Looking to absolve myself.

Today on my way to my car I came upon an elderly man who had fallen down. Instead of rushing to help him, I stayed back and watched him struggle to get back up, under a silly pretense of not wanting to hurt his pride. I do a few good deeds from time to time. I have been known to shovel the neighbors driveways, to befriend the quiet person in the class, and to help people who have dropped things. I offer my seat on the train to old ladies, I hold open doors for women with strollers, but I didn't help him, and I know I should have.

The Movies

Movies have ruined me forever. Everything I think I know, is from the movie. Any flirtatious behavior I may have picked up is not from real life, but from the movies. Everything I know about life I was taught in the movies. Speech patterns, romance, what you’re supposed to do when your sad or happy. The movies taught me what was charming, what is beautiful. Sometimes I wonder if I had never seen a movie who would I be? Where would I learn who to be, on whom would I pin my personality. Would I expect the same things from men if there weren’t hours of Romantic Comedy’s rolling around in my head? Would I expect the same things from myself if I didn’t have 70 years of beautiful actresses staring back at me in my mind’s eye? If I had never laid eyes upon a young Marlon Brando would I think that the actual boys that I met in real life were more attractive?

Jenna on Loneliness: an excersize in vague self pity.

I went on a date on Tuesday (you Jenna? A date? With a male? Yes, shocking I know,) it is now Saturday and he hasn’t called me. I’m no expert in these matters but even I know that’s a bad sign, and because I refuse to be a glutton for punishment I have given up hope.

It’s not as if there was an undeniable spark, it’s not that I think he’s the one, the love of my life. There was nothing miraculous about the affair, and yet at the same time, there was something miraculous about it. I thought we had a good time, we like a lot of the same things, and I thought that as far as first dates go it was pretty good, which is a little miraculous.

He loves This American Life and is baffled by the critical acclaim of Stanley Kubrick! Oh be still my heart! He is tall and has lovely brown eyes. I began to imagine, as the evening went on, that I could date him, I imagined us settling into a casual comfortable relationship in which we frequented art house movie theatres and took long walks around 3^rd and 3^rd down town.

I really don’t understand what the problem is. He seemed to enjoy himself, and while I am cautious about liking people, I thought that at least a second date was in order.

But alas! I find myself alone again, naturally, and because I imagined our casual hip future together this fact seems to be weighing on me somewhat at present.

Loneliness is an emotion I feel I am particularly familiar with, having a chronic difficulty with the opposite sex, and a persistent adolescent sense that I don’t really belong in the real world. I feel that I am keenly aware of loneliness, so much aware of it that, for me, it has shed some of its negative connotations.

There is something deeply romantic about loneliness. In my personal world view romance is less about being in love and more about longing, about never having that which you want. I’m talking old school romance; knights who devoted their lives to a single woman and never even touch her, the idea that longing is sweeter than having. If this is the case then I am one of the most romantic people on earth.

Right now I am home alone, making spaghetti (my homemade marinara is particularly magnificent if I do say so myself) and listening to Frank Sinatra. Later I intend to watch Roman Holiday and sigh frequently. I don’t feel sad, but wistful perhaps, and this is the first chapter. This is where in romantic comedies we meet our heroine; all alone making spaghetti on a Saturday night. The most fantastic thing about being alone is it means that anything can happen. You’re not with someone, so you could, potentially meet anyone.

I went to Blockbuster today and rented “Love Actually” whose splendors I intend to wallow in tomorrow. I love going to Blockbuster because one of the employees always gives me one of my movies for free. He is sneaky and says that I’ve earned a free movie on my rewards card, but there is no way I am earning a free movie each and every time I go into Blockbuster. Sometimes we talk about movies (once he confused the Coen Brothers with Wes Anderson, how embarrassing!) I like to think that he looks forward to my blockbuster visits. That he secretly pines for me. It makes me feel good to think that I am inflicting pain on someone else, because quite frankly, it’s just my turn, and feeling bad that I can’t love him back makes me feel like I’m a good person.

My aloneness allows me to cultivate weird pretend relationships like the one I just related. There’s Lonnie the TA who has no idea that while the professor spoke long on eastern Europe and the development of film editing techniques I was imagining his lovely jewish nose rubbing against mine Eskimo style. It was really Lonnie’s nose that made me love him. When I occasionally see him on campus my heart does a strange plummet like that of seeing an ex, even though I never spoke more than a few words to him.

There’s the crazy haired bespectacled boy at the library help desk, whom I like to pretend notices when I come in to use the computer lab, and longs for me to have computer problems, so that he may lean over my chair, catch the subtle bouquet of my perfume, then say something seductive and brainy like “It’s a problem with the motherboard, may I buy you a Chai Latte from Chartwells?”

I balance these fantasies simultaneously going from one to another as the feeling moves me, like improvisational dance for my brain. They keep me company, and my imagination in good, if somewhat sentimental form. It is something to do, while I wait for someone who likes This American Life, Art House Cinema, and me.

My two cents.

I went to see James Bond today, and one of the previews was for the new Star Trek prequel. They're trying to make it cool and sexy, but the reason we love Star Trek is because it's campy, has low production values, and is the unsexiest thing on earth. All of it's charm lies in it's shortcomings. No one can ever beat Shatner and Nimoy.

Oh, Disneyland

I spent fall break in Disneyland with three of my very best friends in the entirety of the world. In some ways one feels foolish waiting in line for Snow Whites Scary Ride when one is 21 years old, but really and truly I believe that Disneyland is much much better when you are older.

Don’t get me wrong, it was great when I was a kid too, but everything was great when I was a kid. My mother, pleased to find an artistic streak in one of her children indulged my over active imagination, and my predilection for fantasy and make-believe made every day fantastical. Remember the day in summer when the fireman checks the fire hydrants. Cancel my appointments because my day was booked. There were weeks were I sat in my backyard and played with mud every day. A trip to McDonalds was frenzy inducing, and being torn away from the ball pit at the Burger King Kids play place was tragic enough to elicit tears. Between mud and fast food what did I need with Disneyland? I felt that kind of magic joy almost every day.

But sadly I grew up (well…sort of) and things that captured my attention for hours on end no longer held the same power. I think I could probably play with mud for a few hours now, but not for an entire day. I have no desire to go throw myself into the shooting waters of the fire hydrant, and when I go to McDonalds now, my meal doesn’t come with a prize, and all I can think about is the empty calories.

Instead of dancing happily through life I began to worry about boring things like money, jobs, and boys (mostly the lack thereof) all things I swore up and down I would never worry about when I was a kid.

But when I go to Disneyland those things disappear. The last night of the trip S and I went on Splash Mountain by ourselves because M and B didn’t want to get wet.

“We won’t get that wet,” I assured S who had never been on the ride, “You’ll get sprinkled but it’s not bad,”

But of course we sat in the front and I emerged soaking wet. But the night air in Annaheim was warm, even in October, and the complete dishevelment effectively obliterated the last vestiges of restraint and inhibition.

We sweet talked our way into the wheel chair entrance of Peter Pan, we ran madcap through the all but deserted temple of doom, come to think of it. We ran everywhere. When I was a kid, if a place was worth going to it was worth running to and I found the energy to run everywhere, and that night it was back. We ran all over the parks, past families and “too-cool” teens and we threw ourselves onto every ride with a breathless excitement. I wasn’t thinking about tomorrow or yesterday, only about now, running with fireworks exploding overhead, music playing everything was right with the world, because everything was right now.

` I love Disneyland because it allows me to be a kid again, and I excelled at being a kid. I feel sad that an evil faceless corporation can give that to me, but so it is, and I will continue to pay great amounts of money to live completely free of reality. I live reality every day, I don’t need it in my vacation. So here’s to the child within, here’s to spending a few days in a bubble! Here’s to Disneyland!

Bugs

There is a fly in my room, whom I have christened Edouard (franco-spanish spelling of course) He seems very fond of making his presence known at night right before I am about to fall asleep.
I am lingering blissfully on the subtle ledge between sleep and consciousness when a gentle but disruptive,
bzzz bzzz bzzz bzzzz bzzzz bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

For all my having named him you might think that Edouard and I have grown to love each other, like the cricket from Mulan, he might become a tiny companion.
But in fact I try to murder Edouard almost nightly. I chase him about with a shoe for some time, but my room has peculiarly high ceilings and i think Edouard knows i can't reach him there.
Worn out by failure and futility I go to sleep vowing "Tomorrow night Edouard, tomorrow night!" and occasionally I shake my fist at him to let him know I really mean business.
But Edouard, on his lofty perch, laughs a tiny fly laugh.
He's buzzing about my lamp right now, and oh how I despise him.

Once I found a spider in my shower, and I couldn't bear to kill it. I can't explain why. Could have been my very young readings of Charlotte's Web. It could be the strange affection I've always had for them. I used to make pets of them when I was too young to know that they were supposed to be frightening.
In any case, I didn't kill her, and named her Lucy. I only saw her about once a week. I've no idea where her web was, I never saw it, but when i sould see her scurrying across the wall I would smile and say, "Hullo Lucy,"
But in a plot twist strangely like Charlotte's Web, I started noticing that instead of seeing Lucy once a week, I was seeing several smaller Lucys.
Lucy, whom I had treated as a guest, had had the bad manners to reproduce in my home, and where one spider is a charming eccentricity, several is unacceptable, so I killed all of Lucy's offspring.
Sometimes I ponder the moral question here. Am I a better person for letting Lucy live, or a worse person for killing all her children. Would it have been better for me to kill Lucy to begin with, and therefore have less spider deaths on my head? Some of them probably escaped, does this redeem me?
I think like most big question, there is no easy answer, except perhaps that I live in squalor.
Strangely I've never felt any great longing to spare Edouard.
I think maybe flies are like chickens: they deserve to die.
Chickens are savage stupid animals and I don't think they can process emotions like happiness or misery. When I worked at "This is the Place" There were always several cases of Baby oh-so-cute-and-fluffy chicks brutally pecking and trampling their brethren and sistren to death! One time I found a dead chicken in my yard. It's eyes look the same living or dead. No life has gone out of them. They are always blank and alien.
They're not like sheep, or pigs, who are feisty and lovable. The best thing they can do is be food.
I guess the lesson here is really, the only animals who deserve to live are the ones that are easily anthropomorphised.
But I still eat sheep and pigs, so maybe the real lesson is that I am a carnivorous hypocrite.
One thing I know, Edouard and I shall meet again and he shall curse the day he pupated!


Destiny waits for thee, Edouard!

Jenna battles the freshman 15 at 21

It's supposed to happen when you go to college. You're metabolism changes, and you inexplicably gain 15 pounds. I went all these years without this great misfortune, but I discovered a little over a month ago that I had, indeed, gained 15 pounds. With shock and horror I threw myself into healthier eating habits, but progress has been slow and often discouraging.
Losing weight is a bitch.
It should be against the laws of physics, that you can't gain weight any faster than you can lose it.