whoever reads this should follow me on tumblr here

i don't even know what this blog thing is anymore
it used to be a place to put things in case they got deleted
but now i'm too private to show anyone anything

oooooh private phase

it's just that i want them to be perfect first
this is a problem

tumblr?

She said it wasn't finished. I needed to do something with the lemon. I needed to make it darker or something. Otherwise, my art teacher told me, I lost the lemon. But I liked things unfinished the way sketches were done in pencil, the way lead looked messy and sewn together. It meant more to me unanswered, imperfect. It meant something that we didn't leave, that we liked the ruins, that we tried to save them.

Maureen smoked on the golf course and parked in the front of the clubhouse, a no parking zone. It wasn’t really raining when we got out, but some raindrops hit my purse. I pushed through the bathroom door and held it open for her. Her purse was bulky. She was small and a little chubby. I watched her walk past me into the big stall around the corner.  

“How long have you been in Kansas?” I asked, crossing my arms on the toilet seat.

“I grew up in KCK, then I moved to Eudora.”

           

“Oh I’ve been there.”

             

“I didn’t like it. Everyone knew my fiancé. I couldn’t drink a beer outside without someone seeing. It’s too small. Now I live in DeSoto.”

“Do you like it?”  

“I like my house.” 

The toilet flushed. She held her purse between her arm and body while she washed her hands.

It was green in the light from the clubhouse bathroom. There were bulletin boards and posters with wives on the walls. I thought about how Desoto to Maureen didn’t seem like Desoto to me. I had been up too early in the morning.

           

Little white dogs on leashes walked by the tent after we drove back. The tent had been badly decorated with internet bought banners and bracelets, pirate-dressed rubber duckies and an inflatable treasure chest full of bottles of hard alcohol the nurses called shots. Thanks to Kansas liquor-license restrictions on the golf course where I worked, sitting under the Hospital’s OBGYN-sponsored, pirate-themed Hole 12 with these women for twelve hours was my job. So I took walks to escape and got rides from white haired men in golf carts who were nice, and who I was nice to. And even though I had time to enter the white tent and eat some rice and beans and an enchilada. Volunteers for the hospital handed out shirts and musicians with brass instruments and hungry supervisors sat or stood together as I left with my plate. Even though I talked to the nurses about the seasons, with Maureen repeating “I just eat healthier in the summer” and with her later in a car because we were out of walking distance from a restroom and the golf cart still wasn’t back. It was raining. More mist really. We were driving through neighborhoods I recognized but I was confused about where we were. Even though they surprised me with their moments of calling an ex-husband because he was closer in vicinity. How that was the weirdest part. Temporary tattoos on their cheeks. Their lawn chairs and stomachs out over their legs. Their bandannas and noses and makeup. Falling asleep in the lawn chairs because Deb would stay awake waiting through the lightening for the next round of golfers and Maureen grabbing the keys from her friend’s purse saying “Come on, we’re going to the bathroom.” The people who really kept me there were the men.

                       

At Ryan’s, ideas drift in front of us like islands and we are the captains of different truths. Something as natural as the two of us gives me light I can hold onto until later that week when I wonder and hope it won’t go away. There are too many faces in memory I don’t remember anymore.

In the upstairs apartment of a house where cats rule and all of the cats are overweight Adam just looks at them shaking his head asking why, but I don’t want to ask myself that question and look away. I understand the attraction to someone who loves what you love, out of everything.


He weirdly pulls my chair close to his while we pick out which cat bowl is our favorite. He holds my legs as if they were one and leans over them. He arches over me. The chairs are at two different angles. It is difficult because he's so big.

He says, “Let me take care of you.”

Smiling sort of hard like my eyes could probably start crying soon. The kitchen is not the same with my eyes this way and I am unable to hide for the first time. The smallness of the cigarette between his fingers and the scar along the bottom of his palm. Shaky big hands. Thick. 

Him saying you’re going to make me cry. Me saying I doubt it. Him saying I haven’t cried in three years. I can’t believe that. 

The cat scratches his neck and he shouts ow and it scares me and I am drinking my tea like are you going to scream again sort of scared and curled and him really apologizing, speaking extra softly to the cat, cradling it like a baby.

           

Cat hair falls from the ceiling and we are in a sort of intercourse facing the bookshelves in different rooms. Conversation leads too far inside Adam’s head to be real because it’s me looking in and he is the wall around me and we are unable to get to the bottom of anything that way. 


The hipbone is his favorite part of the body. I repeat you don’t know me. Luckily, there’s a patch of mud and I’m wearing shoes.

           

I rush into Ryan’s living room with my arms full saying, “These are the only clothes I had in my car and I have to wear my uniform tomorrow.” Shaking my head in the mirror in her room as I change out of my uniform and walk into the living room in a long floral skirt and plaid button down.

They all turn from Futurama.

           

“You can borrow some of my clothes.” Ryan says.

           

Scott stands and walks past me, “You look like a Mormon.”

           

The mud in between us.

           

The feeling of needing something. The feeling of needing to beg in the bathroom, washing my face. This is an important concept. Very strange. The dynamic shifts and I make plans to leave. Wanting normalcy and then catching my friend run out of the shower without a shirt, a little crouched going through his dresser but not completely guarded because maybe he wants me to see something real.

           

This is what I talk about with Ryan. The almost encounters and how hard it is to live in more than one place. How waitresses should be paid more and how her boss has it out for her. She’s cold, but Scott is still here with his whiskey and ice cubes saying he figured out why wine in Spain is so cheap.

“They’re all alcoholics,” he says.

The porch light is off but the light through the living room window is bright enough. “That’s why they take that naptime, so they can get their fix and be able to work.”

           

I have a theory that Scott is a little boy trapped in a body that's too big for him. He drinks at night because he can’t sleep. So many leftovers are at everyone’s houses.            

It’s raining outside when I wake up at Adam’s and drink a large glass of pre-brewed iced coffee before a slow and overcast day at the country club. And even though it hasn’t rained in the morning since then, I wake up happy and watch viral videos in another living room on another couch with another person who plays Halo like he’s watching football. Shouting. He comes home tired and I know that means I have to leave.

Scott asks me where I’m going and I can picture him thinking about it. But the image and reality are not the same. The image can’t capture the little things, like my dishes piling next to the sink and when Adam says cigarettes are evil. When it was ninety outside in September, but we were out there anyway. 

I pointed, “Look a woman landscaper” 

I thought he'd be excited about her blue bra strap, but Adam was just happy she was a woman.

“There’s no women landscapers,” he says.

           

No image contains the view from his front steps and the side of him. If he leans back. Or the way he can’t really fit on his couch or the poem he showed me by Wang Ping. The lack of light in the bedroom. The billowed curtains. The art on the wall. His office. How I don’t get his jokes or like his music, but I liked that it was soft and that he played it for me the second time in his broken car. He opens my door and I crawl through to open his. Taking the pillows out from under my head. How I open around him. He starts to tell me he doesn’t like it when I feel bad and listens to my theories about why Ryan is the way she is, asking me to stay, it doesn’t matter, he just wants to see me, and he is stronger than me and I watch my body crumble against the wall if he threw it.

           

“Why would you think that?”

           

“I don’t know. You’re so big.” 

           

How impossible it is to be a nomad on my period. Just hoping it won’t come and wondering why I got so sad in the kitchen when he offered to take care of me. I make it back to my couch where my friend is playing Halo and his girlfriend is pixilated and asleep on his computer screen.

i am crying for the mountains and the children 

alone in the hills in my closet 

forever

i saw the books on your desk and stole one

then found a piece of paper in the printer

and a blue pencil in my bag

just to see my handwriting

to match it up against hers

i think i stole this pencil

because i can't use the word paradox

without sounding like a teacher or

a student -- now i'm neither of 

those, or both. i do not know what

or who anyone is at least every five minutes

i've got questions but i erase them

your phone is old and my eyes hurt 

from the fire how brilliant does a person 

need to stop being

to be ok 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sftuxbvGwiU

i am very afraid/scared/freaked out/disappointed
i mean i guess its cool she got the alien out of her
and how she survived on her own
but mostly i am just creeped out and have a huge headache
im going to start going out more
i feel like a goblin
Prometheus makes me feel like a goblin
i don't even know what to say
goodnight im sleeping forever tomorrow
thank god

outside on the wooden porch swing
i had visions of virginia wolf


on my wrists are friendship bracelets
my new favorite song is spongebob squarepants

if i could figure out how to follow someone in this world i would
but this world is too confusing
at least there is string that i can tie into knots at night


in the morning i turn over and look at my friendship bracelets and tell them that i love them
i misspell bracelets
i look for a Father's Day card at Walgreens
and pass an old man walking his cart down the aisles and up the cement ramp
in a KU basketball cap
i think about the clothes i would wear if i was an 80 year old man
definitely a hat, and a t-shirt
i think about making t-shirts with collars sewn around the necks
i could learn how to sew instead of practicing the guitar
which is broken anyway

i must leave to research friendship bracelets

is docx the same as doc?

please!

Shit is books, books are food, food is shit. The conclusion? We're in it. Deep.

seeing my parents is always funny. my dad always gets my jokes and my mom laughs at inappropriate television scenes really loudly and talks about me when i walk upstairs. she gave me all of her old clothes she was going to give to goodwill and says funny things when i try them on in front of her like, oh i was smaller than you are. isn't that funny? why would you say that? and ozi writing a new chapter in her book about a grape. and alex when he pulled Me and You and Everyone We Know from the middle of my bookcase. all of these heartbreaking moments happening around me at what seems like the wrong time, but time doesn't exist.

outside i held three rocks and lined them up like brothers. then i pushed them down the hill and i think if i was in preschool again i would try to build a tower, too. or would i? if i could go back, would i still trace the timeline and masturbate under my desk with my coat on and throw a huge fucking fit over being made to write a report on the statue of liberty because i didn't want anything i wrote about the statue of liberty to be a book report about 354 stairs? things were so meaningful back then. when i actually saw the statue of liberty she looked small and i was bored after the first five minutes. it was nice to ride the ferry there, though. and i took a picture of my friend courtney sitting in the sun with a beautiful baret in her hair.

i get to read this literature and play drinking games

and into the abyss of the internet i go

Bolsheviks!
Weeping!
The Same Location!
Dave Van Ronk!
he was a friend of mine!
part of my heart in Olympia
part in Houston
part in Denver
part in Bilbao
and Alabama

thank you summer
for this

dear daniel bailey i wish that i could read all of your poems kept in your computer for further notice
and i wish that sasha would send me her thing about a mail order bride
and i wish that nitzan would marry adam
sometimes i think hey all of my friends should get married
we could go to weddings forever
we could ask for more time
more paper
and water our dumb roommate's flowers
when my brother forgets to say goodbye

i woke up at 8:am, free

I think he likes me

he was looking at me like he wanted to eat me

Hans Christian Anderson wrote this:

and when it boiled the sound was like the sound of crocodiles weeping

in the middle of the war on terror

and the war in iraq for weapons of mass destruction

and operation new dawn

that color really washes you out

I am listening to Barenaked Ladies.....
where is the lease? Ah!
Why do I never know where that is!
When I think about my life
I imagine hiding out in the teachers' resource room
...........it's like they are connected
...........and sometimes.....other people are in there...
and sometimes
I find things

The next two weeks are state assessments CAN'T WAIT

Watch out for those flying recyclables! It's March in Kansas!

This is for you SAVANNAH

what are these

crescent rolls

I get dressed listening to Lil Wayne and go out to see art. At first I don't know where to park, but it's Lawrence so after I few minutes I find a parking lot and a crowd of other people looking at the art already. One of them turns out to be my five year old student. Her Mom smiles, "It's Hailey, right?" and introduces me to her latin boyfriend. With my hands in my pockets I walk around. Most of the paintings on the wall are of hay or in Chinese, which I can't read. There is a camera on a shelf on the ceiling. I think it's funny. An artist asks me if I am an artist and we watch someone hit a silver tea pot with a hammer. "I was afraid he was going to hit a finger," the artist said. "I didn't want to see blood." This week the teachers told me I was going to teach shapes for math groups. I don't know if that was an insult or a compliment.

I don't even know what the difference between a poem or a newspaper article is anymore. A window is a photo and mine is closed. A joke is a tomato. The top most searched word after define: is love.

It's hard to understand people.

Do you understand anyone?

No.

Not even me?

Of course not.

The sun was out all day and I thought about the Beatles. A stranger was nice to me. Savannah leaned her head on me and called me little bird. She also spied on me when I was singing in the shower and repeats lines from my made up song. She thinks I didn't know she was home :)

What did Martin Luther King want to be when he grew up?

A Doctor.

I guess he wanted to be lots of things. This page says he wanted to be a Lawyer.

So he's like me. I change every year.

Oh yeah? What did you used to want to be?

In first grade I wanted to be a zoo keeper. And before that, when I was five, I mean four. When I was three. It's hard to remember.

Everyone, what do you all want to be when you grow up?

I want to be a policeman or a race car driver.

With both of those you'd get to drive fast cars. What is the Emancipation Proclamation?

Uh...........

In the morning I'll write a whole paragraph about Emily's red and black barette and the dirt in her fingernails I tried not to notice when she wouldn't let me teach her how to tell time. "When my Mom gets her tax return she's going to get me that barette from family dollar," she said.

Driving to the dentist in the rain I used my horn so I wouldn't get rear ended. After I parked and walked up the stairs to the door I passed a man watching the demolition of a building across the street.

My dad is still sniffling and he can't eat too much cayenne pepper because it's too strong. I revert to a child and hit myself between the eyes with the end of a pencil while I file my taxes. "You're getting money for this you have to do it. Stop acting like that," Mom says.

Coming home and organizing the porch with that cigarette

putting up pictures

the year of the dragon is my year

"Oedipa nodded. She couldn't stop watching his eyes. They were bright black, surrounded by an incredible network of lines, like a laboratory maze for studying intelligence in tears. They seemed to know what she wanted, even if she didn't."

Thomas Pynchon ^

Somehow everyone has gone home and Robert keeps making mumbling gestures, kissing my cheek and holding his hand on my side so I can feel its weight. Too afraid to even take off my scarf I sleep with it on. My make-up is smeared in the morning as I look around at Robert in a gray undershirt and a typewriter in the corner and flag of Kansas against the wall--a little less grown up than his last room.

There are so many stars up there when you get out far enough. On the road, talking to Ryan's dad about schools. Ryan turns to me. That's nicotine gum; he's addicted. She cries in front of the cash register in McDonald's because she can't find herself the way Depok Chopra can. She gets a chocolate-dipped ice cream cone; her dad coffee.

Driving to the water to see it. Me and the lone branch standing up against the wind. The layer of stillness and boat abandoned out there where there's no parking in front of the gate and I run back to the car for exercise, looking up at the stars because I don't want to be the only one anymore.

The train tracks invisible until the train passes and our arms are linked like we will walk tight together in front of any train, but you only spoke Spanish after pulling me on top of you and I can't stop hearing you say "Me encanta cuando ries." Sitting like Buddha. And I don't mention the lack of handwriting about to affect the curriculum, but I do bring up the spelling bee.

oh, the future

are we there yet?

I came home to a girl with dark hair, cut short around her head, stirring marinara sauce and munching popcorn in the dark. We curled up in front of Netflix for a couple hours and I forgot more things, days, amounts of money, addresses, people I know, it all. There was a lot of curling up today.

I have started to ask myself serious questions. Am I the woman carrying a filing cabinet to her classroom? Am I four years old eating pizza at a table in the cafeteria? Was I featured in People magazine for losing weight? Did I run into a tree and suck my thumb next to a girl's knee? Did she pick the rubber mulch out of my hair and tell me "What do you have in here, toothpaste?" Did I not understand until tonight, in her arms, that outer space was not pretend? I gave birth to twins and found them sitting in the lap of a girl, watching a movie, then repeated how dark it was in the room three times.

Do I look darker to a person coming in from the light? I felt a little stranded next to a farm house, but also managed to buy a cappuccino and park in front of the lake where it was hard to see the stars. Red, blinking towers stretched out before me like dim and alien souls in this mess of children and pregnant newly weds. God save us all.

""my mom's wedding ring has been next to the sink for two days""

tonight I tried it on

thinking: I am afraid of you

I am in isolation/recuperation/forcing myself to read Lolita. I am on page 43. The surgery was quick like I wanted, but I was paranoid and kept hearing the hospital staff talk about the last time I was there after they shut the door. When I woke up there were crying babies and the nurse told me drinking water was not an option. "I know," I wanted to say. "I work with children."

Hurray for Adult Liquid Extra Strength Pain Relief!

Walking back from the mailbox half-way down the street, I try to figure out if I could live here again....the scary suburbs....money, money, always on the mind. The gaps are starting to fill and now, hey, I could use the next $1000 I make to go to Spain or New York or wherever and this time I will have memorized the following little segment of Lolita as defense against all of the assholes out there:

You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super-voluptuous flame permanently aglow in your subtle spine (oh, how you have to cringe and hide!), in order to discern at once, by ineffable signs -- the slightly feline outline of a cheekbone, the slenderness of a downy limb, and other indices which despair and shame and tears of tenderness forbid me to tabulate--the little deadly demon among the wholesome children, she stands unrecognized by them and unconscious herself of her fantastic power.

WTF universe

kids are crazy!!!! all my energy!!!!! just go ahead and eat that staple, see if i care!!!!

Profitless usurer, why dost thou use

So great a sum of sums, yet canst not live?

Mike Mills:

WE HAVE NOT LEARNED ANYTHING,
WE DON’T KNOW ANYTHING,
WE DON’T HAVE ANYTHING,
WE DON’T UNDERSTAND ANYTHING,
WE DON’T SELL ANYTHING,
WE DON’T HELP,
WE DON’T BETRAY,
AND WE WILL NOT FORGET.

Tough day on the eyes...blue, blue sky the whole time. I asked Lesley what happened to the whale songs she was listening to yesterday and she invited me to her corner of the office to eat lunch. She told me about a Halloween party I might go to if I was her age, a murder mystery Halloween party and she regretted her decision to come back home from Germany because that meant she was stuck in Olathe and she couldn't believe the waste. I bet her daughter is beautiful. Sometimes she reminds me of my mom so I go over there if I feel like I need something.

No one understands how to get kids to follow the rules and some boys in third grade thought black was a bad word "because black people and gangsters don't like it when you say it." Their favorite thing to say is "Poop stains."

Many shortcuts through the library to go to the bathroom.

June got upset when I tried to draw a rainbow in a corner of the paper instead of around her self portrait. Noah made me go to space jail at the tree and then at the fence and then next to the wall while the boys watched and I told them "I think Noah is trying to put me in jail again." Except, this time I told him there is always a key and there is always a way out like we were floating in the ocean, just about to go under a huge wave.

Saw Jerome in the hall and I told him I would meet him in the room. He had laid everyone's books out for them and was sitting at the table playing with the timer by the time I got in there. Journey was under the table and DeSean was hiding behind the bookcase. Mrs. Daniels told Journey to sit down and don't get up again. DeSean said they were trying to scare me for Halloween. His eyes looked red. I told him math was the first step to making a play station game and he said "Oh, is that why you teach this stuff?"

I woke up too early after passing out on the couch for at least an hour because when I came back to consciousness I was still sitting up and The Office was still playing. I had to rearrange my blankets while I was underneath them, in the dark; it was almost impossible.

There are these things I need to work on like not thinking all coffee was brewed especially for me and cleaning it up after I spill the hot liquid all over the counter. I need to stop thinking about balloons when my head gets so full during math meetings that I think I might scream or do something violent or write something really angry in my diary later.

We made posters with our Pride families about "No Bullying," and I see them all over the halls as I walk from class to class to the bathroom and there is that other poster I pass that the preschoolers made, of people who are feeling sad. My brother walks in to pick up the car while I'm doing yoga and drinks tea, but when I hear Savannah say "You know how to give a real hug" I get bored with yoga and trying to find inner peace.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xo2bVbDtiX8

There's not much that is beautiful besides a boy sitting alone on a tree stump. A girl sits down next to him and so do I. He doesn't care. At this school the bus will not drive past rainbows or cows that chew waterproof grass, but boys will yell out "Vertical!" after I draw a line on the board. They tell me stickers aren't very fun and cry when they know their time is close to being over. I think sickness brings compassion. The sad, sad, sad, sad lunch room. The bathroom mirror. The custodians. The boy who catches crickets with his hands.

http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/photos/behind-the-scenes-with-jon-stewart-20110914/0476903

On His Disappointment with President Obama

"Obama ran on this idea that the system and the methodology are corrupt. It felt like the country was upset enough that he had the momentum needed to re-­evaluate how business is done. Instead, when he got elected, he acted as though the system is so entrenched that it has to be managed rather than – I don’t want to say decimated, because I’m not an anarchist or a nihilist. But I’m surprised at how much he deferred to the legislative process. He’s accomplished some things, and I’m sure he’s pleased with what he’s done, but I would have preferred to see something a little bit more transformative. They haven’t made the case that government can be effective, or accountable, or agile."

Read More

http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/photos/behind-the-scenes-with-jon-stewart-20110914/0476903

"He gave me assignments. He told me what I needed to read in order to be a poet. Secondly, the problem with my poetry was that I had fallen in love with William Butler Yeats: I thought he was the greatest poet --and still do-- of all time. The problem was, I was a 25 year old kid writing as if I was, you know, William Butler Yeats. [But] I didn't have the wealth of experience or depth of insight to pull it off. So [Allen Ginsberg] gave me assignments to write from I: What do you remember? What did you see? What was the color of the sky? Where were your hands when you thought this? What color dress was she wearing? Precise details. His idea was that I needed to learn how to become my own dictationist, to learn how to transcribe my own sense impressions. Third, he sensed that I had a reservoir of emotions that I had frozen. I had squelched them in many ways, I was afraid of exposing them. I tended to be a body that carried my brain from room to room--I dealt with everything intellectually. So he began by asking me questions that I could only answer from my heart. And by that experience of answering out of that place over and over again, the actual, literal experience of doing that is what gave me my self. He gave me the gift of myself."

Read More

http://www.naropa.edu/news/articles/elephant_fall2006_lres.pdf

i am so tired

if someone says pet peeve again i am going to collapse

red light

and theater seating

the setting we're used to

a continent away from carrying my laptop around

me at all times to feel safe

in the bathroom

after I have just taken a shower and there is mist

It's getting harder to believe we're still here

There is always a plan

There is always an escape plan posted and checked by an officer

there is another store where a little boy buys his belt

He is afraid of getting fat

and throws the word like sand onto the others

who freeze by accident

I do not understand how some people are not afraid

how some children are not afraid

how her presence can silence me

The dirt between his fingernails as he picks at his carrot

I saw the child stop,

open the screen door himself

apologize

There is no hard shell around a child's hands

no waiting

always

young blood can see four petals equal a flower

and after the salute of the visitor

when I finally have time to answer

no one is angry

no one is crying

the sadness of one half of a butterfly is noted

and no one can forget

I am on the phone with the City of Lawrence. For odor or taste problems with my water I should press five--I'm on hold. Our cat, Meow, just jumped on the kitchen table. Ryan, wearing a black tank top and white paint pants, is performing surgery on the near-death plant. Meow has walked over to the window. He is staring at the dead cicada skeleton attached to the screen. A little child is mumbling in a high register. I can press zero at anytime during this call. Meow is now sitting on my purse. He just got scared by the loud noise of Ryan setting the plant next to the window.

This was the most boring part of today. Earlier Ryan found a dead mouse. I looked up solutions on the internet. She was brave.

I have washed dishes in two sinks!

I have seen more than three pairs of glasses!

There is a story written and available on the internet!

Strung together by the television!

And I am told this is something to learn from!

And I agree with this person!

I tell the cat to get off of the counter and love the kids.

She sat on a bench looking out at the carnival and he wore a scarf. After watching the rides for a couple minutes he took her to the train that was built in another century, looking forward without speaking to her and asking questions like "What are we doing here?" and "Who am I?" She laughed in the florescent lights.

By the time they got to the top of the city the boy with the scarf needed water and ran to all of the fountains. Her feet got muddy standing there as she watched him use his hand to throw water at himself and wondered if she was on stage.

They walked over to the ledge to look down on the city, at which point he took out a cigarette and put one foot on the wooden railing. He praised the "Ugly city, full of idiots" because it was his. And she tried to find him running to the fountain afterwards funny but she began to see that he ran away from foreign things and they spent so long looking at cookies in the store she thought he'd never buy anything.

In other news, I stole some philosophy books but can only read Sartre because he talks like this:

But we hardly speak. What good is it? Every man for himself

"Bolaño’s obstreperousness was sometimes a pose—much like his preference for being photographed in a black leather jacket, sternly sucking on a cigarette—but his self-described “gratuitous attacks” had salutary effects. He helped liberate Latin-American writing from the debased imitations of magic realism that followed the global conquest of García Márquez’s 1967 novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude”—all those clairvoyant señoritas and intercourse-inspiring moles—and reëstablished the primacy of such cosmopolitan experimentalists as Borges and Julio Cortázar. For Bolaño, Cortázar’s moody novel “Hopscotch” was the Beginning and the End, precisely because it has neither a beginning nor an end."

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2007/03/26/070326crat_atlarge_zalewski#ixzz1QDrKo7Nb

Shannon has been quiet since I got off the plane. His small mouth is silhouetted by the sun over the lawn furniture and bushes that continue into the hills at a comfortable distance. We find ourselves alone in an Irish woman's breakfast room in Blarney, Ireland around nine in the morning.

While Shannon chews, everything is silent.

"Why do you like Engineering, Shannon?" I ask.

"Because I feel like I can make anything. If a boss asks me to do something, I can do it," he says.

I look down at the table, fascinated.

"Could you make this table? And this spoon! And this sausage!"

"No, I couldn't make the sausage," he says.

"Ah-ha!"

"The people are really the ones who kept me in Engineering," Shannon says.

We finish our cafe con leche and orange juice and listen to The Dispatch from Shannon's cell phone on our twin beds while we wait for mom to blow dry her hair. Dad is sleeping. Our room is so pink we are scared.

"I've never been a little girl before," Shannon said as the Irish woman closed the door to our room behind her. "This will be a new experience."

We watch BBC and I become emotionally attached to a boy who makes bricks out of mud on his knees all day. We listen to The Kings of Leon, The White Stripes and Jack Johnson through Shannon's cell phone and spend half an hour looking for a place to eat, arguing outside of the bathroom because, "They should have expected this." Shannon shakes his head throughout the rest of the trip saying, "Babies." I read Eating Animals and become a vegetarian. Shannon and I go for a walk around the river. There is a Burger King next to a McDonalds next to a burger place we have never heard of. All are equally populated. A bathroom in either is equally difficult to find. There is a little sign in McDonalds that says "Bathrooms" leading to stairs, at which case Shannon puts his head against the wall and says, "Fuck my life." We buy chocolate shakes from McDonalds.

The sky in Cork reminds me of chocolate shakes.

We walk along small roads with our suitcases. "Hey!" I shout. "Where are we going?"

"Shannon knows where we're going." Dad says. "He just won't tell anyone."

"He has no idea where we're going," I say.

There are layers of bushes around us.

Mom tells me that I should wear her special socks when I'm pregnant. She develops a rash in Dublin because of the all the sun exposure mixed with her antibiotics she has to take and gets mad at us for going off on our own. "I can't be in the sun," she says.

"Well why are you wearing a tank top!"

Later in the pink room Shannon says, "Fuck my life. You should have seen them before you got here. They're children. Dad can't be happy unless everything's perfect. That's why I almost killed him. Playing golf. I had the golf club in my hand."

"What!" I say.

"He apologized in time and I put it down," he says.

I am resting in the twin bed next to his, "Would you say most of your life, most of your day, was taken up by," I can't finish my sentence because I am laughing so hard.

"I'm going to beat you with my book," Shannon says.

"This is a good question!" I say, "By reading or talking."

"Watching TV," he says. "I'm trying to change that."

"How many times have you thought of the boys with the bricks?" I ask.

"None," he says.

"Did you know there are more slaves today than four centuries ago? Wait, I think I just mis-quoted that," I say.

"Did I just make this up?" Shannon says. "I'm gonna beat you with this book."

Meanwhile, I am so happy every time I read a newspaper in a breakfast place or hotel lobby in Ireland, I can't even finish reading. In my little book I write: "Beneath the relationship lies a nervousness on the US part and they leave nothing to chance." - Irish Independent

We find ourselves in The Natural Museum of Ireland looking up at skeletons of giant Irish deer. Large amounts of Irish children crowd the room, which is full of shelves of bird and ape skeletons, human heads, insects, stuffed models of lions, jared squid. "This is the last place you want to be with a hangover," Dad says. Kids of all ages are screaming. Shannon says something looking up at them like, "Giant Irish Deer, well this is awesome." He does not compare the Natural Museum of Ireland to the Louvre.

In the car, instead of freaking out, Mom and Dad figure out our coordinates like civil residents of the rented car. "Look at how well we've trained them," Shannon says, raising his eyebrows behind his Iphone.

"What wonderful people I created," Mom says. We are no longer allowed to make fun of her because who paid for this vacation?

"Wow, Honey," Dad says.

"I don't want anyone else to make fun of me," Mom says.

Shannon hits his head against the wall. I fill up my cheeks up with air and make Shannon hit it out.

"You're so dumb," he says.

I laugh and cry at the same time.

Shannon reads Jailbird on the plane to Madrid. His response is this: "At first it was kinda sad, but then it got really funny!" In Madrid, Shannon and I reflect on Ireland. "We were so close to finally doing something cool," Shannon says, looking down at his suitcase. The stoop of the Hostel I booked in Puerta del Sol was occupied by a drunk by the time we rolled our suitcases through the mass of protesters and their tents. Mom blows out the electricity with her hair dryer the next morning and bangs on our door, telling us to get up because we are going to find someplace else to stay.

"Was there construction out there last night?" I ask Shannon in fear of construction dust coating all my underwear I hung out the window to dry.

"No," he says. "The drummer was under the window."

I start cracking up.

We begin to refer to the protesters as the tent people. There are "No Mas Violencia Contra los Animales" signs and lottery tickets and a mariachi band, which, to Dad, seems the most out of place.

"We'll just tell the tent people it'll only cost them 3 euros to use our shower!" Dad says. "We'll pay for our room!" and I become annoyed because Dad keeps saying, "Hey Rachel, get a picture of that."

"I don't want a picture of it," I say.

"I think it's worth a picture," he says.

"I don't want to look at that Church all day," I say.

"It's pretty impressive," he says.

I have to show them how the light comes into the camera so the pictures they take of me aren't too bright.

"We have to take more pictures of Rachel," Mom says to Dad behind me on the bus.

Dad is amazed the kids are out so late and our waiter looks at his wrist when we tell him we are just going to share two Paella, agreeing to make the food only after I throw out "compartir." Just then, a bunch of attractive-sounding Americans sit down behind me and Dad says it's no wonder everyone's still out this late! More kids run past us. "There's no structure!" Dad says. "Catholicism failed!" The paella is gross and no one wants to eat their crawfish. "Those girls were smarter than they looked," Shannon says as they leave the table behind me for someplace else.

Shannon against the railing saying, "Fuck my life. You guys think you have problems? Do you have to walk around with your parents all day to try to find something to eat?"

I sit on the bed.

"All around the world it's the same problem," I say.

"How many days do we have left?" Shannon says.

The man playing the accordion for the line of people waiting to see inside the Royal Palace of Madrid is too happy. It makes me love him. Mom is using her umbrella for shade and Shannon is looking past us at the Palace.

"Look at those clouds," I tell him. "They're beautiful."

"The fucking clouds are prettier," Shannon says, looking over at the accordion player whose face has begun to seem less composed.

"He's so hot. No one's paying him," I say.

"It can only be you, Rachel," Shannon says.

Walking past the metal collectors and rows of jean jackets and parrots on the side of the road.

Inside the Palace Dad exclaims, "This was worth the whole trip!"

Shannon says, "Time to play Guess That Asian! Japanese, Chinese, or some kind of Pacific Islander?"

"Chinese" I say.

"Correct!" He says.

"How do you know?" I ask.

"They were speaking Chinese," he says.

I take them to a place called Caixa and we look at an exhibit of Russian architecture. "Why is this exhibit about this?" Mom asks.

"You don't have to be sarcastic with me, Rachel," she says.

"Why not?" I say.

"It all looks pretty bleak," Dad says.

Out the window someone spray painted: "I remember and I miss you," on a white wall.

The pattern of my pajamas and the curtains in the mirror of the hotel room. Another accordion player mouthing, "Hola," and how much money we're losing on the dollar. Mom undressing, "I'm so impressed with the Moors and so unimpressed with the Catholics. Whenever my patients tell me they're going to Europe I'm going to say, Great! Take a tour!" And I couldn't believe how beautiful she looked putting lotion on her legs and hands after she changed into her peach night gown--how her face looked so soft and warm, and she smiled. I wasn't even surprised when she discovered the lump a month after she got home, or afterwards, when the doctor took it out and told me that it didn't look malignant at all.

i'm so tired. i don't want to pack.

it is always 3am when i pack.

i just got a headache and a shiver from remembering rob baumann's poetry.