postaday2011

Real Contact

I’m reading Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. It’s a fantastically strange novel, almost like a collection of short stories that span through a few decades and show the connections between a huge cast of characters that hardly seem like they should be related and yet are.

I don’t want to spoil it for those who’ve never read it, so I’ll just say that there’s a portion in it that deals with characters living a decade or so in the future, a time at which it seems that texting is the primary method of communicating with people. One of the characters seems profoundly uncomfortable with real speech and much prefers the cleanliness of the short messages we sent to each other via text, or T as it’s called by then. This disturbed me profoundly and I’m having a hard time getting through this section. The notion of real contact between people being something that’s disappearing is something I dislike. I also don’t really believe it’s true.

As a child of the generation that has grown up with increasingly small cellphones, increasingly faster internet and the increasing ubiquity of social networking in our lives, I still don’t believe that the near future contains the loss of real speech or contact between people. In my world, at least, social networking is another means of communication, true, but it’s far from being the only one or the most preferred one. I know few people who spend more time communicating with friends online than face to face.

Thoughts? Comments? Opinions?

The Mistress and the Magicians

Mistress locked me in a room with a candle burning and a loaf of bread, whispering to me as she shut the door that she promised to return. I waited for her. I waited and waited, but she didn’t came. The candle flickered and burned out after a few hours, and still the dawn didn’t come. I opened the curtains, but I could see nothing outside. The storm was so bad that no light penetrated the dark clouds. I tore small pieces of bread off the loaf and chewed them slowly, hoping that they weren’t the last things I would eat.

She said that the Magicians were doing something dangerous and that she was trying to protect me. I believed her, because Mistress never lied to me. I’d been with her since I was a small child, and I remained at the castle after my mother, her previous maid, died of a wasting illness. Mistress was about my mother’s age, but infinitely more beautiful. She knew the secrets of the Magicians because she was married to one. I almost never saw her husband, though, even though I’d lived at the castle for most of my life. He was always shut up in the tower rooms with the other Magicians, or else away with them on one of their infinite tours with the militia.

The reason was, of course, that we lived on the Border, which is the only place Magicians were allowed to live. They weren’t illegal, because the Crown used their services, but they didn’t want them to be anywhere near the capital. Some people in the big cities, I’d heard, didn’t believe that the Border was real, and they thought the Magicians were mad, people who’d contracted some illness, and that the Crown was simply quarantining them far away so that they wouldn’t spread the disease. It was feasible, I suppose, but living on the Border as I’d done, I knew that they did a real service for us all. They kept us safe.

So I believed Mistress was trying to protect me. When the men came into my room, I thought that she’d sent them. I’ll never know now if she did or didn’t, because by the time they took me into one of the tower rooms that were Master’s workshops, Mistress was already dead, spread out on the floor with her face as white as can be. They didn’t let me run to her. They pulled me back, roughly, and I knew that it was my turn next.

Three Hours

I have slept only three hours in the past… Wait, I’m counting… Oh, my brain isn’t working well enough to figure it out. Point is, I haven’t been sleeping much lately. And this is the first time in a very long time that I’ve managed to valiantly survive a whole day, without taking a nap, on this little sleep. I feel strangely accomplished, and am now going to celebrate by going to bed.

Sand Running

Sand ran barefoot down the street.The hot asphalt only spurred him on. His shoes hung round his neck, the laces tied together, bouncing on his thin chest. The air was heavy with invisible droplets of water, and as Sand ran he felt like he was cutting a swath through a sponge cake.

Houses flashed by, their windows shut tight against the humidity. The A/C units whirred, trying to outdo the mosquito’s buzzing. A few old people sat on porches, fanning their faces with cheap touristy hand-fans that their children brought them from the big cities when they came to visit. They watched Sand run past with interest, but forgot about him almost as soon as he was out of sight. People often forgot about Sand.

His sister, for instance. She was supposed to have picked him up from school and take him with her to visit their mother, but she hadn’t shown up. Sand had waited for an hour, after the school’s office had closed already. He didn’t have a cellphone since he’d accidentally dropped his in a toilet while being beaten up in the bathroom and his father had refused to buy him a new one. Sand hadn’t told him about getting beaten up, though. His father would have just looked disappointed that his kid didn’t know how to fight back and would have offered Sand, yet again, to spar with him at the boxing club.

But Sand preferred running. He loved outstripping his thoughts, slow and sluggish in the August heat. He loved the calluses that developed on his soles and toes, so hard that he could tap his nails against them and hear the same noise he got when tapping on the lids of the overstuffed Tupperware containers in the fridge. He loved not being able to distinguish one face from another because he was past them all so quickly. He could pretend that they talked about him once he was gone instead of forgetting.

Fa-la-la-la-la

La-la-la-la!

‘Tis the season, and all that. WordPress is snowing again. Night is actually cold again. As a Jew, I see the Christmas thing only as a cultural holiday, and I’m not ashamed to admit that I adore the holly wreaths, the twinkly lights, the cheery atmosphere of the lit-up trees, and the thought of little kids running up to open presents from Santa on Christmas morning. Yes, I’m a bit of a big softie when it comes to things like this.

Sure, I also have a healthy dose of cynicism, and I was getting royally ticked off at the fact that many of these decorations went up before Thanksgiving was even over. Yes, I have that bitter, jaded college student in me who thinks that all holidays are just business opportunities for Hallmark and Starbucks.

But, well, I can’t help thinking that it’s all rather adorable.

In other news, my semester ends on December 16, which is also the day that I’m flying home for my month-long winter break. I am SO excited!

But Are We Friends?

“How sad is it,” Diana said, smoke emerging from her mouth in a great, dragon-like puff, “that I slept with him because I wanted to be his friend?”

Jay, who was listening to music in one ear, was only half paying attention. Stevie Wonder was crooning at him on one side and Diana was whining from the other, and his eyes were looking at the twelve stars that he could see in the sky above him. “You know what’s really sad?” he said.

“Yeah, that I slept with someone so that they would acknowledge my existence and be friends with me.”

“No. Well, yeah, that too. Gimme a cig.” Jay waited till he had one in his mouth and, while lighting it, continued through a half-closed mouth. “No, what’s really sad is that we look up at the stars, and we can see a few tonight, and we’re like oh wow, look at all the stars! And there are like twenty, if that, and we think that’s a lot. Out in the desert – that’s where stars really happen.”

“Dude, are you stoned?” Diana looked at him, irritable, and noticed that he had one earbud still stuck in his ear. “You’re not even listening! Damn, I thought we were going to have some girl time.”

“I’m not a girl.”

“I know, but you have conversations that aren’t about monster trucks.”

“No one talks about monster trucks anymore.”

“Whatever.”

The two college dropouts lapsed into silence on top of the old orange car. Jay was still lying on the cold metal, one arm tucked behind his head. Diana was sitting cross-legged next to him, her knees close enough to brush the edge of his jacket. The sound of traffic from the highway kept them company, along with the chilly wind.

“So are you friends now?”

“Huh? What?” Diana had been gazing at the lights of the faraway cars and letting her eyes go out of focus, turning her vision into a strange image of blurred yellow lines on a backdrop of black stillness.

“You and this person you slept with. Are you friends now?” Jay heard the deep tones of Leonard Cohen describing to him the way love felt, and he allowed himself to glance at Diana. Sometimes it was dangerous for him to do that. It would make him feel too much. But Leonard’s voice fortified him enough to do that, at least.

“I have no freaking clue. That’s why I’m so upset.”

“Ask, then.”

“What? I should just ask if we’re friends?”

“Yeah, sure, why not? Just say – we slept together, yeah. But are we friends?”

“I guess. But, I mean, with you and me neither one of us had to ask that, right? We just knew we were still friends. Cause we’d been friends before.”

“Mhm. But we’re different.”

“Yeah, we are.” Diana smiled vaguely and nudged her hand against Jay’s shoulder in a comradely kind of way. He stopped himself from flinching against such a casual touch, and took another long draw on his cigarette.

Star

The chords of the guitar sounded, the lights came on, and he came onstage. She watched from the crowd, wishing she could have the stationary, movie-like experience of being as if absolutely alone. But there were people pressing close on all sides and the crowd surged forward and she was born along with it as everyone pushed closer to the barrier. There was an elbow in her ribs and someone was stepping on her foot. She didn’t care, even though the physical pain was reducing her ecstasy.

But there was still a leap in her stomach as she saw him open his mouth wide and begin to sing into the microphone. His voice was almost lost amid the crash of drums, the hum of the bass and the distorted guitar. The speakers were right above her on the right and the sound was too loud to register in her ears properly. She focused instead on the sight of him, the way he moved, the way his chest heaved as he belted out the notes and the beads of sweat that appeared on his brow as the hot spotlights lit him up brilliantly.

The crowd seemed to make a wrong move, and suddenly everyone was falling, falling, falling back. She fell, the point of the falling triangle, and felt body after body crash down on her. She didn’t scream. She didn’t yell. As the breath was knocked out of her and her eyes blackened, she saw his image in front of her, the way he’d been looking right at her for a moment there. He’d seen her. That was all that mattered.

There Should be a Verb Form of “Drawer”

You know, we can say “to shelve a book” but we can’t say “to drawer a book,” because that’s just silly and grammatically wrong. The reason this seems relevant is because I don’t feel that my NaNoWriMo novel deserves a shelf – it really deserves the depths of a well-lined, jumbled and often-neglected drawer.

I’m not being self-pitying. I know that there are good elements in it. The teacher who leads my writing workshop at school gave me all sorts of compliments – he said that my observations are a lot more mature than my age warrants, that each scene on its own was interesting, engaging and enjoyable, and that I managed to keep my images from becoming clichés. BUT – and I agree entirely – there isn’t enough of a thread leading through the novel. It started as one thing, and ended up as something else entirely.

There are too many narrative voices – two of them I had planned as the main characters, but then two more cropped up during the process of writing. Each of those separate voices could easily take over the novel from the original characters.

Most importantly, there wasn’t a clear, driving force. The two short stories that I wrote for this workshop – and that I’m quite proud of – each had the feeling that there was a deep, emotional connection between the writer and the narrative. I had reasons for writing those stories; unconscious reasons, but their presence was nevertheless present. The novel didn’t have that.

I also feel that unlike my previous three novels, I really didn’t know what I was doing with this one. It was an experiment, more than anything, in writing about people who I didn’t like so much, with whom I had a harder time identifying. I wouldn’t say that the experiment failed, because I feel that the fifty thousand words I wrote are a jumping off point that might lead to two or three entirely separate novels, eventually.

It’s kind of nice to know that I can put this piece of writing away, even though I spent so much time on it, without mourning for it or feeling like I failed. I know how to handle criticism and I seem to be learning how to evaluate my own work. It feels good to be able to do that.

The Library’s Tale

Once upon a time, there was a library. The library had three floors, each with its own distinct personality, although the decor was very similar in all. There were wooden tables, wooden chairs, some beanbags and many shelves of books upon books.

The library liked its function and enjoyed being useful to people. It knew that it was even a comfort to many, and that felt good. But there were two periods of time, three weeks each, that came every year, and which the library dreaded.

These were the weeks when its doors remained open twenty-four hours a day. Most of the time, it got at least seven hours of peace and quiet every night, and while its doors were shut it could breathe in peace and maybe even nap, allowing the books to whisper among themselves and the wooden tables and chairs to stretch their legs and take strolls up and down the aisles before becoming stationary again in the morning.

None of that could happen during those three week periods, though. Instead, the tables and chairs cramped up from the need to stay in the same place for days; the books got bored and sometimes allowed the humans to hear them whispering (which was dangerous); and the library itself, poor thing, began to smell a little bit, to become shabby around the edges, and to feel pale and sickly. Worst of all, though, it had to hear the way the people inside it criticized it, talked about how much they were sick of it and hated it. The library always felt deeply hurt and wounded by this, even though it knew, rationally, that the people didn’t actually mean it; they were only taking their frustration out on the library because they didn’t know it was sentient.

So the library took it, year after year, but it always dreamed of one day allowing itself to expel – with a violent shove out the door – all those spiteful people who decided to curse it for their own need for all-nighters.

November is Over

I finished a novel and won NaNoWriMo. I have a hard time believing that it’s actually happened, that I actually managed to do it. True, it’s only fifty-five minutes into December; it might take a while for me to actually feel the fact that I’ve actually finished the first draft of a fourth novel.

I’ve been extremely busy over the past month, obviously. Not only with NaNoWriMo, but also with schoolwork, hanging out with friends, and generally living.

But now November’s finally done, I’m going back to posting every day for the PostADay2011 challenge here on WordPress.

I’m also looking forward to sixteen days from now when I’ll be flying back home. I’m looking forward to this more than I can describe. I’m looking forward to it so much that I haven’t been sleeping properly at night, because I keep picturing myself taking a taxi to Newark airport in New Jersey, going through the endless but familiar stages to get onto the plane, flying for twelve hours, landing in Israel, and getting to hug my mom when I get off the plane and into the arrivals hall. Those images flash across my mind’s eye every night, and keep me awake, my heart pounding with excitement and with the fear that I always have about flying, even though I’ve done it so many times.

The next two weeks aren’t going to be easy. I have a final exam, a long paper, and a bunch of smaller assignments still due before I’m Scott free. But each day brings me closer to the blessed end of my first semester of my sophomore year. It hasn’t been easy. There have been lots of emotional ups and downs. But I have found my place.

Currently, I’m sitting in one of the quiet rooms in the library surrounded by friends – there’s a red-haired woman on my left, typing away on her white MacBook, a blonde on my right who’s reading Facebook posts on her PC laptop,  a girl with dyed pink and purple hair sitting across from me who’s leaning over her reading assignment with a pencil and next to her is a skinny black-haired woman who’s crossed her arms and folded her legs and is trying to catch a nap. We’re all here together, in this trench-warfare that is the last three weeks of the semester. It’s good to know I’ve got people on my side.