“We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves…”

“A person susceptible to ‘wanderlust’ is not so much addicted to movement
as committed to transformation.” 

—Pico Iyer

 ***

There is something spiritual about Key West, Florida. When you walk out of the tiny, raisin-shriveled airport, the sunlight will brand you: brilliant, pulsating, yellow. Taxis crawl around the tropical island in abundance, like industrious ants, carrying crumbs or tourists double their weight. The ocean is everywhere. The blue, the green, the spray, the kiss.

Bungalows line the narrow streets with vines running up white picket fences, or low iron gates. Seafood shacks & tourist traps have their doors burst wide open, honey on their spiky lips, dionaea muscipula. At night, the music is loud on Duval Street, & the ocean shush-hushes—but more out of habit than judgment. It’s hard not to get drunk on a smoky-sweet paradise.

Artists & cats, writers & roosters haunt the streets. They all have something to prove, & yet they aren’t in a hurry to do so; Key West is a place of eternity, after all.

Like a runaway blackbird that has fallen from the sky, here you will feel migrated, displaced, lost in some wonderful way.

***

Over winter break, I had the privilege of attending the Key West Literary Seminar & workshop, on a scholarship. I rubbed elbows with my literary heroes—Pico Iyer, Rosalind Brackenbury, Judy Bloom. I wrestled my literary demons (like how the hell do people get published these days? how do you make your voice be heard? do I have something important to say? & do I have the time to say it?) I wrote reams of poetry & short stories, inspired by the fierce, close-knit writer’s community around me. On my visit to Ernest Hemmingway’s house, I ruminated on his machismo & rather sad life; to assuage my melancholy, I befriended the polydactyl cats that now sleep on his bed. While wandering the neighborhood, I stumbled upon a quirky-organic, hole-in-the-wall café, & had the best breakfast burrito of my life (it had kimchi & guacamole in it—you do the math). I met a handful of inspiring young poets, novelists & reporters, flirted with the idea of a career as a writer. (Or maybe I just flirted.)

When you travel, you play at adulthood—that amusing, terrifying game. But all that sunlight living in the midst of winter begged the question: am I winning or losing? am I courage or coward? am I decisive & forward motion—or faint & giddy wanderlust?

It struck me driving through Phoenix, Tucson, but mostly El Paso. The Southwest is a haphazardly placed flatland of concrete and air-conditioning.You drive in a straight line for hundreds of miles and only occasionally come across cities. Here is the New Americana. It felt jarring–all of these neon signs and strip malls illuminate our shorter attention spans and our obligation to shop until we drop.

Elmgreen and Dragset’s seminal installation, Prada Marfa, is located 50 miles south of Interstate 10 in western Texas. The vastness of the land is panic inducing, you drive for hours with no mountains in sight; your only markers are abandoned buildings and roadkill.

The installation is a tourist trap for twenty-something artists, understandably. Like other pieces by this duo, this structure feels like a hauntingly frozen moment in time. Prada Marfa is itself a place that comments on the absurd qualities of the larger Southwest. What is luxury? Why is this structure here? Why is it already disintegrating? Why am I scared? And why do I keep thinking about this structure months later?

You tell a dying houseplant to live. Really tell it, talk to this houseplant as though it is your dearest friend in the world, maybe your only friend in the world. You speak words of comfort as you do the dishes, give it positive feedback while you fold laundry, ask it about its day when you’re making dinner. You wonder if an outside observer would think you’re crazy for talking to a potted plant. Anyway, there are no outside observers to speak of, so it probably doesn’t matter. You pour everything into this sad little shrub – late nights in front of the TV, early mornings in front of the computer, all hours in front of the phone. And little by little, it soaks in your words. You don’t really notice, I mean it’s just something to do, a way to stay grounded as you do the million little chores that need doing. It has ceased to bother you that talking to a plant may not be particularly grounded. One morning, you wake up to find the houseplant huddled over in its pot, all dry and crackly. At first it doesn’t register, but then it seems obvious. It looks like it’s trying to escape – but no, not even that. It just looks like it has given up. You consider yelling, getting angry. What right does it have to give up on you? You gave it all you had, and the damn thing sucked up your life force and took it to its grave. But it wouldn’t do any good. Your words clearly didn’t keep it alive, and they won’t bring it back. Just before you throw it down the garbage chute, you notice a beetle sitting on one of the decaying leaves. It’s a terribly ugly beetle, but something stops you from hurling it away in disgust. Surely ugliness is not a sin so great as to merit life in a dumpster. Besides, what does it really matter if the plant is dead? It will be just as good a listener as it always was.

On Romantic poets: “I think they used study as a contrast to poetry. The mind cannot always live in a ‘divine ether.’ The lark cannot always sing at heaven’s gate. There must exist a place to spring from—a refuge from the heights, an anchorage of thought. Study gives that anchorage: study ties you down; and it is the occasional wilful release from this voluntary bond that gives the soul its occasional overpowering sense of lyric freedom and effort. Study is the resting place—poetry, the adventure.” –Wallace Stevens, June 20, 1899

I used to think extensively about the question of scholarship against personal creativity (usually prompted by older relatives who, when hearing I am an English major, inevitably invoked now what are you going to do with that). It seemed there were two distinct answers, perpendicular at best, perhaps not even on the same plane — that is, I could either interpret art or make it. I vacillated between the two sides of a text: I want to write it; no, I should read it, I can tease it apart like corn silks; but why would I pull it apart?

I have these two selves. One is happy researching, reading, combing over someone else’s work all day; the other, beautiful as the person’s work is, becomes distracted at every paragraph break by newer and self-made ideas. Some of me needs to study and some to be studied. Is that an ego battle? Somehow poetry seems the opposite of that, but I can see where the perception comes from. It’s not me; it’s my insides. I am everything but most often I can’t see how.

As I work on a critical thesis alongside my own creative work, I see naves scraping themselves places in corners I had never seen. My notebook is half others and half me, and what I want to make is something in between. I pore and pour alternately, each informing the other, the sides flipping and curling like fortunes on my opening hands.

“Hello?” squeaks a tiny voice from her left. “Excuse me?”

She looks up from her reading, her lips & eyebrows pulling up into a curl of confusion. “Who said that?” she mutters, scanning her surroundings for the first time in a couple of hours. There is no one around the steps of the philosophy building where she has taken a perch to read, except for a few straggling students, whisking to and fro. The sunshine shines most resplendently, dappling her legs & feet in pleasant patterns, despite her purple mood. She narrows her eyes but goes back to reading.

A few seconds later, again, a tiny voice from her left, now close to her ear:

“Excuse me. But, ve vant your blood, please?”

She spins to look over her left shoulder.

No one.

Right shoulder.

Just a little, eggshell-stained Bichon Frise rolling merrily in the grass. The owner looks on proudly from a good yards-length away. “Stupid happy dog,” she mutters in the dog’s direction. “I hate happy things. Go away.”

“But my brethren are hungry,” the voice interjects. “They came to me for help & now I am supplicating, obsequious in my shame & hunger & you say you cannot help!?” The voice scuffles & fades a bit, as if the speaker is in the midst of great, internal turmoil.

She starts humming nervously under her breath. She can see the headlines now: College Senior Has Mental Breakdown—Schools Across the US are Banning Readings with Words over Four Syllables Long (Pretty Much All Reading) or maybe: Parents Highly Cautioned Against Sending their Children to Higher Education.

“I’m not crazy, I’m not crazy,” she sing-songs under her breath. “I love reading, I love school, I—”

“Madam! You must listen! Your negligence may cause the annihilation of my entire village! Your ignorance will be recorded in our literature everywhere & condemned! You will become the symbol of Human Cruelty for generations to come! Please—your blood…please…p-please…” The tiny voice goes from outraged to a little more than a puff-quiver.

Finally, with a dawning sense of horror & absurdist angst, she turns to look down at her shoulder. A wee mosquito (really tiny considering how loud the voice was—did the little thing learn to project her voice like an opera singer? Do mosquitoes go to school for that? She could see the headlines now: College-Educated Mosquitoes Rise Up the Ranks; Human Unemployment Skyrockets; Sophomore on Trial for Sitting on Itsy Bitsy Professor; Prosecutors Furious at Lies: “I Swear, I Didn’t See Him There!”)

“Look, could you just go find someone else to bug?” she asks. She snorts. Bug. What a basketful of chuckles.
The mosquito’s little voice is outraged, tiny proboscis quivering indignantly. “How is it fair that you deny me food? Just a pinch, just an inch—& you could save my life. I’m being polite! I’m asking! Most of my kind would just take, take, take & still you say no?”

“I hate being itchy,” she says. “You might have West Nile. It’s not fair.”

“Not fair?” The mosquito says, indignant. “What kind of a heartless creature are you? Do you think you’re better than me?” A soft cry. “Where is your humanity!?”

In his essay Why Bother?, writer Jonathan Franzen questions our reasons for continuing to read and write in this age of technological distractions. Amidst his disillusionment, Franzen interviews psychologist Shirley Bryce Heath on the nature of formative reading. Heath uncovers a model of reader dubbed the “social isolate” – children who “take [the] sense of being different into an imaginary world”, and form their most important dialogues “with the authors of the books they read”. These readers are much more likely to become writers as adults, as Heath describes to Franzen, “You are a socially isolated individual who desperately wants to communicate with a substantive imaginary world.” Upon those “unpoetic polysyllables”, Franzen’s exhilaration of merely being recognized was his “confirmation of that descriptions truth”. That sense of identification, acceptance, and belonging had “revealed themselves, suddenly, as reasons to write.”
I grew up with that same sense of deep and nagging love towards the written word. But as Franzen wrote, being a “social isolate” reader doesn’t “doom you to bad breath and poor party skills as an adult…… It’s just that at some point you’ll begin to feel a gnawing, almost remorseful need to be alone and do some reading — to reconnect to that community.” For a long time, reading was my way to escape a world that seemed too confusing and precarious to comprehend. As a child, I also took to narrating my own life like the plot of a novel, tinkering with voice and character and pacing. I don’t remember a time where there weren’t voices in my head, stringing frantic thoughts into narrative coherence. Academic culture back home in Hong Kong pushed us towards hard sciences and math, or at least more tangible branches of humanities, like law and history. But all I ever really wanted was to read, write, and create. As I grew older, I continued to read voraciously, but my ditties and story telling diminished under self consciousness and the monotony of academic writing.

Now, I write grasping for logic and reason but end up indecisive and verbose. My first drafts tend to meander without systematic cause or consequence, I explore without coming to conclusions. It’s because I write not to explain to others, but to explain to myself – to dig my way out of the avalanche of information, facts, quotes, song lyrics, jokes, studies, and headlines that we are bombarded with every day. And how to make sense of it all? I write first and form half hearted arguments later, like sifting through wreckage for one solid idea.

Regardless of how hard I try, my writing (no matter how stoic, scientific, or academic) also always gravitates towards the personal. Rudimentary philosophy taught me to “question everything”, and my one and only belief is to think deeply and write incisively about all that affects us, no matter how banal. So I end up talking about Glee and Gabriel Garcia Marquez with equal gravitas. I think a lot about oppression, about feminism, about television, about art. I write about pop culture and internet culture and the state of human rights in China. It seems only natural to me that this is all inherently related – an interdisciplinary web of personal passions, a series of small revolutions that have impacted me in one way or another.

Writing about things that I care about, however, can make it harder to improve and polish. It’s difficult for me to synthesize objective critique as only about my writing, rather than about my causes, or my passions, or even about me. My English teacher in high school taught us to divorce ourselves from the piece of work. “It’s out there now,” she said, “It exists beyond you as a writer, and they’re just words on a page.” But when I write about real events and real people I idolize, it gets a touch too tangible for me to fully let go. Still, I’d rather face those obstacles than fall into the trap of apathy and indifference.

The writers I hate are those who are bored and are boring. It’s a boredom that seeps through from every syllable – sometimes as dull monotony, and more oftentimes as incomprehensible trifle. I know that quality and value, especially in terms of personal interest, are incredibly subjective. But if there’s one thing that reading taught me, it’s that anything can be fascinating when written about well enough. Two of my favorite books, The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon, are about baseball and graphic novels, and I’ve never even had a remote interest in either of them. But the passion and dedication of the authors came through their prose – drawn from investments in both childhood knowledge and encyclopedic research, cemented in fictional stories about the very real experience of existence.

So while I didn’t identify with the short-stop’s athletic rigor, or the economic hardships of a comic book artist living in New York in the 70s, I identified with their love for something so particular. As Chad Harbach wrote, it’s our love for “an apparently pointless affair, undertaken … to communicate something true or even crucial about The Human Condition. The Human Condition being, basically, that we’re alive and have access to beauty, can even erratically create it, but will someday be dead and will not.” Although the process may be painstaking and difficult, reading and writing fill me with sense of recognition, validation, and clarity like no other. And it’s this communal sense of creation, of discovery, of unearthing new ways to manipulate a common language, that strikes me the most deeply as reasons to bother.

And every new year starts out the same way—“This year will be different.”

Because this time you’re actually going to get shit done. You’ll learn at least two dead languages. Get a cushy internship. Fall in love. Write a novel. Bake your way through a book of French desserts. Earn enough money for an Epic Roadtrip with your best friends. Grow a beard. Sarah Dessen could write a romantic young adult novel about the year you’re about to have, because this protagonist is about to get a whole lot of character development up in this setting.  It might not have been your year, but it’s damn well going to be your winter.

Yet inevitably, the lofty goals you developed walking out of your last final or on the flight home from school at the end of December never get checked off. As the first two lazy weeks of the year roll by, you’ve already replaced your goals for the year with slightly less ambitious ones. Learn how to curse in seven different languages. Get a job that pays minimum wage. Make out with the cashier at Whole Foods. Write a haiku. Bake a chocolate soufflé. Earn enough Neopoints to buy a Faerie paintbrush.  Grow a soul patch. Then, the time comes when you stop measuring your winter break in days and weeks and start to measure time in late-night diner runs and movie stubs.

By the end of January, a friend asks you what you’ve been up to over winter break, and you realize that the only New Year’s “revolution” you can cross off your list is flossing.  And by the time next year rolls around, you’ll have an even loftier list to start the moment the ball drops. Maybe you should resolve to keep next year’s resolutions a little closer to reality, but let’s face it, you’ve never been good at keeping your resolutions anyway.

It’s not uncommon to hear girls referred to as looking like dolls–whether it’s their porcelain skin or their Barbie blonde hair, there are plenty of young women who agree that such a comment should be taken as a compliment.

However, a recent internet craze has taken this idea so literally that a handful of girls from around the world are being labeled as “living dolls.” Each has their own specific style, but they all share one thing in common–a unique concept that has frenzied the media.

The first girl I’m going to talk about has been an “internet celebrity,” if you may, for quite a long time. Seventeen-year-old Dakota Rose managed to develop somewhat of a teen fan base through MySpace back in the day, alongside her sister known as “Kiki Kannibal” (Note: not her real name). Starting out as a spunky scene kid posing for over-saturated photos with her sibling, Dakota has now developed her style into something much more feminine, and clearly decided to make use of her natural girly good looks. However, amongst all the fans are lots, and I mean lots, of haters. Speculation as to whether Dakota photoshops her pictures is top of the agenda, as well as her use of a range of make-up and camera tricks to give the illusion of appearing more doll-like, thin and stereotypically (as we have all unfortunately been led to believe), “perfect.” While some “doll-like” girls admit to wearing makeup and often teach how to achieve their look, Dakota Rose insists that she is all real. Type “Dakota Rose Photoshop” into Google images and you’ll be bombarded with photos–a lot of which people have gone out of their way to draw big red circles on, highlighting the areas which are speculated to have been edited.

Nevertheless, she’s still a beautiful girl; something that the fashion industry has not struggled to pick up on–more specifically, the Japanese fashion industry. Right now, she is currently living in Tokyo, working as a model. Unsurprisingly, her famed YouTube channel, and both her blog and her Twitter are now almost entirely written in Japanese. It seems she has found herself a place where, unlike the USA, she is adored and rewarded simply for her big blue eyes and cute button nose. East or West, fake or not, this girl is certainly getting attention.

Next up is Valeria Lukyanova–the Ukranian dubbed by the media as a real-life “human barbie.” Having begun posting videos on YouTube this time last year, she soon brought about a controversial debate on the extreme aesthetics that some women are striving to achieve. She is also under speculation as to whether or not she is just another Photoshop genius. Lukyanova virtually has the body and head of a Barbie doll; a figure that, we’ve all been taught, is physically impossible to acquire naturally.

Photographs of her could be mistaken for CGI imagery–her skin appears to be smooth plastic, while her extreme figure could pass for a character in a video game, complete with unlikely proportions thought of as alien to us human beings. Nonetheless, like Dakota Rose, Lukyanova also dismisses her critics, stating that she is in fact all natural and has had never had any cosmetic surgery. In a recent interview with V Magazine, Valeria insists that her supposedly unattainable looks are all her own: “Many people say bad things about people who want to perfect themselves. It’s hard work, but they dismiss it as something done by surgeons or computer artists.” However, in a Russian TV interview this year, (and I’m only guessing this through reading the comments as I can’t speak a word of Russian) she does admit consuming an all-liquid diet–a clear explanation as to why she is so thin, or most likely, clinically emaciated (yet with a questionably large chest…).

Since posting more videos of herself online, Lukyanova has opened up more opportunities for people to pick flaws in how she presents herself to the rest of the world. “This girl is a FRAUD. Her videos aren’t photoshopped. Does she still look the same? Not only are her looks fake/photoshopped, this girl is also mentally insane”, posted US gossip website, The Dirty. However, in her recent interview with V Magazine, we also hear of another side of this supposedly narcissistic 21-year-old. “The questions of what we are and why we exist have interested me from my earliest childhood,” she reveals–adding that she is also a teacher at the School of Out-of-Body Travel, “an international school in which our instructors show students how to leave their physical body and travel in their spiritual body, where you can visit any place on the planet and in the universe.” So, she teaches people how to disconnect and leave their physical bodies? What an absolute antithesis to the persona she presents to her YouTube viewers. On one hand, she insists on her devotion to the metaphysical, vowing that she has “a responsibility to bring more good, light, and positive emotions to people.” However, if it’s really true when she says, “I want to to share my art and my music and tell people about my spiritual ideas”, then why has she only just brought this up? Many have now been asking, and rightfully so, why she won’t post videos about her apparent spiritual quest, as opposed to those centered solely around her looks? It seems that Lukyanova will be basking in the limelight for a while yet, while the rest of us watch and ponder over what on earth she is really about. For me, Lukyanova is a complex and bizarre individual that I’m not sure I will ever fully understand.

Also from Ukraine, Anastasiya Shpagina has an entirely unique look. Inspired by Japanese anime characters and and with the help of her amazing hand at make-up and a pair of contact lenses, 19-year-old Shpagina transforms herself into a walking talking manga girl, complete with huge eyes and brightly coloured hair. Needless to say, she is just as tiny as her cartoon counterparts, having apparently slimmed her petite 5’2 frame down to just over 6 stone in order to appear as convincingly other-worldly as she can. One of her videos, showing how she does her makeup, has had over 4 million views and there have been rumours, according to the Daily Mail, that she’s even considering surgery to permanently alter her eyes to appear more like an anime character’s.

Surprisingly (or perhaps maybe not so surprisingly, due to the power of the internet), Anastasiya Shpagina has in fact met fellow Ukrainian Barbie, Lukyanova, as can be seen in various Facebook photos. Shpagina also recently met up with my fourth and final human doll, as can be seen in this rather odd video…

Venus Angelic (real name Palermo–clearly born to be an adorable bundle of cute with a name like Venus) is perhaps the most “real” out of the so-called “living dolls.” Living in London and only 15 years old, she can speak five languages and has a particular obsession with all things Japanese. People call her videos weird, maybe partly due to the fact that she has a really bizarre voice. Yet, really, she’s just being her awesomely cute girlie self. Her 112 (and counting) videos include make-up tutorials and videologs about what she’s up to, to the slightly more peculiar “face workout” and mad choreographed dance routines being performed in random locations.

I discovered Venus when I watched this British TV interview in which, frankly, I think Helen Fospero is an absolute closed-minded bitch. Mesmerised and intrigued by Venus’s unique style and odd methods of self-promotion, I decided to send Venus an email to ask her my own questions.

“My look is inspired by Japanese inspired Victorian fashion with a touch of retro and early Hollywood,” Venus explains. Rather than actively trying to look doll-like, it seems that the ‘doll’ label just kind of stuck to her. After posting videos of herself singing and dancing to Japanese songs online, Venus’ Asian audience started making comparisons between her and a doll. “They also often said “Is this girl real? She looks like an android!” and I did not wear makeup. I was just natural.” As she got a bit older, and started buying makeup, it was merely to enhance her natural features. “I thought that it was easy for me to look like a doll so I started first with clothes, makeup, then hair.”

Venus has slowly developed a fan base over time, and now has over 68,000 YouTube subscribers. But as we all know, YouTube is prime troll territory, and Venus has suffered her fair share of abuse over the internet. Nevertheless, she doesn’t seem phased by it. “There are some who like to spend their time hating and ‘trolling’ because,” she tells me, “they’re bored, jealous, and probably should do their homework for once”. If only I had such great self-esteem at 15!

And that’s just it. Venus, above all, has confidence. It is her goal to empower other young girls to embrace their differences, to not expressing themselves freely, and not be afraid of criticism by their peers. Venus’s honest and warm-hearted values are genuine, and her use of the internet as a means of self-promotion seems only natural to a teen of her generation. “Reading and creating blogs helps teenagers to discover other societies, cultures, trends, styles, etc.” she tells me, “The idea that the internet has a bad effect on teens is silly. Certain teenagers might be predispositioned to bad stuff and those are the ones that will want to be part of the ‘bad’ kids on the web.”

Now, and you’ve all probably been thinking about it since I mentioned that Daybreak interview–it appears that many are highlighting something that perhaps Venus, in her naivety, has failed to realise. Undertones of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and the hushed sexualisation of female youth in Japan hover under the media’s noses like a bad smell, and it’s no surprise that many have jumped to conclusions about what exactly Venus’s intentions are. “The case of Venus Angelic is uncomfortably exploitative, as there is clearly a sexual undertone to what she is doing,” Hilary Levey Friedman, PhD, a Harvard sociologist, told Yahoo!. “In general, young girls on YouTube is a disturbing, growing trend.”

It’s a strange territory to delve into–often a large portion of these girls’ fan bases consists of similarly young teenage girls who simply like their style. However, it’s more than likely that Venus Angelic also has fans who aren’t the sort of people you would want anywhere near a 15-year-old girl. Due to the nature of her look and her mannerisms, it doesn’t seem surprising that older men regularly pop up to chat to her on the Japanese website Nico Nico Douga (“Basically the Japanese YouTube”, Venus tells me)–where she first began posting her videos. If you are, or ever have been a teenage girl and have any experience of using the internet, I’m sure this won’t be anything new to you. What does seem bizarre, however, is that Venus’ mother is there, in shot, on the webcam, chatting alongside her daughter. So either we’re all just getting too paranoid for our own good, or Venus’ mother is completely deluded.

Sigh. But at the end of the day, Venus is expressing herself, and in my eyes that’s all that matters. If young girls stopped themselves doing anything that any man might ever find at all attractive, well–they’d be pretty dull little creatures. And the truth is that Venus does have amazingly reassuring values. When I ask her how she feels about being grouped together with Dakota Rose, Valeria Lukyanova and Anastasiya Shpagina, she agrees that “They are very different from eachother and from me. What makes me different is that I try to teach my fans that you can be cute, and that you don’t need things like plastic surgery. I’m 15, I’ve never had plastic surgery and will never do it. I want to be a fashion icon, a good person and an example; exactly 90% of my viewers are girls 13-19. I don’t like it when people see me as weird doll freak shown around in the media circus.”

What really gets to me is how unwilling some people are to just step back and accept. Even some friends of mine, have seen videos or photos of Venus, only to throw back comments such as ‘weird’ and ‘disturbing’. Anything besides the norm, it seems, is too hard for some people to process, and is immediately dismissed as ‘wrong’ or ‘strange’. But at the end of the day, we are all human beings who enjoy different things. Variety is the spice of life – so you do your thing, and I’ll do mine.

Venus ends the interview with perhaps the best line I could have picked. So I will leave you on this note–

“Be creative and have fun, don’t think about what other people think about you while they’re not even thinking about you, YOU are thinking about them!”

For the last four years I have been keeping journals, not of writing, but just as scrapbooks of what I like and what I’m thinking. Here are some scans from those pages.

Yesterday I was frustrated by my roommate for no real reason, telling myself he was talking too loud on Skype. I rolled around my bed until I decided I had to leave, and walked to sleep in my friend’s room across campus. There I spent the late hours gossiping, writing, and sleeping. The rain and wind slapped around outside–if you closed your eyes it sounded like a faraway roller coaster. Yesterday the roof of our science building caved in, trees fell. My eyes would not stop stinging. Last week my friend Cheyenne and I rode ten different airplanes and trains around the West Coast, going to different cities to see old friends and make new ones. On returning to school I was having none of it. I spent my first day back rubbing my eyes in class, and when the lights turned off to watch a video I couldn’t help dozing off; I hadn’t in at least three days. Behind my eyelids I saw the buttery cookie I ate at the Castro, the drunk mom that was arrested for slapping the train conductor, the band of monsters that boarded the public bus on the way to a Halloween party in Portland, and the man blowing bubbles on the tall grassy hill.

After an experience occurs, our hippocampus must go through a process known as “memory consolidation” in order to transfer the experience to our long-term memory. It has been proven that our memory is extremely malleable, which is both terrible and wonderful. Eyewitness memory is not necessarily trustworthy: there have been many cases in which rape victims are absolutely sure that they see their perpetrator in a lineup but really, their memories have been altered. It has also been shown that the amount of sleep people get affects this consolidation process: more sleep is needed after an enriched experience. A psychological study by Sidarta Ribeiro and others says that, “Deprivation of REM sleep…impairs short-term or declarative memory in both rats and humans, as well as procedural memories in the latter. Furthermore, both formal training and exposure to enriched environments have been shown to increase the amount of subsequent REM sleep in rats. Our study provides evidence showing that brain gene expression during REM sleep depends on previous waking experience.” Perhaps my sleepy, recluse lifestyle this week is a result of all that has happened. It all feels like one beautiful warped mess.

—

I can’t help but see the patterns in things. On a train to Palo Alto, I sat reading Jonathan Franzen’s essay “My Father’s Brain” on his father’s dementia. I got a phone call from my mom on that train, and she told me grandfather had passed away. He spent his life’s work as a university philosophy professor and, a week before his death, the book he started writing in the year 2000 was finally published. That morning he choked on his retirement home cafeteria breakfast and lost consciousness. Like Franzen’s father, my grandpa had dementia the entire time I knew him. When I returned home later to speak at his funeral, hundreds were in attendance. I spoke to the crowd, saying that, “It makes me sad that there was no real way for us to connect again, once I was old enough to speak on the same register as him. I think it would have been a beautiful and satisfying thing for us to talk about ideas and thoughts and books. Even though this is now impossible, I do take a satisfaction in knowing that thinking around big ideas is in my blood. It comforts me to know that most books I pick up he has probably read before, and most thoughts I have he has probably thought before. Never alone, I will keep him alive in this realm.”

He and my grandmother were married for sixty-one years. They met in high school. As she watched his casket lower into the ground, she kept turning to my mom and whispering, “I want to jump in after him.”

A boy and I have been writing letters back and forth for months, and we finally met. In Dolores Park, we watched a man make giant bubbles out of a pole-and-string instrument, ate ice cream and ran around a playground. He let me sit on his cardigan so I could go down the giant metal slide faster. As with most males, it took me a moment to figure out what he wanted. This was the first time I’ve found a straight male that was so in sync with the way I think, and I didn’t have to hide any part of myself from him to make him feel more secure. Just like that, he became my first male best friend.

One of Cheyenne’s friends is a body positive burlesque dancer and we had the privilege of seeing the dress rehearsal of their Halloween zombie-themed show. It took place in the basement of a bar, and Cheyenne and I were the whole audience. The formally dressed director sat in the corner cross-legged, taking notes. The actors were all different sizes, shapes and ages. A vague plot about a doctor trying to turn people into monsters strung together the strip tease scenes. I wasn’t sure how I feel about a strip show, but I learned burlesque is a very different thing. This show felt particularly empowering, as each of the actors/actresses looked like they were taking a confident charge over their bodies. This was real, psychological seduction.

At Reed College I visited an old friend that is just starting as a freshman. She spent a gap year traveling on freight trains and working on a horse farm in Scotland. She’s the kind of person that has no Facebook, doesn’t really keep track of her phone and somehow manages to writes letters. When I saw her, we both found out we have blue hair. I also forgot that we have this dynamic where when we’re with other people, something awkward will happen, I’ll giggle, and then she’d glance over at me and laugh at my giggling. She brought a friend along when we went vintage shopping that I half-flirted with, because he was sweet and I knew I’d probably never see him again.

Hurricane Sandy delayed my flight to school, and I arrived back to Ohio at ten past midnight. The last shuttle from the airport to school left at midnight. In a sleepy daze I looked for the taxi stand, and didn’t see Caleb until he yelled my name and waved his arms up and down. I asked him how he was getting back to school, and he told me I could ride back with him. I didn’t know him very well, but two weeks earlier we had a strange night together. We saw The Perks of Being a Wallflower in a group, and all went to dinner after. The tone of the night was introspective, and he told us all a very personal, vulnerable story about himself. I later wrote him a letter on how impressed I was by that. That night at the airport he was there to pick up somebody else and happened to have room for me. I thought of Jenny Holzer’s piece, “It is in your self-interest to find a way to be very tender.”

The one day I met my best friend’s boyfriend was the night before I flew home. The three of us sat on the roof watching the stars before going to a hip-hop show in Cleveland. Downtown has always struck me as sterile-looking, but the bar that hosted the show was in a beat-up looking alley. Half the crowd was from my collage, and the other half were random drunk townies. We danced around to the electronic rhythms and unexpectedly tasteful lyrics. The mood was killed when some other dude came on stage and performed bad spoken-word. On that note, we took our leave. At an IHOP, we realized her how drunk her boyfriend was. He kept making funny noises and throwing around his food. His only conversation piece was “Do you guys use separate instruments to trim your toe and fingernails? Or the same one for both?” A week later they broke up.

For more photos of last week, see Cheyenne’s blogspot.