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?