personal

Liar, Liar, Pants on… Ooo, Shiny!

I’m working at the Hebrew Book Fair, as I told you guys a few days ago, but I’ve been tossed around a couple of times since then, from one sales area to another. I was moved from outside the mall to inside the store, and then from there I was stolen by a very nice woman with dark hair to work with her in the little area right outside the store that’s separate from it but still owned by the same company. Confused? Yeah, so was I. Anyway, none of this is really relevant.

I’m now acting as a boss/manager even though I’m still paid minimum wage. I get to be in charge of the register at the end of the day, as well as the two seventeen-year old high school kids who are working with me.

That’s not the point either. The point is that Book Week, as lovely a concept as it is, is about sales. Pure and simple. It’s about making money. Whenever a certain book isn’t selling, I need to start recommending it to customers after having just read the back cover or inside flap. I need, in short, to lie about having read and liked books. I’m not above an occasional white lie, but in this case… well, it bothers me. As a reader, I want sales-clerks’ honest opinions about books, and I don’t want to cause anyone to buy a book they might not enjoy.

But bookstores are businesses, and the cash register needs to show a certain amount of profit every day. Still, while I’ve recommended books that I haven’t read, I’ve only told people that I’d heard good things about the book. I also never tried to foist a book on someone who didn’t want it after I showed it to them. And, most importantly, I still recommend the books I know and love most of all.

How do you feel about lying, or at least bending the truth and exaggerating, in order to make sales? Have you done it before? Do you feel guilty or do you see it as all part of the job?

Dig in Deep

Roil, roil, scratch and toil,

Dig in deep and turn up soil.

Try, try, scratch and cry,

Dig in flesh and make blood fly.

Want, want, scratch and haunt,

Dig in soul and make cheeks gaunt.

Free, free, scratch and flee,

Dig in deep and turn up “Me.”

Sleepy

Today was very long. A few of my friends visited me at work, which was nice, and I got to read for a lot of the rest of my shift, which was nice as well. Tomorrow morning I wake up and do it all over again until the afternoon. I’m too sleepy to think of anything creative, and so I will leave you for tonight, except to say that there is something profoundly comforting about the knowledge that a bed is waiting to welcome me, my heavy eyelids and languid limbs.

Return of the Book Week (the Length of Which is Ten Days, Actually)

Last year, some of you may vaguely remember (in the farthest recesses of your mind that contain those details that are actually pretty useless and unneeded), I worked at Hebrew Book Week. I’m doing the same thing this year, and today I spent some seven hours setting up stalls, heaving books out of boxes, removing the books from their plastic wrappings and setting them out. My back aches, my wrists hurt and my legs are exhausted, but I got to handle books all day, and in my opinion that’s the best kind of manual labor for me.

Until June 25, I might not have as much time to read all of your lovely blogs as often, although I’ll do my best. I do have most mornings off, but since I’m working on different versions of my resume and gearing myself up to start writing cover letters, I might not have those mornings as leisurely times. I’m applying to internships, you see, at publishing houses and literary agencies in New York City, for next year, and it’s all very exciting and nerve-wracking.

Finally, my current work in progress is coming on well. I think I may have written what is going to be its closing paragraph today, which felt incredible. Since this is the first book I’ve written that has been new to me with every sentence I write, I’m excited to see that maybe it’s actually going to wrap itself up and not leave me hanging and confused as to what on earth I’m supposed to do with the collection of moments in it.

Friday, 9:37PM

My thoughts run together, too fast to articulate in exact form. When I try to pluck at one specific strand, the others clamor for attention and I lose my grip. My mother told me today about the time I accidentally let go of a helium-filled balloon at a birthday party. Even though I had no memory of the incident, I could picture it clearly: myself, platinum blonde hair cut in a sort of shoulder-length bob, long bangs hitting my eyebrows, howling my little lungs out as I stared up into the blue sky into which my balloon was disappearing. My parents offered to bring me another, but I didn’t want it. I wanted my balloon back. Even at a tender age, I was already aware of the difference between something that I claimed and bonded with and something that just looked similar.

It made me think of the way we put our own signature on our things, and the way those items gain a personality and significance to us. The best example, I think, is probably our beds. I know that even though I love hotel-room beds, I never sleep as well in them, even though they’re often way more comfortable than the narrow, childhood bed that I still sleep in every night when I’m at home. I managed to claim my bed at school as my own by putting sheets I chose on it and leaving my books littered in it, but even that was a temporary measure, and I sleep better now that I’m back in my old bed than I slept anytime during the past months.

This morning was one of the hardest I’ve experienced in a while. My eating-disorder loopiness reared its ugly head and I spent a half-hour sobbing because of a stupid number that means absolutely nothing. Even with the sobriety of hindsight, however, I don’t know if I’ll react any differently next week if that number won’t have changed. It’s frustrating, and I don’t know what to do about it. I’m doing everything right, and yet some things are taking so long to change.

Sometimes I want to lose all restraint, to allow myself the perfect freedom to be who I am, as silly or dumb as that may be. But the only way I know how to do that is by getting drunk, something which I don’t enjoy as much as I used to, since it now comes coupled with the awful thoughts and anxieties about caloric intake. I’ve tried getting high a couple of times, and haven’t enjoyed that in the least, either. There is one person with whom I used to be able to be entirely at ease, but things have changed and now there is no one like that, even though there is something close enough to it to be valuable and dear to me.

Maybe restraint is alright, though. Maybe there is a balance to be struck within myself, without the need for outside influence. I just don’t know. My thoughts are all jumbled tonight, and I wish I were like a girl in a young adult novel, struggling beautifully towards something fantastic in the near future.

Honesty is Overrated

Okay. Maybe it’s not. Maybe I’m just bitter. That is a very great possibility. And yet- and yet, there’s a reason why advice to new couples is “Less history, more mystery.” There’s a reason why white lies exist, and why we use them constantly. It’s because the truth can be harsh, unpleasant, unwanted.
Why do we blurt out the truth at the worst possible times? Why do we ruin the beauty and simplicity of friendships with bitter pills and noxious notions of some falsely noble honesty? I don’t have the answer. I also know that I have rarely accidentally said something honest – it has always been deliberate, and that makes me think that this time it was just as thought-out and planned as ever, only subconsciously. That doesn’t make it better. While we’re not the masters of our subconscious, we are the masters of our mouths, and should keep them closed tightly when needed.

I am less than a month away from my twenty-first birthday, and yet everything I’ve written above strikes me as intensely and unpleasantly adolescent. I guess we all have days of regression, and this must be one of mine.

A Bus Ride to Say “I’m Alive”

I got on a bus at the corner of 33d and 7th. It was a big bus; red and black, with a white lightning bolt emblazoned on it. The message was clear: this bus was express, fast, and going places.

The driver, Miss King, was a black woman with frizzy hair and a wide smile. She was big, and as she walked down the aisle to use the bathroom before we started out, she asked people to excuse her. I guess she felt that squeezing her bulk through required an apology. It didn’t, really. She looked happy and comfortable the way she was. She shouldn’t have been apologizing to anybody. A man in his twenties wearing a red-and-black baseball cap (did he wear it to match the bus?) eyed her lasciviously when she passed by. They bantered for a bit, flirting casually.

The bus ride was long. Four hours and fifteen minutes. Not as long as a lot of the flights I’ve been on, but long enough. I slept for about forty minutes, but that’s it. Sleep and I aren’t the best of friends these days. I don’t know what happened between us. Maybe sleep was offended by me somehow? Personally, I feel hurt that sleep comes to visit so reluctantly and leaves so quickly after he arrives. Maybe we’re just playing a pride game now, neither one of us willing to apologize and make it up with the other because we each think that we’re not the ones to blame for this estrangement.

I thought that we saw Baltimore twice, but it was actually only once. The first time wasn’t really Baltimore. When we actually saw it, I was surprised because it looked exactly like I imagined it. There was a port that seemed to cover half the city with boxes and shipping-yard type stuff. The rest of the city was smoggy but beautiful.

Spring Break sounds like the name of a movie with drunk teenagers and naked blondes. Or maybe it’s a safety video about how to take care of trampolines. What spring break really is right now is a piece of family in Virginia, a road-trip, and a lot of homework.

I’m writing. I’m writing almost every day. When I don’t, I feel odd. A red Moleskine has become a new journal. It’s too conspicuous to be one, of course – it fairly screams “Open me!” – but I’m using it anyway. It’s important that I keep using pens. I never want to get to a point where I don’t love pen and paper anymore.

 

Sugar-Coated

Words on paper; black words on white paper, to be exact. Words, formed of letters, each individually meaningless shape coming together with others to create forms that the eye, or maybe the brain behind it, recognizes and understands. Words, meaningless things, really, when you get right down to it. Words are used to express every trite emotion in the book, every cliche of humanity. Words are nothing more than sounds rolling off the tongue, sticking between the teeth like bits of food that weren’t brushed out properly. Words are like phlegm, coming up the inner-tubing of the body and coughed out messily, loudly, sometimes violently. Words are just like any other bodily function – they serve their purpose, but they’re not to be discussed, not to be praised, not to be loved.

Of course, it isn’t so. If words are like food, they’re like the richest dessert, the most delicious cream-filled, frosted and glazed piece of chocolate cake that ever touched your pallet. If words are like bodily functions, then they’re like the satisfaction of a wide yawn, the comfort of a stretched muscle, the lulling sound of the pulse beating softly in the ears. If words are nothing more than sounds, then they’re like the sweetest music, the most poignant, the most touching of all pieces ever composed by man.

Words are never simply anything. They’re never simply, for they’re never simple. Words are mazes, sentences are labyrinths, paragraphs are cities and pages are countries – novels are entire universes, poetry galaxies.

In the wrong hands words can be dangerous. In the right ones, they can save lives. Falling from the right pens, words can change the world. Dripping from those poisonous ones they can destroy it.

Words on paper. Simply words, or rather words, complicatedly.

Relation

Walking around campus, I live. I breathe, the cold air entering my lungs and exiting through my parted lips. I can’t exhale through my nostrils because the low temperature and the freezing wind causes an uncomfortable running of the nose, and so I can only breathe out into a tissue.

But the air that once hurt my very bones and caused every patch of meager flesh to vibrate with fear and chill, is now refreshing and delicious. There’s always a hint of woodsmoke in it, and snow piled up amongst the branches of bare trees. Not only are the smells now accessible to my senses, but also the sounds – the laughter, the murmurs, the ringtones and shouts, the starting up of cars and the shutting of windows – these don’t make me wince as they once did.

It is all life, surrounding me, astonishing me, comforting me and convincing me day after day that I am here, I am alive, I am well. Time passes bit by bit, but the watches and clocks hold no terror for me anymore. Where once I needed the seconds to fly and the minutes to race, I now accept their slow or fast movements as their own and trust to them. Where once my heartstrings pinched and my throat filled with that hard, unmistakable lump of emotion, now my pulse is quiet and normal and my throat is clear and dry.

Has the world changed? Surely not. It is only my relation to it that has.

Inadequate

Not enough – that’s the thing.

Not enough of a personality.

Not enough of a joker.

Not enough of an adventurer.

Not enough of a drama-queen.

Too much also –

That’s the strange thing,

How there can be too much

That becomes part of inadequacy.

Too much of a ‘fraidy-cat.

Too much of a listener.

Too much of a pleaser.

Too much of a dullard.

Too much of a forgetful face.

Not enough and too much

of everything Important, it seems.