I run around in the dark, I play games with my friends and with complete strangers -- sardines and soccer. I have the most fun ever and am so sore the next day, today. I want to do it all over again all the time, so much so that I am never sore. I drank a forty for the first time and everyone was impressed with the speed in which it was gone, but I think I can pass on that in the future. That, and the three dumpstered krispy kreme donuts. ugh.
But yeah, yay... go fun. Let's hear it for fun. All the time. Sometimes I begin to hesitate. I think: Maybe I should not go to the Indian festival, maybe I should study for that test. But then I remind myself that I promised myself I'll live like I am famous, and as a famous person, everything will be taken care of in good time and there's no need to worry about it. Being concerned doesn't help, fretting doesn't help -- just doing it with ease and a carefree mind helps. And so I ride my bike to the Indian festival and watch the children dressed as elephants / adolscent boys dressed as sparkling seducers dance the dances they have been practicing for months for me.
How can you be free if everyone is not fed? How can you enjoy what you can afford if others can enjoy nothing? You know that feeling of guilt, of general despair, that feeling of heaviness and regret you can't shake even when you're happy, even at you're happiest? You know how it just doesn't make sense to you, so you think there must be something wrong with you? It is the feeling of not being free. Not being free. So now can you imagine freedom? Now does it sound as glorious as everyone else makes it out to be? Do you get it now?
I dance around. I yell hey, isn't thursday night dance nite at my house? I smile and shout at my friends get out of my house! and add quickly but then come back.
1 listen to music very loudly all the time 2 get a skateboard... preferably a longboard 3 ride your bicycle fast through the night... make it jump over things 4 think of touching / touches 5 dream of gardens and boys and skateboards and victory 6 imagine falling down dramatically and somewhat hurting yourself and jumping up like it's no problem and feeling kinda good about that 7 fall for people who stutter 8 repeat the line there's a fire over and over again inside yourself until you can feel it
Dateline Charlottesville... I drive into the black heart of UVa in search of my sister. It's a dark night, obscuring the landmarks that are supposed to guide me, and making the small print on parking space / you-can't-park-here signs even harder to read.
I finally park far far away from where she is, next to the spaces that are reserved for the astronomy department at all times, and I zig zag my way to the general area. I ask three people Hey, where's Jefferson Hall, and two of them are useless freshmen, uh, I mean first-years. The second is a transfer student from the University of Mississippi, and when he says I dunno and tells me he's a transfer student from the University of Mississipi, I smile and feign a frown and say I thought ya'll were supposed to be smart around here, I clap my hands chop chop, maps! come on, maps! let's get on the ball here.
At night, I walk to the boys' house in order to fetch the Green Machine -- the old Voyager single-speed cruiser that Jonathan fixed up just for Elizabeth. But instead Evrim keeps me there until 4 in the a. m., giving me course after course of delicious food. We compare notes on how to make turkish coffee, and joke with Joe about Lenin and iron, and Evrim teaches me how to play backgammon for real, but he doesn't call it backgammon. He has a better name for it that I forget now, here in the next afternoon.
In the morning, I wake up after thriving through my dreams happily. I turn on the music loud and dance around in my thin underwear and gold necklace, brushing my teeth and watching my own moves caught up in my shadow. How sexy, I think. How sexy we are when we're all alone and no is watching. I rush home from campus, skipping class again (it doesn't count, don't yell at me). I pedal the Green Machine and can't wait to dance and sleep again. Here I am.
Ladybugs have been living with me. They are constantly walking up door way trim, stumbling out of cups, and looking out the window. Two weeks ago when I was out walking around at night looking at art and the first one sat on my shoulder between pacing up and down the strap on my right shoulder, Ryan pointed it out and smiled: "Ladybugs are auspicious."
I wear a necklace around my neck now. It is a simple gold chain, and off of it hangs a small blue eye surrounded by a simple gold shell. I grew up always thinking of it as the 'evil eye', which is shorthand really for the idea that it is supposed to ward away the evil eye, keep people from casting curses on you, and in general keep bad stuff from happening. My arabic aunts gave me one when I was a kid, but it disappeared right about the time I really could've used it. When I was in Jordan this time, it was the only thing I was keen on acquiring. I did and now when I wear it, bad things seem to stay away, when I take it off they seem to attack, and when I put it back on they beat a hasty retreat. I think.
Now, I know. I know I know I know. But I don't really care what you think, what I think rationally about this. What I think of is that I saw a movie once where one brother said to the other "religion is a crutch," and the other replied "what's wrong with a crutch if your legs are broken?" I broke my arm this past year, and a whole lot of other things broke too, so I wear my necklace and remember how I think I heard someone say in arabic that it is the eye of god.
My eyes ache from staring at words and images all day, my butt hurts from sitting in the same lame positions to do so. All I really want is a skateboard, all I really want is kung fu. Surfing. Now that's the ticket. I want my body to feel as unburdensome as possible, I want to fear no inanimate object or inert situation, I want to never sit in chairs again.
I have verbose spats with people about things that really aren't problems. We have no problems, now do we? We are all safe and healthy and comfortable, right? Say yes. Say it is so. Let's not worry about all the things that fall under these three.
I want to throw away everything except what I really love, and I want to line up what's left next to my bed at night, the way Denny the six-year-old nephew would line up his toys next to his bed at night. So he could play with them while he was sleeping.
I don't know if I dance right... and by that I mean I don't know if I think the same things other people think when I go dancing (because I know and I am told that I am a good dancer, a great dancer). When Amanda and Elizabeth and I were brave and busted in and went dancing last weekend, they, those two, shook around and pulled boys to them, and I jumped around by myself and wished for more space and took long ominous pauses against the mirrored walls.
The things I think when dancing:
1 The floor bends and everyone is having fun and I smile and frown and think of Israel and wedding receptions that fall through the floor and kill everyone except the bride, who broke her pelvis, and I don't know what happened to the groom.
2 Sometimes I resent them, this room full of mostly white pretty comfortable kids throwing themselves around, especially when they do it to songs that are popular but I know that they know are no good. But that night, my first night dancing and back from those other places I went to, I leant against the mirrors and smiled because I was so happy that they were all happy and safe.
I wish that I had my own personal dj, my own personal room full of people not being self-conscious, my own personal lighting and sound system. I wish for trance dancing.
"The trance dance is the focus of .... ritual life; over 50 percent of the men have trained as trance-performers and regularly enter trance during the course of the all-night dances," I read in my anthropology text and write in the margins achingly "I wish it were so here".
I read the Pessoa materials Andrew Bourne xeroxed for me, I read the pamphlets of fiction from McSweeney's no. 7 that Evrim lent to me, I listen to the Weakerthans and Dntel and Fischerspooner, and think about how there are too many things to love in this world. I wish I had mongongo nuts to eat like the !Kung of South West Africa used to eat among the 89 other species of things that they ate. When was the last time you ate 89 things?
The best explanation to nosey enthographers: "That is the way it is done, so that is how we do it."
Maybe being an adult is not defined by the fact that now you have experienced bad things, that now you know bad things, but instead that now you must just remember everything. Like how good it is to be on a bicycle right before a storm with people in cars going a million miles faster than you but having less fun yelling "Hi!" out their windows because they don't know you at all but, wow, they are so happy to see you.
how the Tiv of West Africa react to Hamlet / why I am an anthropologist
"You tell the story well, and we are listening. But it is clear that the elders of your country have never told you what the story really means.... Sometime, you must tell us some more stories of your country. We, who are elders, will instruct you in their true meaning, so that when you return to your own land your elders will see that you have not been sitting in the bush, but among those who know things and who taught you wisdom."
