Piano Tricks

Imagine you’re walking down a second floor hallway of St. Mary’s Academy, the only all girls high school remaining in Oregon. You’ve just turned left from Sophomore Hall, where you had to travel past the classrooms designated for math and history by tripping over 167 other girls who are sprawled across the blue carpeting, and now you’ve crossed into Freshmen territory. Luckily you don’t have to worry about accidentally falling onto one of them, since they would never sit on the tiled floor (much too cold!), but somehow they still manage to get under your feet anyway.

You push the itty bitty girls aside, making for the stairwell at the other side of this hall, when you pass the large, engraved double doors that lead into the chapel. Suddenly, you hear piano music lilting through the wood of the doors.

But instead of the Catholic hymns expected, you hear: dah-dah-dah dun dahdah dun dahdah! and immediately recognize the tune as The Imperial March pierces through the hallway at full volume.

“Must be Margo,” you chuckle to yourself.

Margo Gilbert has a seemingly undeniable urge to play at least the opening lines of that song whenever she sees a piano in a room. If she knows one exists in a room, even if the doors are closed, she’ll still go in and play Darth Vader’s theme, then exit the space as if nothing usual happened. And Margo definitely doesn’t tickle the ivories when she plays the theme. No, to her it deserves the same volume as Holst’s Mars. If there is no soundproofing in the room, the theme echoes through the entire floor of the school.

Though Margo has taken formal piano lessons, she says she mostly learned this song, and almost all the others she loves to play by ear. “I have perfect pitch,” she explains. “I think one in 10,000 people have it. Actually, more kids are born with it now. Well… it’s pretty rare. But it basically means that if someone sits down and plays a piece – whenever I hear a sound, I can tell you if it’s an A flat, or a B flat, or whatever. It’s completely useless, but it helps me cheat.”

Margo’s sitting at a piano in our mutual friend Amadea’s house. “Yes, Amadea has a piano in her house,” Amadea quips, rolling her eyes. “In a house with siblings named Johann, Amadea, and Sebastian, you have to have a piano.”

The whole room chuckles, and Margo drifts her skeletal white fingers along the keys, the piano crooning out a haunting melody.

“What’s that?”

“Theme from Corpse Bride,” Margo responds. “It’s supposed to be a duet though.”

“Hey, do you know the song from Princess Mononoke?”

“Um…” she pauses. “How does it go?”

I sing the first few lines of the song: In the moonlight, I felt your heart quiver like a bowstring’s pulse…

Margo dazzles us all by playing back exactly what I’ve sung.

“Wait, you do know that?”

“No,” she responds.

“Wait! Can you play anything I sing?”

“Of course,” Margo laughs loudly. She has one of those fun laughs, stuttering a little bit: ahaha haha hahaha.

We proceed to test out her claim by singing random pieces having her play them back, from Memory to I Just Can’t Wait to Be King to Ice Ice Baby.

“Oi, my fellow compatriots, I never this was such a great party trick!”

Crazy Fish Ladies

“She’s was all happy, flipping around. And now she’s all sad because she wants in. Whose desk is this?”

“Mine,” I replied, looking up from my furious typing of the conversation, surprised at the random question tacked on to the end of the remark about the fish. Apparently the tiny creature, whose name was Little Lady, had previously been swimming around its small bowl and was looking into the larger tank with hope, and “trying to make friends” with the larger fish in the tank.

“I take it you don’t study there?” Laura asked me, sitting down on Liane’s bed. Her body faced me, but her head was turned sharply to the left, watching the fish tank which took up more than half of the desk top between the two beds.

Laura is the RA from first floor Mac, a petite blonde with a lot of energy to spare. Already she’s bounced around the room several times, not seeming to want to stay in place for more than a few seconds. I feel tired just watching her move around.

“No,” I answered shortly, still trying to keep up with my typing, and with her.

“I don’t like this beta,” Laura said to Liane, who was across the room and doing something that made clunking noises. Laura was speaking loudly, as if she didn’t realize that her volume was a little over indoor acceptability. “She’s a bitch. What if my fishy’s pregnant? I want babies! What if the bitch eats them! She’s too young! Like me. I’m too young. What would you do if you were preggo right now? I would diiiiiiiie.”

Laura got up and tromped to the other side of the room, where Liane had taken Little Lady and transplanted it into a new, larger container. “Where is she?” Laura asked. “Awwwwww she’s already in there! You should put her in there,” she pointed to the big tank. “She likes her new friends! Oh, but she has a sickness. You should put her in there anyway. Oh, but you don’t want the other fishies to get sick. It’s like an STD.” She moved to the other end of the dorm room, looking in the mirror and noticing the clock. “Oh, it’s already 7:30!” she exclaimed.

“My clock is ten minutes fast,” Liane said calmly as she added Ick-Guard to the container with Little Lady in it.

“It’s already 7:30!” Laura exclaimed again as if she hadn't heard, crossing back over to Liane’s bed and sitting down again.

“It’s 7:25,” I input.

“What’s that one?” Laura asked, once again peering into the large fish tank.

“Sharkbait,” Liane replied, coming over to stand in front of her, simultaneously plugging the in filter to the tank that made it sound like we had a small waterfall in our room.

“SHARKBAIT OH HA HA!” both girls shouted at the same time. Liane sat down next to Laura and they both giggled, Liane’s Hawaiian laugh was deeper than Laura’s chuckling, even though Liane is a few inches shorter than Laura.

“So are you going to put her in?” Laura asked again about her fish.

“Later,” Liane sighed softly. “I know a person who had a dog named Little Lady,” she added, possibly trying to distract Laura.

“That’s the best name ever!” Laura shouted loudly. “They all look like they are getting beat up by the beta. Oh, it might be because there’s food. What’s that one?”

“That one’s Larry,” Liane explained, pointing at the fish. “And that one’s Moe.”

“Oh! Because – that one looks like he’s singing to us! I’m afraid that she’s gonna run into the glass,” Laura said, apparently switching back to talking about her own fish. “She’s a lucky little fish! She was gonna be another fish’s dinner!”

“Where you get her?” Liane asked curiously.

“It was a weekend program. Probably from the thing down the road. Okay, I gotta go. I wanna be here for the big transfer though! It could be emotionally traumatizing! Wait, see how that one is like ‘BLUB BLURB BLUH’?” Laura asked, imitating a fish noise.

“Like how?” Liane giggled.

Laura obliged her and made the noises again. “’BLURGH BLUR BLUB’.” Then she got mesmerized by the beta fish again. “Right. Hey, you lost your dinner, girl. It’s not there anymore!”

“You know how pitbulls are confident? She’s like that. She moves like that,” Liane explained.

“Awww. Okay, gotta go nooooooooow,” Laura sighed, getting off the bed and moving to the door.

“Bye,” Liane said.

“Bye. They all have bluepy lips,” Laura said. By now I was starting to wonder if she had ADD as she moved back and sat on the bed again. “Why are they eating their poopoo? You should get a starfish. Like um…”

“Flo,” I supplied when she couldn’t come up with the name.

“FLO! I like Flo. And the cleaner dude.”

“Jacques,” came the answer from Liane this time.

“Jacques! Okay, I’m gone,” she made to stand up again, but kicked a pile of papers on the floor. “Uh oh! I kicked somebody’s home- Much Ado About Nothing! Who’s reading that?”

“Me,” I responded.

“For Shakespeare? I was in that play! Okay, I gotta go. Oh my god! Bye!”

This time Laura actually left the room, the door crunching shut behind her.

I sat for a moment and finished typing up the conversation, then went back over it, laughing at the non-congruity, and also completely amused that there is someone who is more of a crazy fish lady than my roommate.

Snapshot of a Girl

She pulls up her knee-high sock, then unfolds her body as she stands, teetering a little bit as if she overbalanced or stood up too fast. “Sure you can interview me,” she agrees, talking a seat on the metal bench. She pulls one plastic knitting needles out of her messy bun, leaving a pencil to hold the colorful hair in place, then retrieves the other and a ball of yarn from a fuzzy purple bag. “You don’t mind if I knit while we talk, yeah?”

“Sure, that’s fine,” I reply, shifting my weight from left foot to right, my sweaty palms making the paper clutched in hand crinkle. “Um… well, can I ask about the bag? It’s rather… odd, but cool!”

“Oh, this?” she asks, petting the pink purse thing with a smile as if it were a pet. I notice now that the face on the purse is made of a blue glove for a nose, and has huge googly eyes that jiggle when she shifts on the bench. The flap of the purse is the mouth of the monster, and the whole pink purse just seems to fit with the rest of the girl. She seems equally fuzzy, and just as loud person. “My aunt made it and one day when I was at her house I saw it, and it was just like ‘Wow, hey Auntie! That’s sooooooo adorable, and it’s so me; can I have it?’ and she said ‘Oh my god, you’re right!’ and she gave it to me. I fucking love this thing! Oh… should I not curse for this? Crapshit! I mean…”

We both crack up and I lean back against the glass of the bus stop shelter. “I don’t mind if you swear,” I finally manage.

“Great, so hit me with your questions.”

“What’s your philosophy for the good life?” I ask her, figuring that was a good place to start. I grip my pencil tight in my hand, ready to scribble down what she says.

“Um…” she ponders for a moment, making a few stitches with her needles, the sound of them clicking together accompanying her words. “Don’t get in the mindframe of misery. If you’re feeling down, try to do something about it, let happy people help you. If you’re feeling good… exude that happiness, don’t hold it back, smile at strangers, because you never know what those vibes could do for someone else.”

I glanced at her for a moment, absorbing the words. I wouldn’t have expected that from someone who seemed around little younger than me. Especially not the way she dressed in purple socks with unicorns on them, an orange skirt, and a black zip-up hoodie with vicious wolves printed across the front.

“That’s pretty deep,” I reply after a moment, having no idea what else to say. But she was right, I realized. I approached her to talk to because she smiled at me.

“What’s next?” she asked, completing a row and then squinting through her glasses at the row she’d just made. I noticed there was an unbent paperclip on one side of the blue plastic frames.

“What’s the funniest thing that’s ever happened to you?”

Again she thinks for a few moments, then a broad grin lifts her lips and she chuckles. “Um… this is anonymous, yeah? How much do I have to censor?”

“Please, no censoring. It’s completely anonymous,” I immediately assure her.

“Well then the time I accidentally clicked onto the gay porn site and proceeded to have a panic attack because of the penis hanging around. It was 3:00 AM and I had to try and keep from waking the house, but uh...once I got over it, I went and read the bios for the porn stars. Turns out, most emo porn stars have fantasies about Zac Efron! May not have been that funny at the time, but it's great now!”

“How in the hell did you manage to get that accidentally?” I chuckled.

“Well, I was looking up someone on Google, I don’t remember who now, but I ended up at this gay porn site. It was traumatizing! Too much penis! I hate penis!”

“Um…”

“Well, I’m not strictly a lesbian, I like men too, but sex is creepy,” she shudders.

“Creepy?” I repeat, shifting my weight again on my feet.

“Yeah. I don’ t like sex. It's weird.”

“What else do you not like?” I ask quickly, hoping to get back into a little more comfortable zone, at least for me. She doesn’t seem bothered about talking anything; not even a blush colors her cheeks.

“Well, let’s see,” the girl replied, her knitting abandoned on her lap now. “I hate snow. It needs to die. And I don’t like Boy Scouts either.”

“Really? Why not?” I asked, settling down even more. “My best friend doesn’t like them either. She says they are sexist.”

“They are!” the girl nods firmly. “Their values are old-fashioned and outdated, they are very sexist at times, and they really, really need to screen their scoutmasters better...if they're going to continue being an organization, they need to make a lot of changes. I mean a bunch of scoutmasters recently have been molesting the boys, I’ve been reading about that, and there have been a lot of claims of sexism, they're anti homosexuality - basically, they're stuck in the 18th century and can't get out.”

“What do you love?” I ask her, still finding it weird that she too dislikes Boy Scouts.

“I love rain - there's just nothing quite as cleansing as walking out in the rain, whether it's a drizzle or a downpour. It's amazing to just get soaked outside and have a good time, even on the worst of days it cheers me up. And I like ska music too. It's IMPOSSIBLE to stay in a bad mood with music this upbeat, you've got electric guitars, bass guitar, drums, vocalists, and then a whole brass section!”

I give her another little grin. “You’re a very open, friendly person, aren’t you?”

“I like to think of myself that way,” she nods, her head going up and down so fast that the pencil almost slips out of the waves. “Do you have any more questions?”

“Um… how about if someone wrote a biography about you, what would the title be?”

“Having Sex is Overrated. Either that, or Can’t Stand the Normal, Can’t Stand the Ordinary. Both are lines to a song that I was listening to earlier. It’s genius!”

I nod and write down the answer just like I had all the others. “Okay, now I’m curious about how you’ll answer this next question. If you were a mythological creature, what would you be and why?”

“A Cthulu,” she answers immediately, glancing up as a bus pulls up to the stop. “They’re just kickass. And cannot be defeated! And their name is bitchin’. But hey, this is my bus. I gotta go,” she says, slipping her knitting back into the monster bag.

I thank her quickly as she slips onto the bus, and then she waves at me from inside as the bus pulls away from the curb.

Hi, I’m Possessed By Musicals, Screamo Bands, Crows, and Dust Bunnies (Though Never at the Same Time)

I’ve noticed that whenever I’m really, really happy and have nothing to do, such as complete homework assignments, I head for the kitchen. One of the requirements for being that happy is that I’m at home. Dorm kitchens are not happy inducing. Also, they do not have the ingredients needed to make Triple Chocolate Espresso Mousse Pie. I got the recipe from Martha Rampton (she said working at the Center for Gender Equity would have its benefits, and this recipe is definitely one of them). Over Winter III, I hooked my whole family on the dessert, and now they won’t allow me to come home for a weekend unless I make the pie.

Anyway, whenever I’m baking, I subconsciously sing to myself about what I’m doing. For example: “Cut, cut, cut the chocolate and put it in the pot! It’s gotta melt with the cream and cornstarch!” or “I’m stirring the mixture so it doesn’t stick to the bottom! Burning on the bottom would be bad for the chocolate. So I gotta stir! Stir that mix with my stirring stick! I think it’s called a whisk! Yeah, the whisk is for whisking up my pie filling!”

Okay, so none of that rhymes… and I’m obviously not going to be turning in the song in hopes of winning a Grammy. Still, the funniest part of the whole experience (at least to me) is that I don’t even realize I’m doing this until my mother bursts out laughing from listening to me. She always asks me why I feel the urge to turn my baking adventures into a musical. I protest that I don’t even know that I’m singing, but she never believes me and says it must run in the family: my father does the same thing when he makes Ramen.

However, I do realize when I get possessed by Screamo Bands. This happens whenever I’m extremely frustrated. And that normally occurs when I’m at my computer and receive yet another email from someone wanting me to do something. Then the mouth opens and sound comes pouring out of my mouth in response to the email. I sound like Steven Hyde in the episode of “That ‘70s Show” where he is pretending to be possessed Satan, combined with a cat coughing up a hair ball.

Don’t ask me to do this on command. I can’t Devil-Speak at real people; I can only scream at the ones that live inside my computer that will never be able to hear me. My roommate walked into our room when I was in the middle of a rant once, and the expression on her face quickly brought me into a fit of laughter. This just made her eyes get wider and back out of the room. (My laughter sounds like a crow when I get really worked up and can’t breathe, and I was definitely cawing that evening. I am just thankful she’d already known me for about five months or she probably would have requested a room change.)

While you can experience the crow laughter if you can crack me up past the point of having enough oxygen, and also hear the musical baking session if you were at my home, the closest that you can ever come to hearing me possessed by a screamo band would be my alternative possession by dust bunnies.

My friend, Emily, finds extreme pleasure in tickling me, especially about she figured out that I make weird noises when anyone tickles me. She says that I sound like I’m speaking some strange, foreign bubbly language. Thus, my possession by dust bunnies.

I don’t know why getting tickled causes me to sound like that. I’ve heard people screech and scream, but never burble-talk like me. Likewise, I’ve never heard someone crow-laugh either. That’s not my only laugh, mind. I’ve got the ‘hahas’ and the ‘heehees’ and the ‘ckckckcks,’ but those I’ve heard on other people. The crowing remains unique so far.

Like I said before, I know I picked up the ‘singing what I’m doing while cooking’ habit from my father. Also, I know I’ve picked up the Devil-Speak from my brother. And no, not because he listens to that type of music. Well, he might, but that’s not the reason. I’ve noticed that Nicholas tends to make the same type of noises when he’s trying to make me laugh. Maybe I subconsciously echo the sounds to make myself laugh and calm down.

Yet, this all makes me wonder how much of our quirky behavior has been unconsciously taught to us, and how much of it is just us without any outside influence? And also… even when we adopt other people’s weird behavior, does that still mean it’s their’s, or is it now a trait that makes us unique?

On Nose Pads

They circled each other, their fingers poised for striking. The smaller one lunged for the taller, hands going to armpits. The entangled pair writhed together for a few moments, one trying to get away from the other, even as she was trying to get back at her attacker. Aileen released a shriek when the tickling became too much and she burst into a fit of giggles. Her glasses slide down her nose as she laughed, then fell off, clattering onto the floor.

The pair stopped instantly, Amanda releasing Aileen and allowing her to pick up her glasses. As soon as the metal frames were back in her hand, Amanda leaped to the attack again, a smirk on her face.

“Ack! Wait! I lost one of my nosedudes again!”

“Is that the technical term?” I chuckled, watching as she searched around for the nose pad that fallen off her glasses.

“You know what?” Aileen replied, making a rude hand gesture to the entire lunch table.

Everyone laughed and joined in the search to find the missing piece of silicone. As I scanned the tile floor of the cafeteria, I considered the purpose of a nose pad.

Glasses did not always have the comfortable padding between nose and metallic frame. Not long ago, rims dug into the nose, squeezing the bone and pinching at fragile skin. Red marks were left on the flesh, and even bruising in some cases. Metal could easily cut skin, and if a person wearing glasses got punched in the face, the impact could cause an even deeper injury.

And a single piece of foam, and later, a piece of silicone, protects from the hurt people had to endure if they wanted to see the world around them instead of millions of blurs. The nose pads provide the comfort in eyesight, and vision should be never be painful. Seeing the world should be easy and pleasant. To have it be otherwise is to be cheated.

I’ve been wearing glasses since I was seven years old. If you feel the space behind my ears, your fingers will find an indentation in my skull where the glasses permanently reshaped bone with pressure. But this has been necessary: my nearsightedness has gotten progressively worse over the years, and now my eyesight lags at about 20/400. I know the important of glasses. And I know the importance of glasses that to do hurt to wear.

The Clock

One day, I want to count how many times I look at my clock. I want to know how many seconds I witness floating by, the little green lines on the surface of the clock-face perpetually changing with every sixty seconds. How many times do I pass my gaze over the black box, and the silver buttons and accents around the face without really looking?

How much am I aware of time? And how much am I aware of it passing? These are two different concepts: I know what time it is because of where I am, where I need to go, the position of the sun in the sky, how dark it is, what the stars look like, and if I can see the stars, but I do not count the ticks of time passing between each breath. I do not slide the ribbon of minutes through my fingers to mark how they connect and flow together, one passing into the next.

I see the changing hours, I hear the days change, but I do not notice as they go by. They slither through my mind like mango juice through a sieve: passing through without creating the disturbance of notice.

There are so many sayings about time. “You’ve got all the time in the world,” “time flies when you’re having fun,” but I think a quotation by William Faulkner’s is the one I agree with the most: “Clocks slay time... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.” In recording the seconds, and yet still not being fully aware of the time passing, takes away the magic. It would make life calmer, and possibly more enjoyable, to throw the clock out the window.

And yet, I can’t be anything but a slave to the clock. It tells me when to go to class. It orders when I’m supposed to eat lunch and when to eat dinner, and if I don’t do so, than I feel guilty to have eaten outside of the “correct times.” The clock commands when I go to a meeting, do homework, go to sleep, and when to start the whole process over again.

My clock tells me when to wake up, thundering Muse’s “Starlight” into the room. I can now recognize the first note of that song within a nanosecond. If it comes up on iTunes, only two or three seconds get out before I flip to a different song. If the radio station I listen to, 94.7, plays the song, then the volume goes off for four minutes and four seconds. I can’t listen to the song I used for an alarm last year either. “Scream” by Tokio Hotel is permanently off all of my playlists. I just can’t listen to either of songs. I don’t want to wake up any more than I’m already awake.

I don’t want to know how much I’m missing. It’s better to stay in this schedule and do what it tells me so I don’t have to make a decision. I can stay pre-programmed. I’m safe that way.

Girl with the Crystal Earring

I slide a comb through my hair each morning, and often have to pull back a hank of it in order to brush it out. Whenever I do this, it reveals the shell of my ear, and green crystal flashes in the light. Those earrings have been in my ear since Christmas, except for the few occasions which I remove them in classes to fiddle with as a nervous habit.

These earrings are in the second holes. I rarely wear anything in the first holes anymore. Yet, I remember after I got the second pair pierced, hardly a day would pass when I wouldn’t have four earrings on. I believed the adornments gave me a little beautiful.

Now I remove the earring, sliding my fingernail between the clasp and the back of my ear. The fingers on the other hand pinch the crystal from the front, and as soon as I have a firm hold, I jerk my nail and pry the clasp from post, the momentum pulling the earring from my earlobe completely.

I set the green crystal earring on the wooden board that my computer rests on, and my eyes continually dart to it as I type.

What is the earring’s purpose? It doesn’t seem to be for anything besides decoration. It draws attention to the face, and also can serve as a form of expression of individuality.

But how did society decide that piercings are attractive? What constitutes beauty? Why is beauty and attractive qualities different from culture to culture?

When I was when seven years old, I had my ears pierced. My mother insisted that the earrings be 24 karat gold in case I was allergic to nickel, just like she was. I agreed, and picked out the prettiest ones I could find. The pink frosting color of the embedded crystal belied the vicious sharpness of the posts. By eight, my right ear had got inflicted, and the skin had grown over the front of the earring. In order for the earring not to be permanently affixed in my earlobe, my mother immediately brought me to the doctor’s office.

The numbing cream didn’t work and I screamed when the doctor pushed the front of the earring through the scabby skin covering it, then removed the entire post and clasp.

Still, as soon as the ear healed, I returned to the piercer’s again. I wanted to match.

A couples years later I was in the chair again for the second holes. This time the piercer’s gun caught on the earrings that had just been implanted in my head, tearing and pulling at flesh that had skewered only moments before.

Why do people put themselves through so much pain for the sake of beauty? It is even an adage: “beauty is pain.”

People get tattoos, or even have surgery in order to alter their bodies. But when you think about all these body modifications, plain and simple they are mutilations. So how did this tradition of piercing and tattooing start? How did our society come to view something that causes us pain to be beautiful and attractive? What does that say about us?