the habit of being

Protected: On speech

kat — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 23:41:50 +0000

Antarctica

kat — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 05:11:39 +0000

Lately, what I really want to do is go to Antarctica. I keep saying this: when are we going to Antarctica? But I’m not sure if it’s really Antarctica I want so much as the idea of Antarctica. It doesn’t even really need to be that far away, just as long as there are hardly any people. Antarctica could be just about anywhere, except New York City, because just about everywhere feels deserted compared to here. But it’s also the idea of all that white snow and ice. To tell you the truth, after I made the switch, I never went back to liking the hot soaking tub at Osaka as much as the cold.

The other night, Saturday I think, I went to see the film adaptation of this book Into the Wild, which is based on a true story of a guy who dropped out of his regular life after college and hitchhiked all over the country, before going to Alaska and freezing to death. When I was eighteen I did something similar, minus the freezing to death, and I read this book while I was on the road. So I went to see the movie, and, in it, the guy carries the same book of edible plants my boyfriend and I had with us during our travels and used to make a few very unsatisfying grass salads. For some reason, I felt compelled to email my ex and tell him this. He read the book too, and I think he identified with the protagonist more than I did. After we split up, he went on to travel alone, thruhiking the Appalachian Trail, which was probably what he needed in the first place, and then he got married.

To make a long story short, our relationship was a big traumatic mess that haunted me for a long time afterward, and we didn’t communicate for years, until this past April, when I was in Portland, just at the beginning of waking up. I emailed him, and we wound up having sushi, me and him and his wife. Nothing particularly noteworthy happened at this meeting, but afterwards it seemed like I’d laid down an incredible burden. We pretty much hadn’t talked since then, until the other day, when I emailed him again, about this movie and the plant book. He replied, saying he still had the plant book, and rather nonchalantly added that he’d just been at Thanksgiving dinner at a friend’s place when he just happened to be flipping through the friend’s back issues of a certain magazine when he found a story I wrote. The story was something I published under a pseudonym, and it dealt in part with some of the traumatic happenings of our relationship.

All of this is a little strange: the issue of the magazine in question is now about a year and a half old; I just happened to see this film and email him right after his discovery of it; and, to top it all off, apparently he and his wife have been planning to name their first son the same name I gave to “his” character in the story.

I distinctly remember being so incredibly panicked over the prospect of any of the real people in the story, which I wrote in early 2005, finding and reading it that I considered not publishing the piece at all. I finally convinced myself that that was incredibly unlikely to happen, at least not for a very long time… maybe in the very distant future, if I wound up getting famous, someone would make the connection. After all, it wasn’t that big of a magazine. Anyway, now that the dreaded event has occurred, I am much less mortified over it than amazed at how the universe must have had to conspire to allow it to happen. Things like this happen to me all the time!

I had this realization, while I was in the shower, about a week ago. The gist of it was this: I was in the shower, standing there under the water, and I was thinking about a phone conversation I had had a few minutes earlier. I was in the middle of thinking about this conversation when I noticed that I was actually in the shower. I paused in the middle of the thought and said to myself, wait a minute, I’m in the shower now.

In this split-second pause, it was clear to me that while I was thinking about that phone conversation a moment earlier, I wasn’t just in the shower, I was actually still having the conversation, right then. The conversation wasn’t some event that was stuck in the past, over and done with and frozen and unmodifiable. The conversation, as I thought about it, was just as much in the present as the shower was, and in fact no longer existed in any other moment but the one I was currently in. The conversation wasn’t sitting back there behind me somewhere in a perfected form I could only partly access, it was right there before me, happening, even though I was doing something else. It wasn’t just a static thing I was remembering, but something that was still active and changing as I thought about it.

Thinking about all this a little more, it becomes obvious that not only is that phone conversation going on right now as I bring it into mind again, but everything is.. my entire history is in each moment. And every moment, my history is changing. Just as there are many possible futures, there are many possible pasts. There isn’t just this one immutable life story I can plug into or out of at different points in time. It sounds silly, but it is literally true that every breath is a brand new life: a new past, present, and future all in one. And this is why we cannot be forever doomed by the mistakes we’ve made and the traumas we’ve suffered. It isn’t possible, because those mistakes aren’t really the stable anchors we think they are. Or, to put it another way, they are only stable in as much as we think they are. All you really have to do is let go of the belief in this false stability, and you’re free.

I take it back. New York City can be Antarctica too.

Protected: Unmentionables

kat — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 06:08:07 +0000

Transparent

kat — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 05:07:48 +0000

I did not think I would ever be happy. I did not think I could ever be happy. I was sure I would and could never be happy. I was wrong, but then again I was not wrong. I did not know what happy meant. I thought happy was the opposite of sad. It is true that I will never be the opposite of sad. But then again, why would I want to be? I cannot conceive of what the opposite of sad would be, but the idea of it is very disturbing. I have a hard time with the idea of opposite, as well. The real happy, which is not the opposite of sad, is the opposite of opposite. I am overwhelmed. I become transparent. For moments at a time, I can actually see that there is no boundary between me and other people. It is as if all the air between me and you is sucked out in a vacuum and I can really see you, in high definition. It is even more than that, because there is no me and no you but only the thing that we both are, and I am not talking about a philosophical idea, I tell you I can really feel this, it is fuzzy and glowing and sharp, and I tell you that this feeling is the greatest joy I have ever known. I am not talking about a religion, but religion means something different to me now, because I cannot help but worship. I want to worship. I need to worship. I sing. I move. I pray. All these words are just words and yet they are more than that. My life is just my life and yet it is more than that. It was not until after I had given up that I realized that giving up was faith. I want to tell you, oh I want to tell you so much, I would do anything to tell you. All you have to do to change the world is be in it. All it takes to be in the world is leaving it. All it takes to live is to die. This is not a riddle.

Acupuncture

kat — Sat, 19 May 2007 02:35:28 +0000

I had to reschedule my acupuncture appointment because the acupuncturist had some sort of emergency and disappeared only an hour before I got there. The receptionist, Sua, did not expect this to happen at all. She thinks my name is Kate. She used to think I was a ballet dancer, too, but this is not entirely her fault, because one time I was in there late at night and I told her I had come from a dance performance. I didn’t mean I’d been in the performance, but she thought I did, and by the time she was asking me how long I’d been dancing, and I realized what she thought I had meant, it was like one in the morning and I was embarrassed and I just said I had danced when I was young, which isn’t entirely a lie but pretty much is, because I only took ballet for a few months. I sometimes get annoyed with people who think it’s fine to deliberately mislead others as long as they don’t tell any outright lie. This is especially annoying when I’m in love with the person who does it. A few months or half a year later Sua asked me what I did for work and I told her what I actually do, and she said that to her eyes I looked like a ballet dancer. I said I was too fat and not graceful enough to be a ballet dancer. I don’t know if she remembered that time I was in there late at night after the dance performance or not. Maybe she thinks I lied to her. Maybe that’s why she didn’t call me when the acupuncturist left on his emergency. Maybe that’s why she calls me Kate. I doubt it, though. She’s really nice. She asks me if I want tea and brings me the tea and straightens my towel and sometimes she comes and talks to me while I’m in the soaking tub and it isn’t even a big deal that I’m naked and she’s not. Sua asked me if I’d even had acupuncture before and I told her I hadn’t but that I wasn’t scared. She said it doesn’t hurt and I said I didn’t think it did. Even if I thought it did hurt, I still wouldn’t be scared, but I didn’t tell Sua that. I used to hate the cold soaking tub. It is really cold. One time, maybe a year ago or even more than a year, I went there with my boyfriend and we were in the tubs together, so he can tell you how much I didn’t like the cold tub and pretty much stayed in the hot tub the whole time, even though they always tell you not to do that. He wasn’t really my boyfriend. This was already after we had stopped having sex, but even when we were having sex he wasn’t my boyfriend. Not really. He used to tell me how he didn’t really feel anything and I would cry. I think I had been crying before we went to the tubs, but then I was feeling better. I still didn’t like the cold tub though. That’s how I was. After we had shiatsu, the old man came and talked to us about how we needed to do these exercises together to help each other, and my boyfriend, who wasn’t really, said that the old man must have thought we were married, and now we couldn’t go there with anyone else or everyone would be disappointed. I never go there with anyone else. I always go alone. Now, I like the cold tub better than the hot tub. I like how if you stay still enough you don’t feel the cold anymore. I like floating on my stomach and looking at my hands under the water and feeling so quiet, counting the seconds in my head. I like getting in the hot tub after I’ve been in the cold tub and how my skin tingles all over and my counting seems to go in slow motion. Then I can’t wait until my hot minutes are up so I can get back in the cold and do it again. Now it’s the hot tub I have to struggle with patience in. It seems like there’s nothing in particular to feel or not feel in the hot tub, so it’s not as interesting to be in it. That’s just one more example of how everything is completely different now. But I know if I keep bathing, there will be no difference between the hot and the cold tubs at all. Neither of them will seem better. I can already feel this beginning to happen, right now.