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?

Little Tree

She checked the review mirror and then looked over her shoulder. She didn’t look ahead into her lane, just looked to the mirror again. Then the shoulder once more. Finally, she jerked the wheel, swerving into the left lane. My seatbelt locked up, choking me, before yanking me back into the impression of my body that I’d left in the fabric of my seat.

“Was that absolutely necessary?” I panted, checking the clock on the dashboard. I couldn’t read the digital glow, so I reached out a finger and wiped off the dust. 6:34. Twenty-six minutes to go.

“Of course,” Merry grinned. “It was exhilarating, wasn’t it?” She reached up, without taking her eyes from the road, and stilled the air freshener hung from the mirror.

“Is that what smells?” I asked, leaning forward to whiff at the tree-shaped freshener. The only other objects in the front of car were some textbooks and CDs: the Rent and Wicked soundtracks (which I considered sneaking into my backpack when Merry wasn’t looking), Red Hot Chili Peppers, some country artists, a few mixes, and probably some Fall Out Boy. That’s whose concert we were going to see, so I just assumed she had some of their music in the car, even though I didn’t see one of their CDs. She’d asked me if I wanted to listen to something like them, but we both agreed there would be enough of that at the concert.

“Yeah.”

“It’s black… That seems kind of ominous. Black always me of the Plague, and I don’t think that smelled very good. Rotting flesh and all… That would be a terrifying zombie movie.”

She chuckled and glanced at the black tree. “Well, this one is called ‘Black Ice,’ so maybe they wanted to match the name and the color.”

“… Does black ice smell?”

“You know what, Valerie, I really have no idea.”

We both giggled some more, my stomach aching from clenching from laughter, and from her driving skills.

“I think this smells like deodorant,” I got out a few minutes later.

“Oh my god! Like—”

“Old Spice!” we yelled together. She held out her right hand to high five me. I had to rely on the elbow trick in order to actually hit her hand and not her headrest, or worse her face. It wouldn’t have helped her driving.

“Yeah, I really love the smell,” she grinned, waving a hand at the freshener. “I’ve got a whole pack of them in the glove compartment. It makes my car smell like hot man.”

The tree swayed a little in the echo of our laughter, reminding me of one of those hulu-dancers that sit on the dashboard of cars. I couldn’t help but think about how the person who designed these car fresheners probably had some grander agenda then making a teenage girl’s car smell like an attractive man.

“You know… your car doesn’t smell bad.”

“I know,” Merry replied, lifting her shoulders and letting them plunk back down. “But just in case it starts to… then that Little Tree’ll be there.”

Blog #2: 3:52 am on a Monday Morning

Sweat casts a layered sheen on my face. The wetness does nothing to cool the blood flushing my cheeks. I half-lift a hand to wipe away the moisture and instantly the muscles in my neck twinge in protest. My hand falls back to the mattress with a quiet resounding of the springs. I try kicking at the thin sheet covering my body next, the material catching on my legs so I have to lash out with my feet again and again until the fabric ends up in a twisted bundle on the floor.

I listen for my roommate once the creaking quiets, letting out a puff of air when my ears catch her soft snore from across the room. I sigh again and close my eyes, lying still for several seconds before rolling over onto my stomach.

A full minute bumbles by, then I twist onto my back once more. I press my leg up against the wall, but my skin only steals the cold for only a few seconds before there is none left to gather so I let the limb slide down to the mattress.

With growl, my stomach muscles flex and pull up my jellied spine to a sitting position, which has been liquefied with heat and four hours of needed sleep. The bones slide into pockets of air as I twist my hips, cracking, and I wince as I place my feet on the floor.

Black vision turns red when I stand, and I grip the rail of the bed until there is no more color. Luckily my feet know the seven steps to the window. With a few twists, and a snap, my hair lifts off my shoulders and the sweat chills on my face and body, coolness crawling across the skin like a spider made from an icicle.

It takes fourteen tries to move away from the air source, but my eyes can only blink in five second intervals at this time of night, so I lumber back across the floor and fall with a loud “whamp!” onto the mattress.

Air stirs in the room, the softness of the breeze blowing away the whispers of thought. My mouth opens, the jaw stretching repeatedly to take in the breaths of cold. Then these sensations too… start to… disappe…

The sound of screeching tires fills the room, honking horns, yelling, gasping.

A scream pulses in my throat like a heartbeat, and I want to throw it up, let it fly from my lips and splatter on the ceiling, then let it trickle down the walls in jagged red lines to rot there.

Yet, I press the shriek back down, bury it even deeper, down into my stomach to let it churn, mixing with a different kind of acid, because somehow beneath the screeching in my belly and the screeching on the street I can still hear the sound of snoring.

I roll over again and lift my pillow to press it over my head, but I feel the sweat at the back of my neck, so the pillow remains underneath my cheek. The breeze tickles my bare toes and I kick at it like I kicked off my sheets, but the air does not respond to me. It just echoes the screams within my ears until I do not know which ones are mine, and which ones are not.

My First Cup of Coffee

I think that parents often let their children try coffee at a young age just to stop the seemingly endless whining. While I’d like to think I didn’t complain as a child, I’m not sure what else would have inspired my parents to let me try coffee before I was old enough to need caffeine to function.

I don’t remember exactly how old I was, probably around eight or nine, but do I remember sitting next to my mother on our blue and white checkered couch and begging a sip. I don’t even recall why I wanted to try coffee so much. Probably because it was a forbidden drink that only adults were allowed. So, my child’s mind decided that if I got to try the coffee, then I would be more mature.

Anyway, my mother decided to let me try her drink. Perhaps she figured that I since I was, and still am, such a picky eater that there was no way in hell that I would like it.

And oh, was she right! As soon as that horrid liquid touched my taste buds, I wanted to spit it right back in the mug. I was positive she’d accidentally made her drink with fuel oil instead of coffee. Still, I swallowed the concoction, of which my mother was probably very grateful. Nobody appreciates backwashed coffee, or any other beverage for that matter.

After that gritty experience, I decided to avoid coffee for awhile. My father tried to offer me a taste of his homemade iced mocha instead of the milk and hot coffee my mom had, but I quickly declined after smelling the drink. The brownness of the liquid, diluted with melted ice cubes didn’t smell like what I thought coffee should smell like. Coffee was supposed to be warm. It smelled spicy and exotic, like distant lands that you couldn’t even imagine how to get to since they were so far away. There was supposed to be an imagined residue left on your tongue after someone ground up the beans when you were in the same room. The taste was supposed to hold the memory of resting in the cradle of a paper filter, having hot water pushed through it, and then being percolated into a glass pot. Coffee was supposed to be drunk from a ceramic mug, not a teal plastic cup with a hot pink lid. (And yes, my father still uses these cups for his coffee).

I realized then that it wasn’t the idea of coffee that I liked, but rather the smell. Freshly ground coffee instantly softens a room. The smell relaxes; it makes a place feel more comfortable and homey. This affect is what led me to allow my brother to talk me into tasting his peppermint mocha years later. To my surprise, I actually enjoyed the taste of the coffee this time, and ordered my first whole cup of coffee. Sure, this form of the beverage had been altered with chocolate, milk, and sugary syrups, but it made me realize that a lot of the foods I’d discarded in the past after just one taste might be enjoyable if augmented slightly.

So, I really had two first cups of coffee: one that I tried and discarded, along with the idea of ever liking coffee, and a second that I enjoyed and consumed with the realization that other aspects of life could be also liked if I changed the way in which I received them.