Nebunele.com

Ladies & gents, some technical difficulties with the flash player. Sparky, heeeeelp! Everyone else: music coming soon…I hope…

Played a bit in me dad’s studio with him and made a song out of the kite poem a few entries ago! Lyrics & vocals me; instrumentation, composition and mixing Doug; melody both of us; supporting vocals at the very end me & Claytie.

Whee!

Update (by Sparky): All better now. Everyone: enjoy Alissa’s rocking singing!

I just read the latest entries in all my various friends’ blogs and it gave me blogging envy. So here I am. I don’t have all that much to say. Hang on, let me see if I’ve written a poem lately…Here’s one…(thanks Claytie for the title)

I Never Took My Shoes Off At the Beach but My Toes Are Full of Sand

little miracles
cat I thought was a boy getting pregnant
five-dollar bill in my pocket out of the wash
Sam calling me right when I thought of him
The music I love playing on the stereo at the thrift store
Enough peanut butter for a sandwich
if you scrape the bottom of the jar

Hey look! I finally figured out how to post pictures on my blog! I haven’t figured out how to control their size, though…

She is ready

She waits

There’s more on my picasa gallery at http://picasaweb.google.com/foolissa, if ya wanna see all the fruits of our labors last week.

Whee!
Alissa

When I was ten years old
my aunt gave me a big white shell.
She told me to hold it up to my ear
so I could hear the ocean in it.

The air above me is so vast.
The ground I lie on is so vast.
I am the seam where they meet—

the whole globe pushing
sand into my back,
the whole atmosphere pushing
air into my lungs.

I went to the beach today.
The air was velvet on my skin.
Damp sand broke apart in my fingers.
I could hear the ocean in it.

-Alissa

Here’s an experience I’ve had a few times: I invite a friend out to see a play with me, a friend who doesn’t go to a lot of theatre. The play is mediocre or bad. I am apologetic about dragging my friend out to see it, but they demur–in fact, they thought it was great! They really enjoyed it!

This is disappointing to me, and I’m only just starting to be able to articulate to myself why. I am not disappointed in my non-theatre-going friends’ taste. But because I have been lifted to the heights of my soul by theatre, been dashed on the rocks of reality by theatre, been awestruck, altered, asked to change my whole way of seeing the world by theatre, it’s disappointing to me that this mediocre or competently done bit of drivel is all my friend has ever been led to expect from theatre.

It’s like, you know, when there’s this utterly magical place you know about, with an amazing view of the ocean that’ll rock you to the core of your being. And there’s someone really special you want to share it with, and you plan the day for weeks, and finally–finally! the day comes, and you drive or walk or fly to the place–and it’s socked-in fog. You can’t see five feet. And your special friend looks around, and inhales, and nods, and smiles, and says, “This is great!” And they’re not just being polite, they really mean it, they like it a lot.

But it’s not the thing you wanted to show them. And no matter how much you explain about how great the other thing is, they can’t possibly understand without seeing it. And you’re still alone in the vast beauty of the thing you wanted so badly to share, even though they think they’re with you. And it’s frustrating.

So, I don’t know. I could write something bitter about how so much theatre today is crap that it’s no wonder nobody goes any more blah blah blah, but I hate that shit. That’s all of art, right? A hundred failures for every success, and it’s kind of more beautiful that way, and even the worst failures aren’t worthless.

I just wish…I don’t know…I wish that everyone would go see, that hundred-and-first time, instead of giving up around sixty-three. But when I take my friend, and they are pleased by number two, I know they’re going to give up soon unless they get lucky and see #101 early, out of order. Because my friends are smart! They won’t be satisfied with mediocrity for super long. And I can talk until the roof of my mouth dries out, but there’s no reason for them to have any faith in more magic existing than they’ve already witnessed. So there’s a little bit of desperation in me when I take people to plays, because I want so badly for them to be taken and lifted, and I feel like I only have so many chances before they start wanting to do other stuff.

But maybe I am being snobby and arrogant. Maybe I don’t have an exclusive, and maybe, they really, they genuinely were moved by that play we just saw that I didn’t think much of. Isn’t it a little righteous of me to think that I’ve seen something they haven’t, that they couldn’t possibly understand until they see it themselves?

But I do, I do feel that way sometimes. I don’t know if I’m right. But I feel that way sometimes.

-Alissa

next day update: Yeah, so my good friend Dave says, and is right: All this time I’m asking if I’m arrogant to think I’m seeing something other people haven’t. But of course, when they like the play, they are seeing something that I’m not. Of course! And I am humbled to be exposed as so egocentric. :p Thanks for the reality check…it’s true. And so from now on I must remember to ask “what is it? what did you see?” and get knocked out of my box.

This is exciting! So a new friend of mine, Michael Welch, is a prolific and knowledgeable haiku poet. I asked him if he had read that Beth Lapides book that I was so happy about finding a few months ago. He’d heard of it (not read it), but has a different notion of what haiku actually consists of than most of us Americans who learned from our fourth-grade teachers that it’s a poem with five syllables in the first line, seven in the second, and five in the third, and little else.

So here’s the additional information I had already gathered through being a poetry fan: that 5-7-5 is sort of a bad translation from the original Japanese form (hence there are plenty of lovely haiku that don’t stick to that formality). That haiku are more about concrete imagery than emotional description. That what really defines a haiku is that little “aha” moment that fits compactly into the three lines–a little mental jump that the poem helps you make.

But! My understanding was still far short of what a haiku really is! Michael’s essay in haikuworld has shown me different. Key bit of understanding that has changed the way I read haiku, and I had to read the essay twice before it sunk in: a haiku depends upon a comparison between two distinct things (usually with a pause or caesura between them), and the “aha” in a good haiku should come from lingering on the two disparate images until the link between them becomes apparent.

Wow! Just looking back at the haiku examples in the essay that way, my perception of them shifts, and they become hundreds of times more awesome. How did I not get this before? This is a whole poetic form that I had mostly dismissed as boring–I sigh to think how many brilliant little insights I have totally overlooked in my life by simply not knowing what to look for in the haiku I encountered.

Hurrah for a new analytical toy!
Alissa

So Claytie and I have made a working schedule, and it involves me getting up at the ridiculous hour of 7:30 am tomorrow. And, of course, I have been tossing and turning in bed for the last hour, unable to sleep. Chances of sticking to schedule: approximately 30%.

Something I’ve been thinking about lately is my relationship to time, and here’s the thing: I have a bad one. Me and Time just weren’t meant to be. I mean, he’s nice and all, but I’m starting to suspect him of being emotionally abusive, and they say once you recognize the signs, you should get out, and fast. But it’s gonna take more than a little courage, and a bit of figuring out how, to break up with Time.

One thing I’ve consciously avoided all my life is worrying about what I eat. I really like to eat, and it would be a shame if ever in my life I felt guilty for chowing down on something I enjoy. This is something I make room for in my life, and I tend to be drawn to things that are good for me anyway (thanks mom) and my occasional indulgences are just lovely (and usually punish me enough later that the guilt is unnecessary, aversion-wise). But what I’ve recently realized is that I feel like I’m on a Time diet that I’m constantly blowing. And I suffer for it, every time.

It’s come to a head with this recent month of relatively unstructured life, though it started years ago. I overestimate what I’m capable of accomplishing in a given chunk of time; I constantly second-guess whatever I’m doing at the moment, because there might be a more productive way I could be spending my time; and no matter how much I do in a day, I usually feel like I haven’t done enough. And I feel guilty about it. And I long for ‘free’ time, but when I have it I stress out about the stuff I’m not accomplishing. The only times I have that feel truly free of expectations, ironically, are nights like this, when I should be sleeping but for one reason or another the brain and body just aren’t cooperating. I can’t possibly be to blame for this, and no one could reasonably expect me to be productive with this time, so whatever I do is more or less a freebie. Maybe that’s why my insomnia’s been worse lately.

I’ve all but stopped reading novels, because I can’t pick one up without the haunting feeling that there’s something more important that I ought to be doing. I’m one of those people who’s late to stuff more often than not, mostly because I consistently underestimate the amount of time it’s going to take me to leave the house. I frequently make complex and exhaustive and rigorous schedules for myself that I don’t have a chance of keeping. Sound familiar, dieters?

So…what the hell do I do about it? Expect Less just doesn’t seem like a good option. I try to ’schedule’ myself time to be spontaneous, which is rather ironic, and over and over again I let new events (social, work-related, whatever) bulldoze into my expectation-free time without much of a hesitation. I need a new way to trick myself into being guilt-free about time. If…if any of you have any ideas…

Wide awake in Westhaven,
Alissa