Tylenol y Coca-Cola

When my dad got sick and started coughing all over the house a few weeks ago, we all joked that he had fallen victim to the whooping cough epidemic. After that (staying true to his characteristically goofy sense of humor) he punctuated each cough with a loud, high pitched "WHOOP WHOOP!" It was absolutely hilarious while it lasted and never failed to make me laugh, but then just when he got better my sister managed to catch it too. It hit her harder, meaning that we had to "whoop whoop" for her, since she was so fatigued, and a few days ago she finally went to the doctor. Meantime I had been coughing a little too, but I didn't think it was that bad at first.

And then came the diagnosis: acute bronchitis, not whooping cough. My dad of course panicked and had me look up the symptoms: fatigue, coughing up mucus, sore throat, check, check, and check-- for the both of us. It's supposed to clear up on its own after a while, but for now we're armed with enough hot tea, cough drops, and books/computer games and TV (depending on which one of the sisters you're talking to) to keep us relatively happy while we recover.

The fatigue alone is driving me crazy. I went to the mall with my mom today, and not even a big Starbucks hot chocolate with whipped cream had enough caffeine in it to resuscitate me. In fact, I think it gave me a headache.

Anyways, the Cubans have been calling daily (their gossip is getting worse and worse; it seems that the whole world knows that I have a boyfriend) to check in and see if we're better yet. And I'm feeling a lot better, really, but the exhaustion is terrifically debilitating. It probably wasn't such a good idea to go to the mall today...

If I were a good Cuban, I'd keep a bottle of Coke and a bottle of Tylenol next to my bed at all times. My nutcase father keeps calling it Coca-Cola con Tylenol, not Tylenol y Coca-Cola, because he thinks it would be so much better if they just mixed the drugs right in with the Coke and sold it like that. Believe me, both companies would make tons of money if they understand their major demographic (which is old Cubans around the age of 65 who constantly moan out announcements of their impending death, which is scheduled to occur within the hour.) They could make a fortune. I'll even volunteer my grandma and great-grandma as spokeswomen. They can be like the Miller High Life guy,the one that always goes around taking beer away from people who don't deserve it, only the Cuban Crusaders will snatch bottles of PediaCare and Excedrin away instead and replace them with Coca-Cola con Tylenol, the Cuban cure for everything! (brought to you by the Association of Cubans for a Free Island. All proceeds fund la revolucion).

So yes. I am in desperate need of rest and Coca-Cola, even though I don't like it very much, and so are the Dodgers (because they're all basket cases now-- I think they actually need psychiatrists too, but that's just me.) Miraculously enough, my mom hasn't needed the potent drug for a while. At the moment, she's happily turning our house into the Museum of Family History, complete with one small shrine dedicated to my career as a track runner and another, this one housed in her long pined-for china cabinet, full of Cuban memorabilia: tiles hand-painted with traditional recipes and tiny pictures of ingredients, a shiny silver cafe Cubano-maker we bought at a drugstore in Miami, and the ARCO china that made up my great-grandma's first set of dishes in America. But that's a story for another day-- a day where I'm not thisclose to using my keyboard as a pillow.

I think I'm going to make the arduous journey to the kitchen and see if I can find myself some drugs-- the Cuban kind, of course.

This is Just to Say

that there is a bowl
of red plums on the counter
with two ripe purple
plums
nestled in,
and the best looking one-
the juiciest, sweetest-
still held fast to leaves
so slender and green
that I just couldn't bite it.
So I took the second,
the bitter skinned twin,
and carefully let beauty be.

Head to Hand to Pen to Page: Minimally Edited Poems from a Summer Afternoon

Summer sun hits the sidewalk and my face
in the just same way
harsh
but just right for
ten minutes or more if I'm lucky
if I'm lucky if I'm lucky
I'll be able to handle
the sun for an hour
and your smile in
the just same way
can handle me for ten more minutes.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Dog--
yellow-haired,
big smiling thing,
why do you insist
on clamb'ring atop the table
I'm sitting at and writing on
and then settling there to
be that much closer
to a breathing
being being,
Dog?

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

4 o'clock
the shadows stop
hiding.
5 o'clock
the shadows start
running.
6 o'clock
my thoughts start
wandering.
7 o'clock my thoughts keep spinning,
but the sun's almost done
dipping
and I must start
collecting
blown down papers
fragment words
keeping
them all for tomorrow.

Brave New World/Tired Old Room

I don't want comfort.

I don't want fear.

I want God,

I want hope,

I want poetry,

I want intelligence,

I want real danger,

I want real life,

I want freedom,

I want wings,

I want goodness.

I want to be happy.

I want sin.

I want choices.

I want to know what I'm doing.

448 days left

What are they going to do when their glass box finally breaks into three thousand jagged pieces? When the doll has snowflakes in her hair and wings on her heart?

(Pretty) In Pink

Now the pink on my nails bothered me, though. It was suddenly too pink, to bubblegummy prep school perfection. I wanted something understated and out of the way, but the only "understated" colors I have are pink. Rose pink, tea dress pink, dusty pink... too much pink. I never thought I'd admit it, but there is definitely such a thing as too much pink. So the best idea seems to be clear polish, but there's too much dirt under my nails, and it won't come out. There's too much to hide, so I need a color. And what's the opposite of pink? Black. All black is depressing, especially when summer is almost here, so a French tip might work. It'll cover up just enough.

There's a difference between planning and doing, though. The plan is to make a glossy line of black on each fingernail with that new polish-pen we got at Sav-ons a month ago, but as soon as I start painting my right hand I know that that won't happen. It just doesn't work, so out comes the acetone and off goes the black. Now it's looking worse, and my only other option is orange, purple, or red. Red is classy. It's safe. That's what I wanted, anyways-- something safe that wasn't pink.

It's funny how things turn out, right? Wrong. It's not always funny. Sometimes it's annoying. Like how sometimes I wake up with a piece of last night's dream still waltzing in my head, and I try to spin it out for as long as possible after I wake up. I pick up where my subconscious left off, adding scenes and giving directions as if I were on a movie set in my head, and then, right when the the problem's been solved and all that's left is the happily-ever-after, someone turns the light on.

"Are you awake? You need to help me with the laundry."

I want to wake up one day, look at the glowing light bulb, and tell it to go away. I'm dreaming, let me sleep. Go away. I heard from somewhere-- maybe it was one of the senior quotes-- that you know you're really in love when you don't want to sleep, because reality is finally better than your dreams. Something like that. Well, I know I'm really living when I'd rather see the sun than the stars; I'm better off seeing things happen than dreaming them up.

Right now, I'd like to see stars until Sunday.

But I don't want to be depressing and sad! I don't want to feel gloomy. There's just so much going on tomorrow...so much homework I'll need to finish and so many quizzes I need to study for, not to mention finals...I don't want to be sad. I want to be alive, sitting in the sun every day and listening to my heartbeat.

Beyond poetry

If I read one poem every day, it would take me a year and a half to finish the book.

It's called the Oxford Book of American Poets. It's got Dickinson, Lindsay, St. Vincent Millay, Whitman, Frost...five hundred seventy one poems in all. Five hundred seventy one days. It seems almost impossible that I'll be able to read them all, but that's part of the mystique of the thing. One small blue-covered book, with five hundred seventy one separate emotions and scenes. There's so much in there to see! If I can read them all...

I don't really know why I consider this such an accomplishment, a task that I feel I have to finish. But I do. I have to read it all and understand it all too.

Sophia is on a Shakespeare binge. Her class is performing Romeo and Juliet (guess who's Juliet?), and now she just can't get enough-- she's watching Romeo + Juliet (the Leonardo one), and we saw Shakespeare in Love last night. It's kind of a good thing she's going so crazy. If not Shakespeare, what would you have her crave? And the more I sit and listen to the lines with her, the more I understand. I've never heard Shakespeare like this before. It used to be that these were just words, beautiful feelings created by a rhyming couplet in iambic pentameter. But now the words are alive in my heart too, and I think I might know why. But is that reason ok? Do I really love you beyond poetry? I'm not sure, which makes me think I'm not. But maybe? Question marks times a hundred.

Things are falling apart brick by brick, and yet Shakespeare and poetry stand still in the middle of it. What in the world are they doing?

Plan Z

There are a lot of words swirling around in my head right now. They flutter around like kites taking off from the ground, twitching and flipping over in defiance. They refuse to let me pin them down into real sentences, much less the vague ideas that they've become.

It started with The New Yorker. I was reading it in class today and people just kind of stared, some venturing to fling the word "Intellectual" at its cover as if that were a bad thing to be, but that's not really where it started. That was just a random side note. It started with an article about diamond thieves that are internationally known as the Pink Panthers, then another article about a restaurant in Turkey that makes old-style food so authentic that it brings people to tears. There was a story about a photographer who takes pictures of the landscape while flying around in his red, engine propelled paraglider, and a thin column about the effect of one painting on a person's whole life. And these are interesting stories in themselves simply because they are stories that seem more like a novel than a piece of nonfiction. That's the best part of them: these are all real stories.

Based on ingenuity, sincerity, good tips, and some luck, these journalists tunneled into worlds unseen by anyone not originally part of them. They travel the world and, if something like a tiny Turkish restaurant interests them, they schedule an interview with the owner and suddenly find themselves accompanying him to market day at five in the morning. The Pink Panther article was all the more intriguing-- imagine meeting up with gangsters renowned throughout the Balkans for lunch and scribbling down your notes in the bathroom instead of right in front of them to avoid arousing their suspicion of you.

Imagine paragliding through the air for twenty two seconds.

I think the reason all these words can't cement themselves into sentences is because they're too fantastic, too quixotic to be real. But they collectively translate into this: How did they get there? How did these people a) end up at The New Yorker and b) end up reporting from wherever they are?

And then there's c)How do I get there? Not The New Yorker, specifically, and definitely not chasing Serbian gangsters, but there, in...at...what?

That's the blurry part. How do you yank the words out of the sky by their kitestrings and pin them on the wall?

Catching up on the daily news

People like to read news that's relevant to them, which is why we read local newspapers. People also like to read stuff that's relevant to the whole world, which is why we read big papers like the Los Angeles Times and Boston Globe. I like to read about things relevant to people I know, which is why I read blogs. At first, they don't seem like your typical news blog. And they're not. Instead of telling me about the world, the five blogs I like to read tell me about the people I see every Monday through Friday-- they give me the news on those five people and, unless they make some kind of observation on another person, those five people alone. I'm inside their heads for a paragraph or more, if I'm lucky.

So after being gone for a week and having no time to read my dailies, I decided to catch up yesterday and, surprisingly, they all have a similar message: I'm messed up. You're messed up. The whole teenage population is a big, messed up world.

Sometimes I can see the point. Sometimes I know that we're all messed up-- I definitely am-- and decide that I'm better off sitting in my room all day than even reading a book. But other times I wonder, what are we going to do about it? There's no point in posting drama after drama if we don't DO something to pull ourselves out of the hole we find ourselves in. I've thought about it, and I almost always come up with a different response: We don't want to do anything after all, we'd rather play the rebel or the wounded artist. We just aren't smart enough to figure it out yet. We'd rather keep dreaming. We're lost. We dont' know how to climb out. On and on and on and on and

What I'm trying to figure out, basically, is what we're supposed to do. Acknowledgement is usually the first step to recovery, though what we're recovering from and what we're trying to recover in ourselves depends on the person. Are we trying to recover or discover? Maybe that's it. Maybe we have all these plans that either didn't turn out or haven't gotten a chance to be tested out yet. Either way, we know things are messed up. There's the school side of us, which is usually ok and always fake, and then there's the real side. That's why the school side is fake-- because at school, who's really going to be their true, unfettered self? I'm not. At school I'm practically perfect, blending in with the other "smart kids" and getting good grades and being nice to teachers, just like them. There's nothing wrong with that kid other than a bad grade here ant there.

Then there's the real side, the one that steps out of the school costume at the end of the day and sits here at a laptop upstairs, wondering what we're going to do. That's if we decide to do anything at all, really. Will we decide to reach over our walls and talk to someone else, or will we just let our fingers talk to a computer instead? Are we ever going to sit down and figure out why we're messed up so that we can find the solution? Because I don't know about you, but right now my personal solution is three thousand miles and two years away. We need to do something now to get out of the hole. And I've asked this a million times already, but how will we do that?

I don't like the whole "Generation Messed-Up" thing we've got here. I don't like this blog post much either, but whatever. It doesn't make sense, because I'm in same situation as everyone else, believe it or not. It doesn't make sense, but I write nonsense in the hope that someone will make sense of it for me.

...

I'm making a really bad decision in deciding to blow off my Chem homework and writing instead, but it's not like she's going to collect it anyways. It's ok. I'll just be a little more lost than usual tomorrow.

I had a nice little blog post all planned out, about how I know spring is here-- because of the bouquet of daffodils in my room (which has now been reduced to a single wilting flower struggling to hold on to life) and the Dodgers starting spring training and all that-- but it just doesn't seem important at all. That being said, I don't think I really know what's important.

You have the basics: good grades, good college, staying out of trouble, being yourself and finding your place in the world are all important. But are they the most important things to me? Because if they're not, then they dont' matter at all. Ok, so grades are a priority, but they're not just for getting in to college. They're for giving me an excuse to take off to Boston for four years and form some opinions on things other than whether or not Heidi Montag should have plastic surgery. I feel like a robot programmed to tell people exactly what they want to hear.

If I didn't have to worry about a single other person or deal with their opinion of what I should do, I'd live right smack in the middle of Boston and read books all morning. In the afternoon I'd walk all over the city, looking for things to write about and stopping for lunch in some random little restaurant where I could sit outside and listen to life go by for a while. And at night, well, there's no telling what I could do. All I know is that in this idealistic little world, my cell phone would be in more pieces than a broken heart. No one to check in with when I leave one place for another, no one to meet up with at eight o'clock sharp. I would wear a yellow dress in the snow.

The few people who read this understand this kind of madness-- this mess of tangled up feelings and stresses that tie you to a page and won't let you go until you've turned it all into words. Little black marks on a screen that tell your little blue world what you need to say.

Maybe I'll end up like one of those people who goes crazy in college because they're faced with almost too much independence after living such a sheltered life. Maybe I've got it better than I think right now and am just being a whiny brat. Maybe I'm delusional.

Maybe those delusions are all I really have right now.

Correction

The problem isn't that I've forgotten how to write. The problem is that I've forgotten how to live. Everything seems like it's covered in Alfred J. Prufrock's yellow fog, and I feel like I'm moving without putting any meaning behind it. I'm lazy. Instead of reviewing how to solve the Chem problems I'm missing steps on, I just skip them. Suddenly I'm addicted to Facebook and Seventeen because they're the mindless junk I want. I feel like I might explode from this boxed in feeling if something doesn't defibrilate me soon.

La Tragedia Andante

Have you ever choked on something? Or maybe been underwater for too long a had to propel yourself to the surface at full speed if you ever wanted to breathe again? If you have, then you know how I've come to feel. If you haven't, consider yourself very lucky.

The irony here is that I'm drowning in a drought. A drought of words, ideas, accomplishments, etc. I have simply forgotten how to write. The fact that I don't have much time for it doesn't help, and the remedy is actually pretty simple when you think about it: all I have to do is make more time.

Ok, good. So let's put that into practice, shall we? Let's say it's Saturday. I wake up nice and late, say around nine, and eat breakfast and be lazy until ten. And then it's time for showers and homework, which takes absolutely HOURS if you're in APUSH like me. And on certain blessed days, I go do service hours. By the time I'm done with that and home, it's almost one and the homework will still not let me rest. I feel tired and stressed, so I read. On it goes, leaving me with almost no breaks worth writing anything in. There's time enough to read a quick chapter, but start an actual story? Please. On weekdays it's just as bad,with a good three hours worth of homework that I can only start after I get home from track practice around six. There's just no time during the day.

Key phrase here: during the day. The natural day, which usually starts at 6:30 exactly on weekdays and whenever I feel like it on weekends. And this leads me to the solution, the way I will write something every day and climb out of this arid well once and for all. It's so simple that I'm surprised I haven't thought of this before-- I'm just going to wake up earlier.

You may not think this is a major revelation, but to be, it's like giving the day 25 hours instead of 24. If I wake up at 5 a.m., I get an entire hour and a half of time previously occupied by sleep. by going to bed a little earlier, I lose almost nothing and gain peace of mind. I really can't get over how easy this seems!

So that's the plan. Wake up early and write something. I've heard on more than one occasion that it takes 10,000 (yes, ten thousand) hours of doing something before you get good at it. I'm not sure how many hours I've logged of real, serious writing that's gone through edits and made me feel good, but I'm going to start right now. I'm going to keep a journal with me and log every minuted I spend doing thought-out writing (this doesn't count as anything but a warm up because of that) and every idea that I come up with. At this point, no thought can be discredited as a bad idea. I'm sure that if everything happens for a reason, so does every thought.

And you, yes you, can keep me accountable. On any given day you can ask me if I've written anything lately, and the answer will always be a yes, accompanied by the writing itself. No excuses or complaints. I'll figure out how to make this work-- I swear on the great Shakespeare Bible.

Back by Popular Demand

No,I am not talking about me and my return to the blogosphere (even though I'm sure you've all missed me and my ground-breaking insight). I'm talking about Lauren Conrad.

There's nothing wrong with Lauren Conrad, really. She's a person trying to do something interesting with her life just like the rest of us-- the problem is that she's tryign a little too hard to be interesting. But I'd say we all do that. We all try to look good and be interesting and make every day a little more bearable, but there's a limit to how hard we try. I mean, how many of us try to do everything possible to achieve that? It's like how almost every kid on Disney Channel has a part in two shows and a CD on the way next month. You can't do everythign just because you can, people.

That's not to say we can't try. I know people who can sing, act, draw, AND write so amazingly that it's almsot not fair, but the point is that people like that can get away with doing everything. Lauren Conrad isn't one of those people. I'm definitely not one of those people (so don't go thinking this whole thing is a self-righteous rant about incompetent people of the world). I've tried singing and think that American Idol would never in a million years send me to Hollywood. I've tried being an artist and realized that unless you let me do some kind of Impressionist interpretation thing, my paintings are not the kind you'd want to hang on your walls. It just doesn't work for me, so I'm going to focus on something I'm sure I can do. The other day I had a lightbulb moment: I am not cut out for writing stories. I really thought I was going to be the next Great Mystery Writer, but let's be real. You, my little audience, have been reading these posts. You see how easy it is for me to write about things that actually happen, don't you? And maybe you've read some stories, but really, this is so much easier. It still takes effort to find the right words, but now I'm not agonizing over what happens next in the story. I can zoom in on how to tell it instead.

I realize that I sound a little like I've found something like the path to total understanding and peace. When I actually do find it, I'll let you know. Until then, I'm going to watch the world so I can write all about it and learn what I can about what I'm supposed to do. And wait with bated breath for LC to hit #1.

Don't go, I'm here! But what do you want me to say?

I find myself surrounded by people who seem to far surpass me in literary ability and general amazingness, and it's rather fun. I mean, to listen to people like me with all these new ideas and poems and sentences that make me step back and say, "Wow, that was amazing," is pretty amazing in and of itself.

And me?

Well, it's like Robert Frost said: "Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things." I do have my moments-- sometimes I write something and I love it so much that I tack it on the wall-turned-bulletin-board in the attic. In fact,just last week I sent something on a trip through the mail and to an editor's hands, hoping that maybe they'll like it as much as I do. But then, like always, there are the intervals. The times when nothing comes out and it seems like nothing will for forever. No words, no ideas, nada nada limonada. A drought.

Right now it's raining both words and real rain, so I'm happy. There was an enormously loud thunderclap a few hours ago (the one that spawned the million Facebook statuses that read "OMG the thunder is sooo scary did u hear ittt?") and lightning that reminded me of an old-fashioned flash camera. It didn't really scare me, but because I was high up in the attic I decided to sit under my desk. I'm not exactly sure what I thought it would do for me if any celestial electricity were to get inside, but it was a good idea in the end. I sat there long after I finished my homework and typed up a few pages of a story, all thanks to thunder.

Ta da!

So it looks like I did have something to say after all. And later on, when real things happen to me and real thoughts pop into my head like a five-year-old munchkin pops their finger into a cake, I'll post it.

Stay tuned, people.

P.S. I know you're reading this Nellie-- you made my day twice in one day, which has got to be some kind of record. Long live paper!

You Are Cordially Invited to the Puddle's Grand Reopening

Don't complain about the small words-- the typed version is at the end of this post!

In the tradition of an especially ol NaNoWriMo pep talk, I'm going retro and hand writing this post instead of typing it. I've been wrting again-- real poems-- and they've all been hand written. Ther's something intensely gratifing about writing something down, rereading it fifteen times, taking a red pen to it, and putting it in neat, perfect type only when the words are perfect themselves. Make sense?

I was reading Time magazine yesterday, adn there was this article about Kindle vs. nook, and it ended by sayng both e-readers are going to be obsolete soon anyways, so it doesn't matter. YES! I cheer, but my exultation is waaay premature. The only reason for this extinction: Apple's new Tablet, the all-in-one e-reader/notebook/laptop thng that will revolutionize LIFE.

So now Apple is taking over the world. Great. (*Side note: yes, I have and iPhone. Apple is ok in small doses.)

Anyways. WE've redecorated the upstairs, so now it has actual working lights and a little sofa, plus a corner that I've turned into my writing "office". It's really just my magnetic poetry board and a wall I've turned into a bulletin board, but it's till my space-- my corner, my Little Women-esque garret. It's nice.

It's night time, but I feel pretty sunny. Things are still going right-- for now, at least. Usually i'm always thinking about two years from now, about Boston and snow and people who say stuff like "wicked good chowdah", (which is seriously what one of the waitresses told us about the clam chowder when I was last in Boston). But surprisingly, I'm ok where I am. No fast-forward button required.