the newborn

December 30

At 1:30 in the morning a fart
smells like a marriage between
an avocado and a fish head.
I have to get out of bed
to write this down without
my glasses on.

-Richard Brautigan

on nostalgia

Max: I’m too nostalgic. I’ll admit it. 
Skippy: We graduated four months ago. What can you possibly be nostalgic for? 
Max: I’m nostalgic for conversations I had yesterday. I’ve begun reminiscing events before they even occur. I’m reminiscing this right now. I can’t go to the bar because I’ve already looked back on it in my memory… and I didn’t have a good time.

I just sent my baby (though she is five inches taller than me) sister off on her senior prom, and now I’m super nostalgic. It’s been growing on me ever since I went back to my high school earlier this week to watch my sister and cousin be presented with two fine arts and two history awards, respectively. Being there reminded me of how much has changed in four years—the campus is virtually unrecognizable, the teachers don’t remember me (save a select few), and the students all seem small and insecure.

And now my sister and her friends are off on their prom, to the same place my class had our prom, and then she’ll go to the after-party and will probably take a swig of alcohol and stop, just like I did. I’m nostalgic, and I hate it cause it makes me sad. My prom night was at once the best and the worst night of my high school career. I remember it so fondly, but I know that at the time I was on edge, infatuated, and emotionally reckless. I hooked up with a boy I liked and who I knew was an ass-hat. Fleating fun, tears, hate, blahblahblah—It’s been years since I’ve gotten over him, so maybe that’s why I look back on the night with more fondness than frustration. But it’s all over.

Like Noah Baumbach’s Max in “Kicking and Screaming,” it seems I’m too nostalgic. I’m nostalgic for moments long past as well as for moments that haven’t even happened yet, like my own senior year of college. Good lord, I’m sure it’s terribly normal to be this scared and exited and hesitant and hopeful about my final year of college, but that doesn’t make it any less emotionally turbulent for me. There’s just so goddamn much riding on this year—at least, it feels so. Relationships and GPA and personal hopes and expectations and making sure I’m prepared for what comes after.

But I’m wine-drunk and lonely and naturally nervous and it’ll be OK, I hope.

quite crafty

In an effort to keep myself distracted, and with a lack of any “real work” to do this summer, I am teaching myself a few things, as well as resuming a few neglected hobbies:

painting dog portraits (for realz yo)  

playing the harmonica (I can semi-successfully play Taps, wootwooot)

sewing (pillowcases) on my great-great-grandmother’s sewing machine 

and writing poetry.

To Remember

some notes from my former self, collected on my Blackberry:

Halloween 2k12: Nelly (or Gwen Stefani)

maybe I don’t want to believe in unrequited love because I don’t want to believe that love can hurt

ingang = entrance in dutch (does outgang mean exit?)

a three person +/open relationship could never work because the strongest bond is always between two particles

read Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”

“Precisely”