i have the grateful dead on repeat today. for some reason, "brokedown palace" is the song i want to listen to over and over again. and "sugaree". and just because i can, i have been listening to james taylor, too.
the older i get, the more i seem to have delayed reactions to things. and the reactions seem to be getting more and more visceral the older i get, as well. the upshot of this is that it's pretty hard to garner any kind of reaction from me, at least on most days. yesterday was not that day.
it's no secret to people who have known me for a long time that late may is probably my least favorite time of year. i realize that may be a dumb thing to say, but i really can't help how i feel. some years, it doesn't even bother me. may 18th is just a regular day, not the day my dad died or the day we buried my poppy. this year was mostly like that. i waited to get good and upset until yesterday, when an entire avalanche of horseshit combined with missing my dad and my poppy, and conspired to have me sit at my desk and cry for a good half of the day. and then, thinking that i needed some consumer therapy, i went to home depot to pick out carpet samples to take home and try out, and got so overwhelmed with the gravity of picking out 850 square feet of carpet by myself, that too made me cry. all the way home. i am probably the only woman in the history of the carpet industry who cried because she had to pick out carpet. i woke up this morning with splotchy marks still on my face, and gritty eyeballs. and i almost started crying on the way to work, because i just wanted to stay home today. sometimes, i hate being a grown up. and i really hate feeling sorry for myself--it's such a time suck. but it's real.
so, i'm working today, in spite of how i feel. i'm listening to music that soothes me. i'm talking to the baby Jesus. i'm on my way out to take communion to one of my little old ladies. i wish i could get someone else to take it to her, today. she's getting so old and frail, and i don't think she's going to be with me much longer. but, she's very uncomfortable, and she misses her husband, so i certainly won't be sad for her when she leaves the party. i will miss her, though. and today, it would be nice to have a buffer between me and that feeling. however, to ask someone to do that for me would require me to risk being told "no", which i don't think i could stand to hear today, at least not without a temper tantrum and more tears. so, i'm on my way to see miss mary. and i'll smile. we will laugh. we will share communion. and then, i will get into my car, crank up the tunes, and be glad that tomorrow is a day off.
i love you people.
mil besos--rmg
22 May 2008
14 May 2008
pretty is as pretty does...
My friend Beth took this picture at some random bar in Austin. I guess it’s cheating for me to use it here, but I don’t really care. I guess it’s even sort of cheating to call Beth “my” friend, because she started out as my little brother’s friend, and I have co-opted her since we got out of high school. Anyway, Beth sent me this picture and the minute I saw it, I knew it was something powerful. Incidentally, Beth is getting married soon. She also has a new bike, eight toes on one foot, and double AIDS. That's what I heard, anyway.
Beauty is a weird concept. Like love, beauty can be used to describe or mean about a million different things. For instance, you could say that life is beautiful. Or that a particular person is beautiful. Or a painting or a sunset. You can say you had beautiful meal or a beautiful evening. I’ve even heard beautiful operas and seen a beautiful ballet. Beauty isn’t always the Venus D’Milo, or a perfectly chilled bottle of champagne.
In my opinion, beauty is best viewed against a hard edge, because that’s when it’s the most real. Beauty is easily accessible in a museum, even if it’s not the art form of your choice. Beauty is easily accessible on television, on the radio, in magazines. Beauty of form—we have a glut of that, or at least we have a glut of what society tells us is beauty. But it’s fluff, because you don’t have to try and see it. It’s in your face, totally obvious—air brushed and color-modified for your enjoyment. We have lost the art of hunting beauty and of creating it. Let me explain…
I have found great beauty in my life. Even when I realize that people I love and care about deeply could care less, or worse, never cared to begin with and just gave me lip service out of some sick and twisted sense of chivalry. I have seen beauty even when I’ve wanted to tell the truth and knew I would get into trouble for telling it. Life is even beautiful when people can't tell the difference between the truth and a big fat lie, because the potential for truth to win out is there, and truth is always the sister of beauty.
There have been moments when the beauty of life is enough to break my heart, in a good way. There was a Sunday in 1996, when I was three weeks away from turning 18. That was the weekend my dad got diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. That is what we like to call a real bitch. Dad got out of the hospital, and my mom was bringing him home to recuperate or die, at the time, we just didn’t know which…and I was following them in my own car. I was fiending for a cigarette, and since my parents didn’t know I smoked, I was chewing my cuticles and bawling like a banshee. To add insult to injury, this huge, nay--cataclysmic, thunderstorm started screaming out of the sky. At one point, I had to pull the car over because it was raining harder than i was crying, and the combination of my snot and the pounding rain made driving not such a great idea. And then, as quickly as it had started, the rain stopped. The sky was still this mournful deep gray color, but sprawled right across it was the most incredible rainbow I had ever seen. I have yet to see anything that beautiful in my life, again. It was so powerful, so moving, such a stark contrast to the way I was feeling on the inside that I got out of the car to look at it. Over those wheat fields, in the midst of this ugly awful thing invading my family and our lives, that color riot looked touchable, accessible, promising, and ever-so-slightly hopeful. It was beautiful, and for the briefest of moments, in the middle of my own pain, it made my life beautiful, too.
Beauty can be a real doozy—just ask the Trojans. My best friend Ryan’s great-grandmother used to remind me often that “Pretty is as pretty does.” I didn’t understand what the hell that meant until I got into junior high and promptly realized that some of the prettiest people on the outside are some of the most miserable inside, and that just because someone has a nice face, it sure doesn’t mean they are nice as a whole person. Conversely, many pretty people are treated like morons simply because they are beautiful, which is unfair, because the world is big enough for at least a few people to be both beautiful inside and out, right? As for the rest of us, who in the world ever says (and really really means) “Oh, I would rather be less good looking than I am, and have a better personality.” ?
Your family is obligated to tell you how cute or handsome you are. From where else did we get the phrase “a face only a mother could love”?. My mother is the exception to this rule. When I was younger, I took her appraisals of my physical appearance much more personally than I do now. My mom is the one who would tell me, “Why yes, Rachel, those pants DO make your ass look like a tank.” Or “Come over here so I can tweeze your eyebrows. You look like a yeti.” She would then pin me on the bed, literally screaming and crying, and tweeze her little heart out. But those tweezing sessions always ended with a kiss, and a “You really are a lovely girl, Rachel. I love you very much.” Thank God that woman is honest and has an eagle eye for stray eyebrows, otherwise, I could have been a real disaster area.
Your friends have that same obligation to lie to you about how you look, (except for the gay ones, and they are bound by the code of the gay mafia to steer you away from artificial fibers and animal prints, no matter how good you think you look decked out in jaguar spotted pleather), although they can be trusted a little bit more to tell the truth. Friends can be more diplomatic than family, because they love you by choice, not by genetic or legal obligations. The good part about a friend telling you gently that you look like a Thanksgiving Day float is that she (I can only speak from my own experience, people…) will usually make a nice suggestion for what you can do differently, or loan you something out of her closet.
The people who are blindest to looks, and most aware of looks, are the ones who are in love. Love is beautiful. Love is a duality of being. Love is blind, but love also sees every flaw in stark detail. Granted that flaw-viewing is usually done somewhere between 2 am and 4 am, in the blinding white spotlight of our own minds: the interrogation room into which we retreat to find out if we really mean what we say, and if we really say what we mean. That room is a hard one to be in, and the privacy glass isn’t always as fool-proof as it looks.
Beauty is tricky, because it can be so easily contrived. A turn of phrase or a glance held just long enough can make the most awkward silence beautiful. Sometimes beauty is empty space—no color, no sound, no sensory stimulation, just starkness. Beauty that is only on the surface is dangerous, because a good coat of spackle can fool the most wary of eyes, if those eyes are beguiled by how good that spackle looks, how solid, how true. Beauty without substance is no better than a soundbite from the nightly news—it doesn’t make much sense or hold much water without the real story to back it up and make it real.
My high school boyfriend told me I looked beautiful in my black prom dress. He also told me I looked beautiful in my red prom dress (the next year). He told me I looked beautiful in a bridesmaid dress, too. I think he was lying about the last one…But I basked in the glow of his admiration. My God, is there anything better than being 17, knowing nothing of the heartache that adulthood is about to drop on your carefully coifed and laquered hair, loving a boy who will ultimately break your heart ? I remember his face, his wide-open face, and how he smelled like Tide detergent and Zest Soap, and I remember I believed I was beautiful, simply because he said so.
My college boyfriend told me I looked beautiful at a wedding for some mutual friends. I was in a borrowed dress, 10 pounds lighter than the last time he had seen me, and had a new haircut. “You look beautiful” were the first words out of his mouth, and immediately put me at ease. I needed to hear him say that. I believed him when he said that. And even though I haven’t spoken to him in years, I will always be grateful for that compliment, because in that moment, he honestly meant it, and I honestly believed it.
The next man who told me I was beautiful was a total stranger. I was in this sporting goods store looking for replacement poles for my camping tent, which mysteriously turned up two years later (and people say God has no sense of humor…). This guy in an army uniform followed me from the front door all the way to the back of the store to tell me I was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen. Not just beautiful. The most beautiful. I was totally dumbfounded. I’m honest enough with myself to say I feel like I have a nice face, but my ass and thighs never got that memo. They’ve always been sort of all I can really see when I look in the mirror, which probably goes a long way in explaining why I am so bad at dating. To have a total stranger take that kind of notice of not-so-little me was incredible in my life. I’ve always been friends with girls who’ve gotten free drinks, been hit on in bars, or received obnoxiously large bouquets of flowers from mystery men because they were beautiful. But this time, it happened to me. Granted, it happened in a sporting goods store, and the guy who said it may have just gotten back from being deployed in a country where women are kept under veils, but it still happened to me, instead of happening to someone else while I watched, trying my best not to feel like “the other sister”.
I had two very distinct feelings about this incident. One: I was humbled that a total stranger said something so nice to me, and walked all the way to the back of the store to say it. Two: I felt the compliment had to be directly attributed to a) I had shaved my legs that morning, and b) had actually put on make up, a skirt, and dress shoes in stead of flip-flops. It was hard for me to just take that compliment and deal with it. Maybe it was because it came from a total stranger. Maybe it was because I struggle with my own self-image, and most days don’t feel beautiful at all. Maybe it was because my brain vapor locked and all I could do was smile and say thank you, instead of giving the guy my phone number. That was one of the most surreal moments of my life, and one that I take out to remember on days when I feel like I’d rather stay in bed than put on lip gloss and go out side. What is comes down to is the difference between being beautiful and feeling beautiful. Sometimes those are the same thing. Most times, they are not, at least in my world.
I could take off on a tangent right now about how the media and MTV and whoever else have taken physical beauty and made it into some monstrosity and mockery of real beauty. But you already know that, so I’ll spare us both the agony and the angst.
Beauty is many things. There are probably as many explanations of beauty as there are for love. What makes something classically beautiful as opposed to something that is beautiful to just a specific audience? Is there some hidden standard that makes Leonardo Da Vinci a universally laudable master, but makes Salvador Dali a niche artist? I guess it boils down to the paradox of visual beauty I have in my own head. I love nothing more than to watch the sun set over some empty panorama—the ocean, a back pasture, a stretch of highway, the mountains, etc. I also love to stand and look at big buildings, intricate and massive cathedrals, banks, municipal buildings, sky scrapers, etc. They are both pleasing to me, but in very different ways. I would be hard pressed to say which I favor more. Watching people mill around St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York is as beautiful to me as watching all the colors melt into dark over a stretch of county road.
Beauty is a weird concept. Like love, beauty can be used to describe or mean about a million different things. For instance, you could say that life is beautiful. Or that a particular person is beautiful. Or a painting or a sunset. You can say you had beautiful meal or a beautiful evening. I’ve even heard beautiful operas and seen a beautiful ballet. Beauty isn’t always the Venus D’Milo, or a perfectly chilled bottle of champagne.
In my opinion, beauty is best viewed against a hard edge, because that’s when it’s the most real. Beauty is easily accessible in a museum, even if it’s not the art form of your choice. Beauty is easily accessible on television, on the radio, in magazines. Beauty of form—we have a glut of that, or at least we have a glut of what society tells us is beauty. But it’s fluff, because you don’t have to try and see it. It’s in your face, totally obvious—air brushed and color-modified for your enjoyment. We have lost the art of hunting beauty and of creating it. Let me explain…
I have found great beauty in my life. Even when I realize that people I love and care about deeply could care less, or worse, never cared to begin with and just gave me lip service out of some sick and twisted sense of chivalry. I have seen beauty even when I’ve wanted to tell the truth and knew I would get into trouble for telling it. Life is even beautiful when people can't tell the difference between the truth and a big fat lie, because the potential for truth to win out is there, and truth is always the sister of beauty.
There have been moments when the beauty of life is enough to break my heart, in a good way. There was a Sunday in 1996, when I was three weeks away from turning 18. That was the weekend my dad got diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. That is what we like to call a real bitch. Dad got out of the hospital, and my mom was bringing him home to recuperate or die, at the time, we just didn’t know which…and I was following them in my own car. I was fiending for a cigarette, and since my parents didn’t know I smoked, I was chewing my cuticles and bawling like a banshee. To add insult to injury, this huge, nay--cataclysmic, thunderstorm started screaming out of the sky. At one point, I had to pull the car over because it was raining harder than i was crying, and the combination of my snot and the pounding rain made driving not such a great idea. And then, as quickly as it had started, the rain stopped. The sky was still this mournful deep gray color, but sprawled right across it was the most incredible rainbow I had ever seen. I have yet to see anything that beautiful in my life, again. It was so powerful, so moving, such a stark contrast to the way I was feeling on the inside that I got out of the car to look at it. Over those wheat fields, in the midst of this ugly awful thing invading my family and our lives, that color riot looked touchable, accessible, promising, and ever-so-slightly hopeful. It was beautiful, and for the briefest of moments, in the middle of my own pain, it made my life beautiful, too.
Beauty can be a real doozy—just ask the Trojans. My best friend Ryan’s great-grandmother used to remind me often that “Pretty is as pretty does.” I didn’t understand what the hell that meant until I got into junior high and promptly realized that some of the prettiest people on the outside are some of the most miserable inside, and that just because someone has a nice face, it sure doesn’t mean they are nice as a whole person. Conversely, many pretty people are treated like morons simply because they are beautiful, which is unfair, because the world is big enough for at least a few people to be both beautiful inside and out, right? As for the rest of us, who in the world ever says (and really really means) “Oh, I would rather be less good looking than I am, and have a better personality.” ?
Your family is obligated to tell you how cute or handsome you are. From where else did we get the phrase “a face only a mother could love”?. My mother is the exception to this rule. When I was younger, I took her appraisals of my physical appearance much more personally than I do now. My mom is the one who would tell me, “Why yes, Rachel, those pants DO make your ass look like a tank.” Or “Come over here so I can tweeze your eyebrows. You look like a yeti.” She would then pin me on the bed, literally screaming and crying, and tweeze her little heart out. But those tweezing sessions always ended with a kiss, and a “You really are a lovely girl, Rachel. I love you very much.” Thank God that woman is honest and has an eagle eye for stray eyebrows, otherwise, I could have been a real disaster area.
Your friends have that same obligation to lie to you about how you look, (except for the gay ones, and they are bound by the code of the gay mafia to steer you away from artificial fibers and animal prints, no matter how good you think you look decked out in jaguar spotted pleather), although they can be trusted a little bit more to tell the truth. Friends can be more diplomatic than family, because they love you by choice, not by genetic or legal obligations. The good part about a friend telling you gently that you look like a Thanksgiving Day float is that she (I can only speak from my own experience, people…) will usually make a nice suggestion for what you can do differently, or loan you something out of her closet.
The people who are blindest to looks, and most aware of looks, are the ones who are in love. Love is beautiful. Love is a duality of being. Love is blind, but love also sees every flaw in stark detail. Granted that flaw-viewing is usually done somewhere between 2 am and 4 am, in the blinding white spotlight of our own minds: the interrogation room into which we retreat to find out if we really mean what we say, and if we really say what we mean. That room is a hard one to be in, and the privacy glass isn’t always as fool-proof as it looks.
Beauty is tricky, because it can be so easily contrived. A turn of phrase or a glance held just long enough can make the most awkward silence beautiful. Sometimes beauty is empty space—no color, no sound, no sensory stimulation, just starkness. Beauty that is only on the surface is dangerous, because a good coat of spackle can fool the most wary of eyes, if those eyes are beguiled by how good that spackle looks, how solid, how true. Beauty without substance is no better than a soundbite from the nightly news—it doesn’t make much sense or hold much water without the real story to back it up and make it real.
My high school boyfriend told me I looked beautiful in my black prom dress. He also told me I looked beautiful in my red prom dress (the next year). He told me I looked beautiful in a bridesmaid dress, too. I think he was lying about the last one…But I basked in the glow of his admiration. My God, is there anything better than being 17, knowing nothing of the heartache that adulthood is about to drop on your carefully coifed and laquered hair, loving a boy who will ultimately break your heart ? I remember his face, his wide-open face, and how he smelled like Tide detergent and Zest Soap, and I remember I believed I was beautiful, simply because he said so.
My college boyfriend told me I looked beautiful at a wedding for some mutual friends. I was in a borrowed dress, 10 pounds lighter than the last time he had seen me, and had a new haircut. “You look beautiful” were the first words out of his mouth, and immediately put me at ease. I needed to hear him say that. I believed him when he said that. And even though I haven’t spoken to him in years, I will always be grateful for that compliment, because in that moment, he honestly meant it, and I honestly believed it.
The next man who told me I was beautiful was a total stranger. I was in this sporting goods store looking for replacement poles for my camping tent, which mysteriously turned up two years later (and people say God has no sense of humor…). This guy in an army uniform followed me from the front door all the way to the back of the store to tell me I was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen. Not just beautiful. The most beautiful. I was totally dumbfounded. I’m honest enough with myself to say I feel like I have a nice face, but my ass and thighs never got that memo. They’ve always been sort of all I can really see when I look in the mirror, which probably goes a long way in explaining why I am so bad at dating. To have a total stranger take that kind of notice of not-so-little me was incredible in my life. I’ve always been friends with girls who’ve gotten free drinks, been hit on in bars, or received obnoxiously large bouquets of flowers from mystery men because they were beautiful. But this time, it happened to me. Granted, it happened in a sporting goods store, and the guy who said it may have just gotten back from being deployed in a country where women are kept under veils, but it still happened to me, instead of happening to someone else while I watched, trying my best not to feel like “the other sister”.
I had two very distinct feelings about this incident. One: I was humbled that a total stranger said something so nice to me, and walked all the way to the back of the store to say it. Two: I felt the compliment had to be directly attributed to a) I had shaved my legs that morning, and b) had actually put on make up, a skirt, and dress shoes in stead of flip-flops. It was hard for me to just take that compliment and deal with it. Maybe it was because it came from a total stranger. Maybe it was because I struggle with my own self-image, and most days don’t feel beautiful at all. Maybe it was because my brain vapor locked and all I could do was smile and say thank you, instead of giving the guy my phone number. That was one of the most surreal moments of my life, and one that I take out to remember on days when I feel like I’d rather stay in bed than put on lip gloss and go out side. What is comes down to is the difference between being beautiful and feeling beautiful. Sometimes those are the same thing. Most times, they are not, at least in my world.
I could take off on a tangent right now about how the media and MTV and whoever else have taken physical beauty and made it into some monstrosity and mockery of real beauty. But you already know that, so I’ll spare us both the agony and the angst.
Beauty is many things. There are probably as many explanations of beauty as there are for love. What makes something classically beautiful as opposed to something that is beautiful to just a specific audience? Is there some hidden standard that makes Leonardo Da Vinci a universally laudable master, but makes Salvador Dali a niche artist? I guess it boils down to the paradox of visual beauty I have in my own head. I love nothing more than to watch the sun set over some empty panorama—the ocean, a back pasture, a stretch of highway, the mountains, etc. I also love to stand and look at big buildings, intricate and massive cathedrals, banks, municipal buildings, sky scrapers, etc. They are both pleasing to me, but in very different ways. I would be hard pressed to say which I favor more. Watching people mill around St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York is as beautiful to me as watching all the colors melt into dark over a stretch of county road.
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