had looked for it there, in the tub,
As one searches for a lost bar of soap,
Finding it, only to feel it slip through my fingers.
Elusive heart.
Amongst soap suds.
And Joni Mitchell’s songs.

Perhaps,
It is not so lost as I had thought it.

This morning came earlier than I had anticipated, ushered in by the familiar clack of a dog’s toenails against the hardwood floor and the cold, attic air upon my nose and ears. With a rainy drizzle steadily dripping along outside my bedroom window, the circumstances were ideal for sleep long into the early afternoon hours.

I recall being a little girl and waking up in the middle of the night, sick to my stomach and scared. Clad in a little blue nightgown and clutching a stuffed animal, I would totter into my parent’s room awakening their sleeping lumps with an apologetic whine for help. This morning, it was my mother who approached my slumbering self with news of unease.

Where her stomach had been quite upset the day before, today the situation had worsened and she had received orders from her doctor to visit our local emergency room. “It must have been the almonds I ate” she theorized as I maneuvered her Prius onto 1-95 towards the shoreline emergency center, memories of a more menacing sickness brewing in both our minds.

About seven hours later, after an all to familiar foray into the world of MRIs, Morphine, EKGs, Catscans, and waiting rooms, here I sit, processing it all. My mom’s border collie, Spin-o is asking me to take him out for a walk, a lengthy one at that as he has waited so patiently all day long.

I am no stranger to responsibility…nor should I be, I am twenty years old and every day more of a woman of heart and mind than ever before. I have seen my share of hospitals, of heartache and of victory and have taken it all in stride. Yet, sometimes I feel like I am once again a timid, nightgown clad, little girl, looking for someone to hold her hand, and whisper reassuringly, that it’s all going to be ok.

Saturday, December 16, 2006

Sex and the City~

My radiant roommate and I went and sat in the basement of bobst (you know, in one of those little private rooms) for almost four hours today. After a short stop at Upstein for chick fil a salads, we returned home. Since then, I have been stapled to my desk, studying law and society, natural science, language and society, and my aim buddy list. I am going mad and it's a Saturday night.
Somebody get me a cocktail.

Wednesday, December 13, 2006


Here I am, lying on my bed (which this year stands several feet off the ground) watching Seabiscut and attempting to conclude this paper on controversies amongst women within the first and second waves of feminism. Of course, I can’t. I am so absorbed in the movie that my soul aches more and more with each passing scene.
Sometimes I think my heart may break with want of my Ham, yearning for the familiar feeling of swinging my leg up over a horse’s back, settling back into my saddle, its seat imprinted to my butt and legs, a perfect fit and silence but for the measured breaths of my horse beneath me and the beating of my own heart. There is only a little more than a week left before I am free of finals and homeward bound, but in this moment, a week feels like forever.
Home is where you find yourself more complete than anywhere else. For me, I am more myself on the back of a horse than anywhere else in this wide world. As an artist draws her brush against canvas, moving paint over paper in fluid waves, I have been moved to move in union with another animal. Each movement, an expression of unified intention.
I am ready to go home.

Wednesday, December 06, 2006

Cold blue steel…
And silence, save for the measurement of your shotty breaths;
In and out, your voiceless calls for love against the ticking of a black handed clock.

I find myself standing in an empty space filled with folding metal chairs and sharp edged desks.
Thinking of a strangled blue blanket that always leaves you shivering.

Bare foot on a blue tiled floor, cold and incrusted with soap scum memories of

You, lonely and faceless.

Tuesday, December 05, 2006

Resurrection~
Today, when riffling beneath my bed in search of a certain pair of winter snow boots, I came across one of my most treasured possessions; a neglected tool whose weather-beaten body has served as a medium through which I express myself.
I first purchased my Canon A-1 mechanical camera in high school, a time in my life when the darkroom served as a sanctuary, offering refuge from the stormy twist and tangle that was my life.
With college came the distraction of friends and classes to an extent that somewhat elbowed out my photographic pursuits. For the past year in particular I have been excavating other areas of my life and have left my camera lying dormant, collecting dust beneath my bed, replaced by its spiffier and speedier digital counterpart.
Given the somewhat revelatory nature of the past few days, it seems only fitting that today I finally took my camera out from beneath my bed and separated it from the wealth of dust that had gathered about its carrying case. The Canon's body felt like an old friend in my hands, and I smiled at the familiarity its sturdy mechanics struck beneath my fingers. In that moment I recalled why the sensual and graceful nature of a mechanical device, despite being slower to produce than its digital counterparts, is timeless and to be treasured. There is something grounding in the nature of an instrument whose form represents the fitting together of interlocking parts through a process of manual assembly; a means of construction that is increasingly rare in this world of superfluous speed. Our fast paced world brands a mechanical approach to just about anything “out dated” and “sluggish”…I wonder if such is why I value it so. Perhaps I am craving constancy, a metered way of moving through life. I drive a standard transmission, shoot a mechanical camera, watch old movies, ride a horse…yet I live in a city considered to be one of the most hectic urban jungles. Indeed, I find peace in solidity, in cause and effect, in the weight of my camera, and the mechanics of cogs, each piece fitting together with fluidity. Perhaps the old balances out the new and the sturdiness I favor in certain areas of my life allows the inconsistency of others.
My appreciation of mechanics and manmade devices must be, in part, hereditary. I think of my grandfather, a great sportsman and a manufacturer of firearms; I picture him holding in his small hands weaponized works of art, guns of finished wood and inlaid hand tooled silver, each piece representative of one individual’s dedication and devotion to the instrument he was building. I then think of my father and his life long love of the automobile, his understanding of the way each piece of an engine unites and connects to motivate motion. Or my mother, the artist whose pastels painted fingers can trace form over paper, weaving women’s bodies into existence with ease, how the reins fit into my hands, interlaced with my fingers ability to subtly signal…I could go on and on, in short, my family finds ourselves in manual, palpable forms. Our hands and our touch, interacting with other physical forms yields emotion and inspires us to explore.
Inspiration is created by connection; this afternoon, holding my heavy bodied camera, feeling its parts move beneath the surface of its metallic exterior as I advanced the film or clicked past stops on the way to a fitting aperture, I felt as if I held a little part of myself, a part of my potential not yet recognized and a unifying actor along my ever winding way to self knowledge.

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