When Faraway Things Seem Close

This post is long overdue.
Originally intended to be a cross-post with Emily, this was written by both of us at various points throughout the 24 hours leading up to Pride Weekend. Intoxicated and driving around my hometown and the surrounding highways aimlessly, we stopped at a CVS to purchase a notebook. And by that I mean I got nervous, shoved two dollars in Emily's hand, and made her go buy a notebook. I don't think we kept this up as long as we intended. Nevertheless, I present to you the chronicle of two really anxious girls overwhelmed by possibility. And Tegan and Sara a little bit.

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June 26 2009 10:30 pm (Emily)

I GOT INTO Katrina’s house last night at 1 am. I went 24 hours without sleep and woke up at 1 pm.

We drove around Rockland aimlessly listening to Tegan and Sara which was so epic it cannot properly be described. We should ideas and dreams and things that would make us happy. I’m having an I-Thou relationship with the road. The roads in America are all the same.

We have the same idols and we constantly bring the conversation back to autostraddle. We auto-dance. We are auto-hot. We are auto-blazed, auto-drunk. We auto-win.

We don’t know how to get there. All we know is that City Girl is the best Tegan and Sara song and it’s possible to be nowhere and not lost at the same time.

The road is magnificent.
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June 26 2009 10:45 pm (Katrina)

WE'VE BEEN ON the highway searching for the overlook for about 20 minutes. It probably would have been only ten, but as I am probably in no condition to be driving, I’ve been going at a steady 40 mph on a 65. This adds a new element to auto-blazed.

I look over at the clock. 10:40. There is so much night to be had. It reminds me of DC, of the apartment, where we’d be too high on uppers to sleep but too stoned to have a real conversation. It’d be 2:30 and we’d feel like the night was so new. 10:40 is so early and I wonder if this is what it’s like to not know you’re young.

If someone asked me how long I’d been young for, I’d say my whole life. If you asked me when I’d stop being young, I would tell you that’s not up to me. When does one stop being young? Do you wake up and know, or is it something that only occurs in retrospect? And if youth is defined by behaviour, I plan to always be young. If growing up means giving up your voice and forsaking your selfish desires , and well... being no fun, then, regardless of the number of years we've actually been around.. well, I’m gonna be forever young. So suck it, Rod Stewart.
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June 27 2009 1:51 pm (Emily)

DRIVING IN THE CAR with Katrina’s parents. We’re listening to The Clash. My heart was pounding at the beginning, thoughts like “holy shit” kept going through my head and I almost forgot where we were going. To be honest, when “Rudie Can’t Fail” came on I felt relaxed, it was a little sound from home, something familiar. Because everything here is new. Every step I take is one into the unknown and it is both exhilarating and terrifying. In fact the past two days have been exhilarating and terrifying and these next two should be so intense I’m expecting my heart to explode at any time.

Except I’ve got this feeling we’re all in this together and together we can deal with anything.

Katrina joked about me sleeping in the car to avoid questions but now her brother is passed out next to me.

We’re about to get on the highway and it’s end to end traffic. My heart begins to pound again. I just want to get there.

I don’t know if the nerves are from pretending to be from Boston and going to AU or from meeting autostraddle and really Riese really. Both options are plausible.

I am having a heart attack again. We are on Lexington.

2:34 pm we are on the corner of Lexington and 56^th.
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June 27^th 2009 2:44 (Katrina)

WE JUST DROPPED EMILY off at Brooke’s which means we pulled off this incredible charade.

Waking up at a quarter to noon and laying on top of the sheets listening to “City Girl” on repeat, we knew we wouldn't be this still again.

Tegan and Sara were singing about me when they said “I know you’re scared even though you say that you’re not”. They know this as I try to stride confidently through my house in my baptism-ready dress and heels, sending secretive, self-assured smirks to Emily, trying to convince her we’ll make it through the car ride.

We will, and we do. Off I go to the house of God.

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Also, if you just read that and thought to yourself, "Well that was cool, but I'd prefer it as a stoner comedy," here's a badly edited video that was never really supposed to see the light of day, due to its bad jokes and continual breathless laughter over nothing.

I'm working on a lot of things right now. While you wait anxiously for them, check out how the rest of this weekend turned out by clicking my link at the top or reading Emily's exceptionally beautiful coverage of the same event. You could also do both.

Everything We Touch Turns to Discourse

So this piece lives on the walls of the apartment where I spent my last week in DC. It's a spontaneous stream-of-consciousness piece that I scrawled across the walls in what, so far, have been the happiest, most simple moments of my life.

I was a bit hesitant about taking it out of its original context because I was scared it would lose its meaning and its feeling, but lately I've been having a really difficult and terribly frustrating time conveying my college experience and my new-found identities and ideas to everyone around these parts, and I thought this might dip into the surface.

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So am I a beatnik or am I a sellout? Am I guilty of fraudulence? Does my fuck-what-you-want-ain't-got-nothin'-forget-my-possessions non-materialism truly mean anything if I've got a $200,000 education keeping me here just not to care? Can I really be free of my possessions and obsessions if mom and dad are still backing up that iPod and that computer and when the year's over, I go back to my house in the New York suburbs to drive my car (MY car) around suburban streets to the sounds of my motor and the empty satisfaction of the American dream?

What am I?

I am my own god.
In the beginning there was God, and Zie loved us so much and so well that Zie gave us the greatest gift of all: to, in turn, create Hir as we wished. And so I have made God into myself, for that is all I will ever control. And I am my experience, and I am yours, and everyone I've ever known. I am love in and of itself. I am human relation because if I can know that someone's life has been changed because of me, then I do not regret because I have lived.

What if you died tomorrow?
Would you be sorry or scared because knew not how to live?
I think that I would not. I may not wake up tomorrow or never again write or create or have my soul leak dark blue on to a page. I may never fall in love again or know everything or meet a beautiful girl be a beautiful girl or see the children of my friends. But today I sat on the floor of our apartment (OUR apartment) slicing a stolen apple with a clear plastic knife and felt complete among the beers and the boxes and the feeling that we were living it like we wanted. My best friend knocking back his second beer at 2 pm, and I felt infinitely happy.

We are everything.

We ourselves are individual microcosms, universes, worlds within ourselves. Eyes reflecting starlight are stars in themselves, bright thought glazed, leading our ways and revealing ancient secrets through mere glances. Passion is a tempest, violent in its beauty, tumultuous and turning, leaving ships in its wake, its sailors not destroyed, rather, changed.

We are the colliding of bodies.
We are the collapsing of bodies.

We are pressed hips and chapped lips and trembling fingers, shedding their regrets and hesitations and releasing all that words do not, cannot, say.

We are verbal intercourse producing birth, creation.

Revolution?

Revolution.
Don’t you go thinking that what we’re doing here isn’t revolution, because revolution is born every single day. It happens every time you change someone’s mind. It’s deconstruction. Every time someone questions who they are or what makes them that why or why they’re unhappy, that’s revolution. If even just one kid stops getting so goddamn down on themselves because they’re not “just like everyone else” because they realize that “just like everyone else” is a farce created by a system designed to tell us that we’re wrong, then that's revolution.

Why be "just like everyone else"if all that means is assimilating into this world full of –isms? Sexism, classism, racism, heterosexism. Why should we all strive to be white, rich, and upper class? Why is that what “equality” means, and why do we tolerate “tolerance?”

What if wealth became experience, not status? Because if that was the case, wouldn’t we already be prosperous in human connection?

We could all be wealthy in each other.

Have a Great Summer

There's no best part about quite literally not living anywhere, because every single part is the best part. I mean this totally and completely. I carry my life on my back, I have absolutely no responsibilities, I fall into the stories of the people around me, drink beer, and live my life so well that I cannot even comprehend it. My every day is enhanced by the excitement and mystery of where I'll fall asleep that night and what I'll do when I wake up the next morning because for once, I am free of obligations and may really and truly do anything.

I'm calling it urban backpacking.

(Partially because the only reason I can afford to do this is because of my privilege and my parents' permission, but whatever. It's the end, not the means).

The worst part is that, being the last one to leave of those who are leaving, I have to watch everyone go. I have cleverly evaded this by occupying myself just enough so that I've managed to not say goodbye to the majority of people who have meant the most to me this past year. And I would almost feel guilty about this, but I don't. Goodbyes don't mean much to me at all. I mean, they do, but not nearly as much as my time previously spent with a person that made an emotional goodbye expected or worth it at all. I don't say goodbye because 1) they're rarely permanent, and 2) I don't want the last time I see a person for quite a while to end up being some awkward, fumbling, sad attempt at a summary of what our friendship has meant, and 3) you already know that I want you to have a great summer. That's basically it. I love people too much for goodbyes, and my verbal skills often fail me, leaving me with a lot of regrets and "I wish I had said's," and that's not anything that anyone needs to bother with.

The last time I saw you, I probably just left it at "later."
Because that's really all it is, you know?

Things I UnLearned in College

This was going to originally be a finals week rant about how frustrated and exhausted and pressed for time I was. But somewhere along the line I changed my mind. It may have been at midnight on the seemingly inaccessible patio on which, only six floors up, I could view the entire school, silent, consumed by their books, while I exhaled and watched cigarette smoke float through the still, humid air over the top of my Red Bull (the two have been a strangely familiar but not unwelcome combination from high school) as I prepared for one more caffeine-soaked evening devoted to conquering the evils of microeconomics. It also may have been six-and-a-half hours later, when, dazed but bright-eyed, I emerged onto the quad to find the air as still as ever and witness a few individuals milling about under the newly grey sky.

Or maybe it was just that substance-induced sleep in the amphitheater the other night. Who knows.
The point is that I realized that all this stress and pressure and unhappy-making nonsense was just that: nonsense that a series of events and places and people socialized me to believe were necessary to a generic, synthesized form of happiness and normalcy. And that, as much as I've learned in my first year of college, the things that I've unlearned are just as, if not more, important in deconstructing everything that I had assumed I wanted.

So here we go.

They told me I had to be a business major because that's how you make money, and money buys you success, and this success makes you happy. Money makes you happy because you're always entitled to new things, such as a new wardrobe each season bought from the nearest mall with the money you've been earning at that dead-end minimum-wage suburban-kid job. But you know you're happy because why else would you keep trying to earn money to buy things? You still want it, really, you do.

To be a woman, they said, your hair must fall at least to your shoulders, and you must use it to lure men. This and your feminine wiles. Failing at either of these disqualifies you as a real woman, and you'll never be beautiful. For that you must be ashamed and scared and spend your time shielding yourself behind another person.

And yes, you do need another person to make you complete. You can't do this by yourself because if you're not in love, then you're not happy, and if marriage and children aren't in your future, then you're not normal (did you ever notice that everyone you talk to is mysteriously and definitely married when they talk about their futures? What makes that a given?). If you blew it the first time you loved, then you'll never find it again, and you probably didn't deserve it in the first place, so you have to go and ruin everything you touch because it'll never be the same anyway.

Pants are necessary around others.
So are shoes.
And you can't get there if a pair of wheels won't take you.

Carrying all this shit around, it's no wonder everyone is so damn unhappy.
The problem is where to go from here.

I think I'm going to spend the summer (when not flipping burgers and fending off angry pool moms) alone on buses, wandering through cities, bumming around friends' places, losing myself (though not really getting lost, because that's terrifying) in the woods, reading, reading, reading, hearing other people's stories and making my own.

Company is always welcome.

As Far As Waking Up in the Beds of Strange Girls Goes

I think this one may be my favorite.
Probably partially because it wasn't like that, but also because free housing in Montreal is the shit, second only to finding out that that connection you thought you've been making with someone without ever seeing them is actually real and staying up until 4 in the morning watching/mocking The L Word is completely worthwhile.

Anyway, her name is Emily, and we sometimes have similar thoughts, though she's a little more music/photography-oriented and sometimes writes in a more stream-of-conscious style. Read it though. She's got a maple leaf tattooed on her arm, and that's how you know someone is worth your time.

This post is also about Canada.

Lately I've been doing this thing where I'm really cautious about throwing whimsical statements into the air because I've picked up this habit of actually following through.

Among the results of this are my previously mentioned night at the Potomac, thirteen hours of travel for about a day and a half in Montreal, and a rediscovered affinity for girls in v-neck T-shirts. These are a few of my favorite things.

Montreal was immensely rewarding. It taught me that the exchange rate of spending time with people in other countries is about double (potentially because of travel time), that swing dancing is difficult, that there are lighters so tacky that they shock even me, that you cannot make right turns on red in Montreal, and that, yes, I can speak enough French to negotiate last-minute sleeping arrangements in the corridor of a hostel under a bookshelf containing both a French translation of 100 Years of Solitude and the Dr. Phil reader. Brilliant.

Traveling for no reason. It's the only reason.

The Gospel According to Tyrone

I finally made some resolutions I could keep.
1. Start a conversation with every person I bum a cigarette off/from.
2. Make it happen. Anything, by any means necessary.

The basic outline of Friday goes like this:
Brandon and I, broke as all fuck, are standing outside CVS smoking with the homeless people (is there a politically correct term for them?) who sell Street Sense. After warning us about the fact that the Bloods have arrived in Tenleytown, he tells Brandon to show me a good time tonight (I mean, we are a radical queer couple after all), and tell us that, with no money, we've got two options: go to Hains Point and watch the planes go by, or go down to Georgetown and sit by the Potomac. It'll clear your mind, he says. It's just you and the water and God, you don't need anything else. And don't forget to thank God every day when you wake up. And if you wake up one day, and you can't see, thank God anyway, because you woke up. Ten heart attacks and fourteen strokes down, Tyrone still sees it fit to sit on the corner and preach the word.

He simplified religion in what is potentially the most effective way I've ever heard.
1. Keep holy the Ten.
2. Love and respect.
3. Preach a little word.
4. Take care of God's children.

Brandon and I head back to the dorms to polish off our five-dollar bottle of Andre, pick up various supplies, and then head to Tenleytown to pick up the G1 bus down to Georgetown.

The details aren't too important. Just know that we were broke and stoned, and we spent two and a half hours wandering through the city under bridges, through dark French-looking alleyways, across Georgetown's campus (holla at Village C), along highways, down trecherous stairways (it was like a MOUNTAIN, I swear), and across and incredbily vast bridge to Virginia and back. We also encountered a number of belligerent preppy drunks.

I can't express how far from the water we were when we first got there. But it was essentially seeing a point in the distance and making the decision to get there no matter what. It was getting what you want.

Finding the water after all that time is indescribable. The closed park we wandered into was surreal. I had never seen so much newness in one place. The stainless benches sat on the edges of patches of straw; the park was so new that grass hadn't even grown yet. Under the harsh white streetlights, the blackest asphalt I have ever seen gleamed and shone, leading us to the Potomac River.

It didn't need to look like anything when we got there. It didn't need to be grand or vast or endless in its possibility. Knowing that it was there, and we were on the edge of it, and that we had found it simply by seeing it and standing at least fifty feet over it an hour before was enough. The things that you get when you ask and the things that you get when you just look blow my fucking mind.

Plus we sort of found God.

I guess it's all held in the idea that truth and belief are only what you make them. The truth is only what you can get enough people to believe, or what you can get the right people to believe. And so if you believe in God, then Zie exists for you, and that's all that matters. And if Zie does exist, then Zie has given us the greatest gift of all: for us to be able to create Hir for ourselves. God created us, and in creating us, gave us the ability to create God as whatever image we see fit, and whatever we need.

It took us an hour and a half to walk back to school. We made in at about 5:30 and smoked inside a hollow sculpture. You have not been high until you have been high inside art.





I believed in God on runways and starting lines. Zie found me again by the Potomac River.
You don't need to believe it, but I guess that's the point.