« May 2004 | Main | July 2004 »

June 23, 2004

My little plot of cyberspace.

So, back in college, I used to have a website. Among the things I published there is a paper I wrote junior year on the history of tampons. This was four and a half years ago. And you know what? Just today, a college student from British Columbia emailed me to let me know that she's researching Tampax for a paper, and she found my research really useful. This is what I love about the web. I'm glad to be back.

Posted by sarah at 12:58 PM | Comments (0)

June 22, 2004

the first summer of the rest of my life.

I tend to talk a lot about being fifteen. At least once a month, I'll pull some crazy item of thrift store clothing out of the recesses of the closet and model it for Patrick, saying "I wore this to school when I was fifteen. How cool was I?" Or I'll open up my journal from tenth grade Creative Writing class, and read through an entry about That Summer.

I was fifteen in the summer of 1994, ten years ago. And while it's true that fifteen for me marked many standard teenage milestones (first kiss, first boyfriend, first time staying out past curfew), that's not really what I think about when I think about why that age, and that summer, shaped me so strongly, and why they still have so much resonance ten years later. What follows is a beginning of the explanation.

* * *

That was the summer when I began to understand gravity. I don’t mean the fall of steps, the way a toy, when dropped, will crash to the floor and break. I’d understood that since I was three. I’m talking about the pull of the earth in its orbit, the way the moon shapes tides, spreading them over the surface of the planet like a housewife spreading thick, sweet frosting over a layer cake.

It was all about lying on my back and looking up. Up at the branches of trees, their leaves fluttering in the wind. A northwest wind, my mom would say. In Maine, when you’re on the coast, you can tell which way the wind’s blowing just by looking outside – if the sky is blue and the clouds are puffs of perfect white, and it’s sunny but not hot – it’s a northwest wind day.

Erin and I were lying on our backs on the worn, gray pavement of Juniper road. Pavement so old it almost looked soft, pavement the color of a black teeshirt that’s been through the wash a hundred times. It was warm against my shoulderblades and my butt and the backs of my calves. Gravel was digging slightly into my right arm, cocked under my head. The shadows of maple leaves dappled our faces. We talked about reincarnation, whether we believed in it or not.

I thought about how her dad was dead. My uncle. I thought about how, years ago, when we were only seven or eight, in the entryway to the Jones cottage – the linoleum-floored room off the kitchen, near the back screen door – the one that faces the gravel driveway, not the ocean – I had said the thing I most regretted before... well, for a long time. I can’t think of another thing I regretted saying more. And the level of regret was childish in its melodrama, perhaps, but it was deep-rooted in me, a sadness that words from me had caused pain. I hadn’t meant it to sound the way it did.

There, by the screen door, she had said matter-of-factly, a little sadly, "My dad is dead. I don’t have a dad anymore." And I wanted to say I was sorry, to let her know that I sympathized with her pain. But what I said was, "I know. And I don’t have an uncle anymore." And I wanted to mean: it was a loss for everyone, he touched all of our lives, I share your sadness. But I knew, with my next breath, that that is not how it had sounded. It had sounded like I was trying to equate my pain with hers, and thereby somehow negate hers. An uncle is nothing like a father, and losing one can’t be compared with losing the other. When I think of that moment now, it still fills me with a feeling like crying. And I have to take a deep breath to equalize the pressure that has formed in throat and eyes.

But on that day, that blue-sky northwest wind day, we weren’t talking about her dead father. We were talking now about our crushes of the moment. I had a boyfriend. She had an obsessive crush on an older boy.

Later that summer, I would feel the earth moving. It would be night, and clear. Stars would be in the sky, and the brightest one would be Venus. We would lie on the field above Reid’s beach, listening to the wash and rush of ocean, and we would stare up again, at the sky, the stars, the planets.

That summer, Erin and I decided that life was moments. And that if we wanted to go swimming in the ocean in jeans and overalls, weighed down by the sogged denim, then slog back up the hill, pine needles and sand clinging to wet ankles, we would. And that if we wanted to sit under a picnic table on the public wharf and sing Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall all the way through, we would. Tourists could stare if they wanted. And that if we wanted to start a mosh pit and headbang to cheesy pop at the Yacht Club’s Teen Night dance, we would. And when they asked us to leave, we just laughed.

I think of that summer as the beginning of my current life. It was a summer of teenage rebellion, but most of all, it was the time when I decided, firmly and clearly, that I wanted to define myself in the world on my own terms, and make the world change to accept me, rather than the other way around. Now, I try to hang onto a little bit of that sense of righteous, iconoclastic idealism. I try to live a life that fifteen-year-old me would be down with.

Posted by sarah at 09:00 PM | Comments (0)

June 16, 2004

I'm trying.

It’s the question I dread. Still, I know that if the people who ask it of me stopped asking, that's when I’d feel like I was really lost.

“Are you writing?”

Today, the person asking was Nat, who was my first-year advisor at Swarthmore, my professor for poetry workshop, and an all-around writing mentor throughout college.

I ran into her in front of the Rosenbach at their Bloomsday event. Police barricades cordoned off the block of Delancey between 20th and 21st, and white folding chairs were arranged in the street in a semicircle around the museum’s steps, where every five minutes or so a new reader took his or her place in front of the microphone to read a few pages of Ulysses aloud. I had walked over on my lunch break through the thick humidity. I was sweating and only had 40 minutes and was supposed to meet Patrick, who I couldn’t spot anywhere among the crowd. So I was visibly distracted as we chatted, and felt bad about that.

And then the question.

Am I writing? It’s never simple for me to answer, because I haven’t quite figured out what it would take for me to answer an unqualified yes. So I often say, “I’m trying.” Which is kind of a bullshit answer. How do you "try" to write? What does that mean?

Am I writing? I write three pages in a notebook every morning when I wake up. Sometimes I write about my dreams, or what I need to get done that day, or about memories from my past or questions about my future. It is more journal than art, though art is on my mind constantly, driving me, tormenting me.

Am I writing? I sit down at the computer a few times a week and begin stories that I never seem to complete, though when I begin them I always believe that this time I will. Sometimes I write out conversations, or describe the way the sun looked on the bus ride home. Sometimes I write small poems.

Am I writing? I started this web site explicitly as a way to share my collections of old magazines, my finds and my myriad projects -– but in large part I also started it as a way to begin to be able to answer that question with an unqualified “yes.” Because while I try to tell myself that all that matters is the writing, I am coming to realize that it’s not fully true. Writing alone, no matter how many notebooks and megabytes of hard disk space I fill, is not enough. If I’m to begin saying “yes,” I need to be sharing my writing.

In high school and college there were literary magazines and workshops and readings and open mikes, and since college there has been nothing. A letter to the editor here, an article in the newsletter at work there, a short-lived blog on Typepad that I gave up on because I felt too limited by the service’s constraints. I haven’t completed a story or published a poem since college.

And at first, that was okay. I was so caught up in the newness of living as an adult in new cities -- working at new jobs, meeting new friends, buying furniture and paying bills and just living -- that not writing much was okay. That had been the whole point of telling myself (and Robert Olen Butler, when he called me that day senior year) that I didn’t want to go straight to an MFA program, after all, hadn’t it? I said at the time that I needed to live more before I could really write. And I think that was true. I have grown up and broadened my experiences immensely since college -- I’ve lived in two cities, four apartments, worked at four different jobs. I’ve made new friends and traveled to new countries and volunteered for a presidential campaign and broken bones. Yeah. I’ve been living. And you know what now? I miss writing.

So to Nat, I apologize for being distracted and reticent when we spoke a few hours ago. It was really nice to see you, and thank you for asking the question. Next time we meet, maybe I’ll be able to just say “yes.”

Posted by sarah at 04:06 PM | Comments (0)

June 11, 2004

Liar.

Found on the sidewalk near 10th and Ellsworth. I like to imagine the writer holding it up to someone -- first the question, then the judgement: "Liar," like some always-failed polygraph. Probably my favorite find, so far.

Posted by sarah at 11:26 PM | Comments (0)

June 03, 2004

change is.

As of this week, I have both bangs and a promotion. Both happened with little to no warning. I'm not sure which feels like a bigger deal right this minute. I mean, okay, yeah, the promotion, of course. But seriously, I haven't had bangs since, like, 3rd grade.

Posted by sarah at 05:25 PM | Comments (0)