tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-90776244956846010022024-03-06T00:32:20.107-05:00Bridget Callahan is Your Best FriendBridget Callahanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06729980008876962813noreply@blogger.comBlogger1178125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9077624495684601002.post-69537252128114257352015-04-30T15:23:00.000-04:002015-04-30T15:23:28.279-04:00DisappearedThe weirdest thing about an overdose is when I hear that someone has overdosed, I immediately assume they are dead. When I was spreading the news that you had overdosed to a few people I thought would care, the first question they all asked was "Did they revive him? Is he okay?" As if it is a normal and common thing to recover from an overdose. Maybe it is. I don't know. These are things that usually happen in spheres at least one removed from mine - to friends of friends. You will be my second friend to OD, and neither of you were super duper close to me, more than casual acquaintances sure, but not best friends. Not family. Two's not enough to make me an expert at these things.<br />
<br />
Yesterday, the dryer broke. I remember when you helped me move into this place, I told you that your reward was you could come over and do laundry whenever you wanted, because you didn't have a washer or dryer. You seemed better than you had on other days, since the car accident, but then halfway through the day you nodded off in front of everyone, in the living room, your sandwich half eaten in front of you. You never came over to take advantage of the offer, and then you died and the same day the dryer broke, so that works out at least.<br />
<br />
In retrospect, you acted just like a junkie. But I had never seen you actually do anything except smoke weed, so I don't think I ever solidified the belief that you were. Maybe you weren't. Maybe you aren't even really dead, and it's all some elaborate facebook joke, I'm always waiting for something like that to happen to me. I didn't know you well enough. It was just gossip, probably true gossip, but also not my business. Can someone die because someone else has too much faith or general respect for them to believe gossip?<br />
<br />
It's weird to have flirted with a newly dead man. Like, my tongue was in your mouth one time, and now your tongue is laying quiet and still and thick and gross, a slab of inert cold meat. That's terrible to say, isn't it? But I think you're allowed to be angry with people who die from drugs, Emily Post says. So I can be gross if I want. I cooled on you really quickly, so basically right now I'm super grateful I never had sex with you. Because it's weird to remember someone's physical presence who no longer exists. It does things to your head, it makes your heart feel painful and mortal. How much worse if that.<br />
<br />
My heart breaks for the last girl in love with you.<br />
<br />
I just now had to tell someone on the phone about this, and I had to listen the dead panic in their voice as they ask for confirmation, panic that was once, for a moment, alive and frantic, but has given up hope completely, and knows what's coming, and it hangs off the side of their voice like a broken limb. So you know, fuck you for that.<br />
<br />
My first thought when I heard was that it seemed like this town requires a blood sacrifice every year. Because every year there's been at least one death, right in this week, the May 1st offering, and it's always these younger men who grew up here, and led sort of unhappy townie lives. I mean, you were pretty miserable. You went through a lot of dark shit. You were aimless and without intention. But you just kept wagging your tail, waiting for someone to come along to love you and save you, you were very puppy at the pound in that way. You were very lovable in that way. But people can't love you back when you hate yourself. Something about the eye contact.<br />
<br />
This town is Lady Bathory, bathing in the blood in the misery and stagnation of its native sons, virgins to other worlds. It pulls them down into the swamps, to digest them alive. This town has figured out how to sell the souls of its people to keep the gilded foreign lilies young forever. And they wander drunk through the weekday downtown nights, in between the cracks of the buildings, through DUIs and bike accidents, slowly decomposing as the PBRs and kitchen line jobs eat at their stomach linings, as the golden beach people get drunk themselves off their life-forces.<br />
<br />
You ate a lot of candy bars, I remember that. That's a junkie thing too, isn't it? I feel like it might be. But maybe you weren't a junkie at all, maybe this was just an unlucky accident. I make too many assumptions. Probably no one will ever tell me. Maybe no one knows. You figure there's always someone that knows, but sometimes people are like cats stowing themselves away in secret spots when they're hurt and weak. I don't know how alone you really were, how private or not. Men have secrets, even the hapless ones.<br />
<br />
When someone dies, I remind myself that they could have easily just moved across country and I might never have talked to them again anyway. People disappear all the time into different corners of the world. So death isn't different from just losing touch with someone. If I just decide to think you've moved away forever, then it's exactly the same. It seems a little egocentric with a good dose of delusion. But I think that was part of why you liked me.<br />
<br />
I will miss seeing you, you were a very nice boy.<br />
<br />Bridget Callahanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06729980008876962813noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9077624495684601002.post-44123782145464915952014-11-11T12:15:00.000-05:002014-11-11T12:15:07.709-05:00City of the Dead<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<i><span style="font-size: xx-small;">(originally published in Roots magazine, 2012, but the lifespan of online literary magazines is unpredictable, and I want to have it somewhere more reliable.)</span></i></div>
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The places you find depend almost entirely on the people you find them with. Which is why it was reprehensible of me to be driving around Youngstown with my ex boyfriend on a cold windy day. I knew if I went with him, I would find something good. Wanna find the dead? Bring something dying with you. Nothing more corpse-like in this entire state than the zombie relationship we had been pumping antibiotics into for the last 8 years, so sure that eventually science will catch up and find us a cure. I know the way this bait works – I used the decaying scent of our guilty whispers, hushed anger, veiled flirting to lure the buzzards, and once I saw the buzzards, I saw the broken driveway which led us into the asphalt heart of the City of the Dead.<span id="more-547" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span></div>
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The City of the Dead is down by the railroad tracks, where the boxcars used to buzz the tire plants and brought their tons of black coal dinosaur bones to the captains of industry and their waiting minions. When approaching it, you will see the skies start to tint a particular color, like a memory of a rainstorm. It will not rain, it never rains here. But there is wetness and puddles and the ooze of moisture through brick. Once upon a time the weeds were kept back by constant traffic, but now they are trees, which technically makes them no longer weeds right? If you get tall enough, don’t you grow out of that?</div>
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Where did they all go, these men of steel and copper and rebar? The buildings lie picked apart, and the roads are torn up. I watched cautiously, expecting giant worms fed on rendered waste to rise up, their coils eating through the landscape. But it was quiet. If not eaten by worms, was it disease? An unknown virus traveling in among the rock waste, infecting the men so that they became unsettled, uneasy, unsuccessful. Did it drive them away to the North? If you are in the middle of Ohio, which direction do you run? North, towards the lake, or South to the river? East to Pittsburgh or West to the great glass capitol of Toledo? Wherever they went, they left. Almost all at once, as if one day they put down their shovels and telephones and looked at each other in unison, mice who hear the cat approaching. They let their tools lie where they were. They packed up their children and wives, and abandoned their houses, which would slowly become the outer defenses of the City. The distractions for community leaders and fake kings, carpetbaggers who would slink slowly in to fill their voids. The City was smart. Left alone by its keepers, it prepared for war, built the moats and murder pits and grew the long grass tall. Then went to sleep, determined to outlive the politics of recession and development.</div>
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It worked. Not even the street rats, with their ever present tags and empty 40s, had been here. Or they had come once and never again. Or they had been eaten and their flesh spun into spools of abandoned cloth. The green waste of ceiling night crawlers drips down the corners. Maybe this City had never been populated by men. Maybe that was the secret, that this was a clockwork factory, and the men were actually made of steel, and these are their bones I am walking on right now, climbing over with no thought, no respect, eager to expose every corner of this places that wants to stay hidden. I am an interloper. I’m probably going to die with some steelworker curse on my head. I’ll be lying in my death bed, striking and dying with the weight of molten steel on my chest, trying to light a goddamn cigarette before my wife catches me.</div>
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So he watched me climb around on the rocks, and since he hadn’t brought his camera with him (on a trip to take photos, what?) he kept pointing out things I should take shots of. Stop doing that, I thought silently to myself. Stop telling me what to point my lens at. There isn’t some formula to this. I’m trying to document death here. But he doesn’t understand the concept of death, he is tingling with life, in the way that never stops to see the remains of what it has fed upon.</div>
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Bridget Callahanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06729980008876962813noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9077624495684601002.post-89299570480022215972014-10-21T16:05:00.001-04:002014-10-21T16:19:20.576-04:00Pickled<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When Frank made the mammoth, it was in a room that pulsed with reds, purples, and orange-flavored pinks -- kept at twilight 24 hours a day, and so warm the staff worked in tank tops and sundresses. Outside, the Northern California Spring was muggy, cloudy, and gray. The skies hung heavy with rain, threatening rolling thunderstorms that marched in from the sea to invade the continent. When Frank walked outside, he had the sensation of emerging from a universal womb. The bodily jolt of coming from the dark-red warmth to the wide-open grays and greens disoriented him. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“There’s no reason we should have spent so much designing the lights, or keep this damn place so warm. It’s a fetus. It’s in an actual womb. What does it care?” His medical technologist Alice would say this every day, as she picked at her kale salad in the hermetically sealed staff break room. Alice was on the paleo diet -- she was only allowed to eat things her primitive ancestors could have picked, foraged, or killed with rocks. It was supposed to be a better genetic fit with the body, reverting you back to a time before agriculture ruined man by introducing him to things like pasteurized milk and pancakes. She knew it was bullshit, that the main point was her ancestors could never have gotten their grubby little hands on the insane selection of fruits and vegetables, weird South American grains and fish caught in Asia, that she could buy at her local grocery store. Those starving, mongrel cavemen would not have been able to eat 3 solid meals a day of whatever they wanted. If they ate one meal a day, they were lucky. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“They might as well just tell everyone to go on a starving African diet, that would be the most effective. I should market that. I could send out tapeworms with the videos,” she joked. But Alice had married a man who was much more attractive than her, and consequently spent most of her meal times gulping down potions and spells, trying always to shed the extra thirty pounds her Polish ancestors fought so hard to ensure their children could have, to survive the long winters. Frank had married nobody, and sometimes he wondered, watching her push a chickpea around her plate with a bamboo spork, if he might have married Alice had he met her early enough. She was smart and relatively pretty at the peak of various diets. Frank’s sister used to call that particular blend of blowsy, broad features a “peasant face”. But Alice had a capacity to believe in fairy tales ,despite knowing better, that he found hard to swallow. A marriage between the two of them would have ended with him as the bad guy.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“An interesting way to look at the paleo diet is to see that it really means condemning the entirety of human advancement,” she told him one night, as they were getting drinks after work. “Basically, we’re saying that everything we've created since we stopped living in caves, and started planning food supplies, and building farms, has been poisoning us. We wouldn't have science or art, any kind of culture, if we hadn't started staying put in one place and building a stable structure for ourselves. But apparently, that’s when the downfall started. And now we want to have it both ways. I don’t know if that’s possible. It seems like it shouldn't be, morally. All I want to do is lose weight and have good skin, because of the society we've built. The cavemen didn't care about good skin.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“It’s important to my world view that I not be the bad guy,” he said.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“That’s an incredibly unachievable goal,” she replied.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Elephants take 22 months to gestate, so the team guessed a mammoth wouldn't be too different. They had used an African elephant as the surrogate mother. They used a zoo-bred one, hoping that an elephant raised on man-grown corn and municipal water would pass along to the calf some genetic hardiness to the new world. The effort of the labor was horrible, the calf was breached and nearly split the surrogate’s pelvis in half. There was a Cesarean, but the poor creature died shortly after the birth, quietly bleeding out despite the veterinarian's best efforts. The zoo was incredibly mad at them. But overall, it was a success, because now they had Judy. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Judy was a 200lb miracle -- a ready-made ghost of the ancient past, and the only one of her kind to breathe a modern atmosphere. The first mammoth to see buildings, and electric lights; the first to hear English spoken. She looked like a children s’ toy, with a comically large domed forehead, and small ears close against the side of her head that had never evolved to keep cool at noon on the savanna, or flap the tsetse flies away. She talked constantly, making deep bellowing noises from inside her baby chest that sounded like a hundred bullfrogs singing. She loved to be scratched in the thick, wiry mats of hair behind her ears, and around the white stumps of her growing tusks.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Frank liked Judy. He felt bad for her, all alone growing up in a closed pen. There was nothing natural about her existence. The first month of her life, she consumed a mixture of proteins and acids that had been designed to mimic the nutrients she would have consumed in the Pleistocene era. The temperature was dropped as her hair grew longer, to recreate the high Asian steppes of her ancestry. The air of the lab was kept heavy in CO2, remembering an Earth that was much wetter and thicker. Frank was a research assistant, and he monitored the little calf’s microbiome, the composition of bacteria in her mammoth guts -- which little creatures were living in her intestines, building their microbe civilizations in her stomach. When he took the daily mouth swabs, Judy looked him woefully with big, brown eyes, an expression only herd animals have mastered, of both confusion and acceptance. She took to butting her lump skull against his arm to try and stop him. All babies have the charm of insistence. </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">He tried to talk to her while he collected his samples, He would tell her what his bike ride to work had been like that morning. This morning there had been a strange, old Japanese man selling watermelons right outside the entrance to his apartment complex, who had cursed at Frank in a thick, fluid tongue as he rode by. Frank couldn't understand the cursing, didn't know if it was personal or general. Maybe the old man was just cursing the world as a whole.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“In fact, I want it to happen again, so maybe I can try and memorize what he’s saying, and ask Akihiro what it means. Am I going to grow horns? Flippers? You can’t underestimate strange men, Judy, or their cursing.” And it was true. Frank was not religious, but he believed in intention -- through the course of any organism’s existence, all the pains and joys it experienced, all that energy of emotion, could build up and remained stored away in forgotten parts of cells. The more a creature had suffered, the more seriously one should take its cursing. He snuck Judy carrot sticks he had pirated from Alice’s lunch, letting her grab them delicately one by one with the end of her trunk.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Despite her isolation from the natural world, Judy was certainly not kept from the unnatural world. After it became clear that she would live, that there would be no laying down and dying without warning in front of the school children of the world, the lab set up several cameras and feeds to share their discovery with humanity. It didn't seem to outwardly affect Judy, nothing in her routine changed. But Frank wondered if she couldn't feel the psychic energy of all those people watching her. After all, her body was from a time period before wireless filled the air, her cells were tuned to different vibrations. How could 6,000 year old cells be prepared for wifi? Or even the vibrations electricity must make, surging through the wires and ground, and all around her into machines trained to be focused on her at all times. Did she feel that? Was it just a slight uneasiness she couldn't articulate or shake, the sense of someone watching? Herd animals had to have a heightened sense of being spied on if they wanted to survive, he would think. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">He regularly checked his apartment for bugs, but never told anyone.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Frank would sit at the end of the day in front of the window to Judy’s pen, watching her rolling a huge rubber ball around all by herself. There was no one to play with, Alice had gone home. He caught himself thinking about what it would be like to be Alice’s husband forty years from now, watching her die. There would be a lot of pies at the funeral, and he wouldn't eat any of them. </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Frank pictured Judy’s death happening as if she had only a certain amount of breath the universe had granted her - the last allotment of air her dead species was allowed, the very dregs. Suddenly she breathes it out like a sad, old dog, like a clockwork toy running down. She lays her head down on her knees, in that submissive folding grace animals have when they know their final moments have come. An animal doesn't feel they should struggle against the inevitable. They hide away and accept it without regrets or apologies. Their body has simply stopped working, and they have no choice, never had a choice. She collapses in slow motion on the smooth concrete floor of the lab that is the only home she has ever known, and it’s over. </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">He knew he was still thinking about Alice.</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">She aged too fast. her telomeres were short, though of course they had nothing to compare them to except modern elephants. The lifespan of the original woolly mammoth could have been three years or thirty, they had no way of knowing. Judy’s lifespan, at its current rate, was five years. There was a moment, almost overnight, where she went from a bumbling calf to a fully grown behemoth, with a long, shiny coat and heavy, dangerous tusks. She suddenly had the quiet dignity that comes with being unable to communicate with anything around you, the bearing of a queen about to be beheaded. Slowly, the company stopped wanting photo ops. Slowly, the school children stopped watching.</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“It’s because it’s more acceptable to keep a baby in a prison, you can call it a nursery,” Alice said, gnawing on a piece of raw sweet potato as she watched the video feed. Frank got up out of his chair, walked over to her desk and pulled her roughly up. He stared at her for a minute before he kissed her, memorizing how there was no protest, how she simply folded into his arms and responded to his motions. He could taste the fibers of sweet potato in between her teeth. </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Stop, someone will see us,” she protested in his ear as he slid his hands up her plump thighs, underneath her stretch-tight skirt. So he stopped. </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">He called off the next day, and drove up to Oregon to look at farms. No one cared that he called off, except maybe Alice. The Judy project was slowly winding down, the budget was on death watch. Humanity had moved on to repairing other sins, the Yangtze dolphin and the Dodo, far less ambitious projects that didn't interest him. She was, in the end, just another elephant with fur. She wasn't an ongoing salvation. If they set her free on the steppes, made a herd of other mammoths so they could repopulate the snowy mountain tops, the bulk of them would be poached immediately. People were still poor and opportunistic. The only thing that stopped her from being a rug was her singularity in the world. </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Frank felt a guilt deeper than his bones. </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">He went back to work, and didn't talk about it. He ignored her baleful stares, ignored both of them.</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Outwardly, nothing in his environment changed, but he could feel the tension of a coming action buzzing in the air. Judy could feel it too. She paced and stomped when he walked right past her pen every day, quickly going home every night to sit in his rented room and think about how weird it was to watch his species, to watch himself, serving a ghost. A loser in the evolutionary wars. Not pretty enough or fast enough to survive. Once they had hunted Judy to extinction, driven her off cliffs to butcher her for meat and bones, and now they worshipped her as a miraculous sign. He was complicit in this. He had fathered a creature, brought it into a world where it would be alien and alone, for no good reason except he wanted to. </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">On the right day, he rented an animal trailer and came at 5am, before the PI came in. The only staff was an undergrad tech who could barely keep his eyes open at the end of his overnight shift.</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“I’m taking her across the deck to Allen’s. There’s something about her sleep cycle that’s bothering him, and he wants to hook her up over there and take a look. After all, mammoth R.E.M. cycles, you know Do they dream of prehistoric men? Do they dream of stars or sabertoothed tigers?”</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The undergrad nodded sleepily. He didn't care. He had a final in two days and rent was due. </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Judy fell in step with Frank as soon as they left the enclosure, step by step. The look in her eyes was one of complete trust, because what had she ever feared? The trust of a herd animal, of one bred to link tusk to tail and follow directions, the confidence that comes from having a leader when one has been leaderless -- it came off her in waves and infected Frank with a sense of righteousness. </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">An hour up the 101, Frank got a call from Alice.</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Frank, I was trying to see if you were coming in today, and then Paul told me you took Judy to Allen’s, but I called Allen and he hasn't seen you. I figured Paul got it messed up.”</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“I’m sorry to put you in this position, but I can’t tell you what to do here. I’m not coming back. And I’m not going to hurt her. But I’m not coming back.”</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Shit, Frank, are you kidding? What are you going to do with her? Are you selling her?” </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“No, of course not. But who knows how much time she has left, and she’s never even been outside. If she died in that lab, I would never forgive myself. I would never forgive you.”</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Alice was quiet. He wondered if she had hung up to call the PI. Maybe she had already done that, and they were tracing the phone call. </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do here,” she said, finally. “I don’t understand why you didn't just ask Harry if we could let her outside. Instead you took something that wasn't yours. That’s massive theft, that’s grand larceny. The company is going to to send people after you, she’s a proprietary formula. This isn't going to blow over.”</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Maybe they won’t. Maybe they’ll be glad for the budget room. If they ever want another mammoth, they have an entire back stock of pickled mammoth DNA. Maybe they’ll give up faster than you think. Especially if you give me a head start. Is anyone at the lab with you?”</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“No, Paul went home,” she sounded calmer, his righteousness was infecting her too. He pictured her all alone in the lab, thinking about him, wondering where he was.</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Do you want to come with me?” he asked. It was a gesture instead of a question. It was as offensive as slapping her ass. But she didn't know that.</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">She hesitated again, but not as long. She was smart, he could already hear her brain figuring out the next steps. He didn't ask her what they were, he wouldn't be there so what did it matter? They were not in this together.</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“ No, I don’t. But I’ll do what I can. I’m not falling on a sword for you though, I don’t think you know what you’re doing.” Alice tried to sound authoritative and stern, but Frank could hear she was buying the fairy tale already -- him, the renegade hero, Judy the princess in distress. She would never admit that for that particular myth to be true, that made her one of the villains. She was good at doing things like that. So in the end she would do something to cover for him. </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“You weren't going to say goodbye to me?” she asked.</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Why say goodbye when I’ll see you every night in my dreams?” he replied.</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Shut up, that’s so stupid. You’re so stupid.”</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">He waited for her to say something else, so that wouldn't be the last thing she remembered saying to him. But when she didn't, he threw the phone out the truck window. </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The farm was nestled high up on the side of a mountain, where the clouds could gather and touch. It was a small, neat shack and a big barn, all surrounded by a high wooden fence. The new wood of the fence smelled sharp in the rain, and glowed a dark wet gold. The fence made him uneasy, the whole point had been to take Judy somewhere with no walls. But at least there was grass, air, real birds. At the very least it was something new. Besides, there was always the possibility that like a dog who has grown up in a cage, no walls would have made her herbivore brain uneasy.</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">He spent his mornings out there with her, watching her graze in the field, trying all the new plants, their tastes and textures. After a week, her coat began to develop a thick layer of insulation and grease in response to the non-programmed cold and wet. Her tusks were stained and sharpened against tree trunks. Her dirty hair became matted and tangled, and she went from an artist’s rendering of a mammoth to an actual full-blooded real-life mammoth -- articulated in full scale, ripe and threatening. Frank was proud of her statuesque profile and heavy dignity. A mammoth that could breathe the modern air, eat the plants that plants had become, drink the poisoned rainwater and live. He hadn't realized it before, but this was always the only way to end the project, to see if the thing he had made could really live. To see what an actual mammoth really looked like.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">His victory was short-lived. Within a month, she was dead. She lay down in the middle of the hillside, curling her trunk around her. She gave an ever so small sigh that made her belly rise and fall, and then she died. </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It was probably the plants she was eating. Or maybe the air after all. The composition of the water, or the noise of electricity, the waves of data filtering through her ears, the plastic remnants in the ground, the deadly sunlight coming through the ozone. Maybe just the weight of being alone. </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It was worth noting, Frank thought, that an alien can only survive a month in our atmosphere. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Frank left her body out there to decompose. Why tell anyone? Someone would just make a rug out of her. He couldn't tell if he was being disrespectful. Elephants had graveyards after all, there were rituals. But he didn't know what they were, only the elephants knew. He wondered what they would think if he brought Judy’s body back to them on the Plains of Africa, on the Steppes of Asia. How they might have marveled at their ancestor in front of them, a past that had only lived in their pachyderm dreams? Then how they might have looked at him, the invader laying the corpse of a miracle at their feet. What does elephant condemnation look like? </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So let her body lay there and be buried, let it be forgotten and not stuffed on display in a museum somewhere. Let no one make carvings of her tusks, or molds of her skull. Let her tail disintegrate with her toes. Let no one break up her marriage. Let whatever intention she carried in her genes dissipate like smoke into the clouds. Please let it be enough to try and be good, he whispered into her little ears. Let the curse not catch him till at least Canada.</span></div>
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Bridget Callahanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06729980008876962813noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9077624495684601002.post-3989822548824836492013-11-19T10:28:00.002-05:002013-11-19T10:54:40.965-05:00How to Find a Job<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiw3oZ6DIqyLOI7IJQ6k3AByfu1VmDDQqs8LvxWNPOsxvhQWVnvvmN9MkvebcvPmuGB4sWAnX_itaZLVaiMkRpebc13KTPyIudCIc9mLQOLOjWfTbRtpRmcVwWMGwSz10VatKjtZVZwv2g/s1600/book-of-job.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiw3oZ6DIqyLOI7IJQ6k3AByfu1VmDDQqs8LvxWNPOsxvhQWVnvvmN9MkvebcvPmuGB4sWAnX_itaZLVaiMkRpebc13KTPyIudCIc9mLQOLOjWfTbRtpRmcVwWMGwSz10VatKjtZVZwv2g/s640/book-of-job.jpg" /></a></div>
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<b>1. Be very quiet. </b>Jobs are scattered, fragile things. Have you ever met a really paranoid person who wasn't a pothead, but was just really really scared and therefore defensive and angry all the time because their adrenalin levels were always spiked? That's what jobs are like. They let home security salesmen into their houses, feed them whiskey and let them sleep with their daughters. If you're going to get close enough to snag one, you're going to need to be a home security salesman, or a girl scout, or a member of the church of jobs.<br />
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<b>2. Find the most beautiful, hospitable, relaxing place in the world.</b> It should be covered in sunlight and trees and blue skies. The weather should always be the exact temperature of blood. Once you've found it, take a moment to appreciate it and wonder what your life would be like if you lived there always.<br />
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Then seek out the exact opposite of that place - where it snows or hails all the time, where the land is flat and featureless, and there are only 500 people in a 200 mile radius and they are all covered in mosquito bites all the time, and people regularly lose fingers to either frostbite or paramilitary militias.<br />
That's where all the jobs are.<br />
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<b>3. Be beautiful.</b> Jobs are like unicorns - they only care about virginity and sex appeal.<br />
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<b>4. Pray to the Job Monster.</b> The Job Monster lives under your bed. It lies there eating the hours of your life you spend staring at the ceiling, wondering what illicit and ill-advised things you can do to make just a little bit more money. The Job Monster sends you emails constantly, of people also looking for jobs, trying to scrape out a living on the black market catching freelance half-jobs. You're a slightly more discerning collector than that - you know better than to waste your precious minutes tattooing 500 words on some mangy half-job's ass so you can come back and find it later, and use it as bait to catch another one. You know it looks lazy, but you also know that somewhere deep inside of you there is a well of really good art, and you don't want it tainted, and you want time to search for it slowly, not panicked or stressed, but quietly and softly, so that the really good job sitting there at the well's edge drinking doesn't catch your scent and run off.<br />
You are starting to realize that you should have settled for a husband years ago, because now you're going to die alone and poor, and it's not like this appeals to you, and you're trying not to be an idealistic brat - but there must be a reason why being sincere about it worked for all those other famous hunters you admire.<br />
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These are the thoughts the Job Monster is gobbling and sucking up as they fall off your bed sheets like snowflakes or dandruff.<br />
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<b>5. Stare out the window at the morning sky. </b>Wonder at how very vividly blue it is, a certain kind of sunshine at 10:30am blue, and the yellowish green of the tree leaves shines out against it. The air smells like September. You feel something in the back of your eyelids lift and heave up in a gasp, and there is an empty feeling in your chest as everything inside you jumps up to your skull, and out your eyes, and this is how you transcend, like the Virgin Mary, just let everything defy gravity and head speedingly up up up...and then while you're ascending through the clouds, if you get scared of the upcoming lack of atmosphere, if you decide the approaching view of space is not worth the inevitable suffocation and death, if you chicken out - you can turn your head around and try to use the vantage point of being a satellite to try and spot the best job. Once you see one, don't worry, you'll fall fast enough. You'll be mad you're descending so quickly, you'll wish you had stayed up there just a little longer. Every once in a while, you'll regret not burning up in the atmosphere. But at least you'll have a job.Bridget Callahanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06729980008876962813noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9077624495684601002.post-35781250922675470022013-11-18T20:27:00.002-05:002013-11-18T20:30:38.359-05:007 Tips For Making Yourself More Attractive<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOs5HgUqsYQ4WPolXTG6Wwi8sW9xKGcLrB5NqGgrGqz8NVKDr6o5Ykyu9pfiKJOwahqDL9Zdi2xb7XLiOo97EZDNb8-7-uqOdA73Dqr14_OeFcsRE0_ZtV6pljR5WL9MntC1ndmceRNDk/s1600/12-scientifically-proven-ways-to-make-yourself-more-attractive-to-the-opposite-sex.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOs5HgUqsYQ4WPolXTG6Wwi8sW9xKGcLrB5NqGgrGqz8NVKDr6o5Ykyu9pfiKJOwahqDL9Zdi2xb7XLiOo97EZDNb8-7-uqOdA73Dqr14_OeFcsRE0_ZtV6pljR5WL9MntC1ndmceRNDk/s400/12-scientifically-proven-ways-to-make-yourself-more-attractive-to-the-opposite-sex.jpg" /></a><br />
<span style="font-size: xx-small;"><i>photo courtesy of <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-attract-the-opposite-sex-2013-7">this terrible article</a> and also cause this looks like the still of a really good movie </i></span><br />
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Every one of us has had a morning where we stand in front of the mirror, the whole day ahead of us, and we look at our face and think "How am I going to pull this off?" The desire to be more attractive to the opposite sex is the most primary natural instinct we have. We smell like it. We taste like it. Our bodily functions cycle on it. Every single person in the world, from the time they are born until their last breath, is going through this.<br />
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Unfortunately, not everyone is given the best equipment. Some of us, most of us, just have faulty genes. Our families have been pumping poison and crap through our blood pool for centuries. We have been bent and molded like plastic dough. However, it turns out since we're all mostly like that, you can actually change yourself to compensate for your shortcomings. They did some study recently that said people totally cared most about traits that were only a matter of pulling out the credit card. Good hair, good clothes. Being neat, well put together, and confident. Being nice. And being generally within the norm of physical fitness.<br />
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But also, all that stuff is hard. So here are some other, more (I think) easily achievable ideas.<br />
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<b>1) Try not brushing your hair all that often.</b><br />
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Maybe this isn't true everywhere, but here in North Carolina, the humidity makes everyone's hair kinda curly, and if you brush it all the time, it get's thin and frizzy. But if you never brush it, just maybe comb it every couple of days, let it air dry, most of the time it looks cute. And if it doesn't, then just take comfort in the fact that you're helping to keep the bar low for the rest of us.<br />
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<b>2) Remember to ask questions about other people.</b><br />
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I'm not going to qualify this one. I'm just going to give you a blank stare.<br />
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<b>3) Don't be upset about something all the time.</b><br />
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Make sure you set aside a few hours during the day to not be angry or worried or sad about something. It doesn't matter what you feel, as long as it isn't one of those things. Some people call it "me" time. I call it "how to maintain and care for your humanity" time.<br />
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<b>4) Be clean.</b><br />
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Just in general, don't smell. You can smell a little. You can even occasionally be smelly, anyone who *does* stuff can't help that. But shower, or bathe, or whatever, every couple days. I will even accept bathing in the ocean, if you really want to conserve water. I accept that as a thing. But water should touch you en masse every once in a while.<br />
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<b>5) Have thoughts about things that have no immediate relevance to your life.</b><br />
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Like, try reading a science magazine. The actual articles, not just the i09 writeup. Or read a book, but not a book about running, or mothering, or anything at all that actually is something you do already. Like, a book about something you never even thought of doing - murder or prostitution or the cod industry.<br />
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All anyone really wants in a partner is someone who's going to be entertaining, and if you are only average looking you can't count on sex being entertaining always, so you need some other assets. Random science facts or being able to play music, those things count. People who are really into international news, that counts. Baking croissants counts. It's not that hard to be interesting, you just have to be interested.<br />
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<b>6) Girls, always wear a flushed cheek, </b>and put a little rosiness on the swoop of your eyelid, and try to match up a pink lip, and honest to god, this makes it look like you just came sometime in the very near past, and guys totally dig this. Not a lie. Totally true.<br />
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<b>Guys, </b>just smile more and stand closer.<br />
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<b>7) Do something, some adventure, all alone by yourself.</b> Make it something really cool, like two weeks in Turkey or a coffee tour in Jamaica. Then you have a cool story to drop anytime you're talking to a new person at a party, but also since you did it by yourself, you're automatically going to get this look of introspection and mystery, cause you'll be remembering something you've not related to other people, and that's really, really hot.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">8) Have a pet dinosaur or whale or giraffe or lion or whatever, something really really big.</span><br />
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<br />Bridget Callahanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06729980008876962813noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9077624495684601002.post-64247981301732388202013-11-17T13:32:00.000-05:002013-11-17T13:32:24.476-05:00Lashes<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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She got them because when she wears them, she feels like a movie star, like an animated character, something more approximating a sex kitten than anything she ever feels by herself. And as such, they give her power, the only kind of power a girl can really feel, because maybe you can talk men into doing things - paying you, respecting you - but you haven't got any real power over them until they want you. </div>
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They come from Indonesia, or China, somewhere gray with industrial dust, and green with predatory vines, full of small brown people who smile widely at foreign cameras, their teeth rotting in their skulls and the stained walnut sheen of manual labor and poverty. In those places, the visual images of beauty have been laid bare, stripped of the intellectual justifications of the West - women are either pretty, or they are cattle. She was told once, in a moment of first world poverty (which is the kind where you don't go to the bars for a few months and you live off processed cheese) that she should move over there, with her big blue eyes and huge tits she could make a killing just by being a hostess at some bar. The person telling her that didn't hear the stink of rape in those words, not hers but all the girls in that world who wouldn't look like her, and therefore not be okay. If she had brown eyes and darker skin, there would be no talk of adventures with moneyed businessmen, there would only be settling for the first somewhat gentle guy to think she can keep a house and have babies. There would be no long studied conversations about self-awareness over cocktails, there would be only work, cook, worry, get fucked, get a few hours sleep, wake up and do it again, for the rest of your life. Know that you aren't good enough for anything else - cling to the daily pains and suffering as the only things that actually make you an individual. </div>
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The lashes are long and shiny and black. She wipes off her mascara before going to bed, and the unnaturalness of them sticks out even more - the plastic black against the soft, thin brown of her own. </div>
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Whose lashes are those? Were they ripped off some child in Africa? She smiles at the girl asking the question, but she wants to point out they were only made by a child, not physically tortured off one. What's the difference, really? Older, richer, desperate women have been sucking the youth from children for centuries, to stain their lips and drape soft things across their skin - an entire class of Madame Bathorys, Countesses of Blood. </div>
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When she wears them, people tell her how pretty she looks, what has she done differently? They can't even remember what she looked like before, not enough to know, even though it's obvious - they could never be real. But people still ask, are they? As if doll things could occur naturally, aren't they supposed to?</div>
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She goes to sleep with them on, and dreams of plastic hair, plastic lips, plastic dresses and stockings and shoes and plastic skin gleaming unblemished and powdered perfect, of men pulling out plastic - sitting across small tables enchanted by things that have been manufactured for them, to keep their attention, like ravens or trolls. Then she dreams deeper. She dreams of factories made of sheet metal walls, dirt floors packed down and crawling with fleas and lice and roaches, of eating cheap noodles out of lead painted bowls - the bland bleached flour taste sour and slick on her and she sees more men. They are everywhere, their faces grown bulbous and elephantine by years of drink and smoke, not even the same creature as her but Men, who demand money, who demand work, who grope and poke and laugh, who pull her hair and tell her why she is ugly - all the reasons she is ugly and useless and no one will ever love her because her skin is not white and her figure isn't thin, and she doesn't smile, why doesn't she smile? </div>
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It doesn't matter, if she smiled they would just tell her that her teeth are too crooked to suck their cocks properly, and then kneel her down in some back room and push it in between her cracked and dry lips, because nothing is good enough for what they deserve but they'll take it all anyway.</div>
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She dreams of drunk men in uniforms, thick with fire and brimstone and the command of craftier men than them, dreams of them rushing in like wolves in the middle of the night to tear their wooden houses apart, to cut the communists' heads off with piano wire, to slice open their faces and tongues, and she sees the women huddled in their night clothes, being pulled away to the jungle one by one as the soldiers feel like it, and the next day she will see those same men in the town, running their soup stands and hat shops and those same wolves will cower to the bigger, badder wolves in suits, who eat and shit Western money, but no one would ever think to cower before the stone, the concrete boulder sitting on her chest, underneath which lives her pain. It waits inside her, inarticulate, unknown to even her, leaching it's toxins into her bones and slowly smouldering into a fire. </div>
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She wakes up and knows it is a lie, it's an idea of an idea she saw or heard somewhere, but she feels the stone inside her own chest - a pebble in comparison, but building building building like a dirty snowball. In the dream, she felt fury and fire. In the morning light now, she feels only the desire to be numbed by it's persistent coldness, until she can't feel anything, and can only go through the motions - smile, manicure, pick something cute, reapply lipstick, smile in the face of humiliating rudeness because you're just a girl and you shouldn't be crazy.</div>
Bridget Callahanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06729980008876962813noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9077624495684601002.post-91434533164769567322013-11-13T12:20:00.000-05:002013-11-13T12:20:13.521-05:00This is How Myths Start<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNVEr6ztr2oMBtFOxcKtqJFCddfRQnk8nje0F9GTqCCbYSPXID0m-RCDQUG3OP_GiIwJeifTnHT8VsdNEMXhubO44GQqWlO7DtAH8vGpb5hSN2X7Fm1DtwiNdfgOHEjFm-ScdwVqWPrj8/s1600/2936145118_c4f7d7286b_b.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNVEr6ztr2oMBtFOxcKtqJFCddfRQnk8nje0F9GTqCCbYSPXID0m-RCDQUG3OP_GiIwJeifTnHT8VsdNEMXhubO44GQqWlO7DtAH8vGpb5hSN2X7Fm1DtwiNdfgOHEjFm-ScdwVqWPrj8/s640/2936145118_c4f7d7286b_b.jpg" /></a><br />
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I am, by natural inclination, a very superstitious person.<br />
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Wait, let's start here instead.<br />
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Once upon a time, when the Earth had just formed out of a coagulation, a collision of rocks and space dust, when it was just a ball of smashed together minerals, the heat from the impact of all those little bits and pieces grew to be so hot all the metal was able to run together, and the planet was nothing but a molten marble, a suspended drop of swirling heavy poisonous rock. And when this happened, all the iron and nickel in the molten mixture started to gather and sink to center, pulled by gravity and whirling dervishes, and it all came together in a dense crazy whirlpool of super-heated stuff, and is now what's known as the Earth's Core. The thing that gives us our magnetic field and therefore allows our entire atmosphere to exist. This is known as the Iron Catastrophe, Jere told me about it as casually as one sends a link to their friend of a Dogs Eating Pickles tumblr. And I felt two things when I read it - first, shame at not knowing about this already or more likely, having forgotten about it already, and two, gratefulness that it existed and a desire to honor that it existed and tell people about it.<br />
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I think this is the base emotional process behind superstition - the shame is basically fear of being found not worthy, unable to prove your value or competency in the face of a huge universe that isn't capable of showing mercy for your best intentions, and which you will likely never be able to know or conquer, whose attention you may never be able to catch. Right, like, when you are something way smaller trying to not get killed by something way bigger, it's important to decide if you either need to hide from their attentions, or you need to try and get their attention so they don't step on you. I guess it depends if you prefer to see the universe as something hunting you, or something marching past you unaware. I prefer the latter, it seems less psychopathic. So first, the shame and fear. That's where the gesture of a superstition comes in - the throwing of salt, or the motion of avoiding a crack, or the carrying around of certain objects.<br />
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The second part then is the belief. Once you've made the gesture, you have to have the belief behind it, or it won't work. Any 15 yr old witch will tell you that. Spells require real belief, and that's where the gratefulness comes in. Because it creates a rush of emotion that sings out "Yes, and Thank You", one of top ten most powerful things you can utter when you really mean it.If I were to believe, for instance, that all I had to do to conjure something I wanted - a desire or a safety - was to think very hard about the molten core spinning around at the center of our planet for millennium, and the very wonder of its formation and existence and slowness of process, then if I was clutching a magnet in my hand and thinking of its mother iron at the same time, that would be a spell. Superstitions are just the little spells we all do, all day, to compartmentalize our worlds.<br />
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I have excuses for believing in these kinds of things, and also for looking and seeing signs of synchronicity all around me. I was raised Catholic, and I was read fairy tales every night before bed. What else could possibly have happened to me? Of course I was going to have an unwavering sense of magic, more so than god or law. Here are some examples:<br />
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- My birthday is 7/10, Sean's birthday is 10/7. I believed this was important for the longest time, and attributed significance also to the fact that the last number in the year I was born was the last number in the year he was born, but flipped upside down, and also kinda believed this was why we always had such bad birthdays together, because we were birthday opposites.<br />
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- A few years ago, I created a fake fb profile for my fake boyfriend, just so I could have my relationship status read things like "Bridget is currently separated from Sunny Disposition. Today is Sunny's birthday, according to the random date in November I picked when I made his profile. Turns out, today is also the birthday of a guy I met 8 months ago, whom I'm consistently halfway in love with. No part of me really thinks that's a coincidence.<br />
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- A guy bought me a rock. I carried it around with me cause I liked it a lot. I lost it, and we started being awkward around each other. I found it again, and everything smoothed out and got better. So now I'm attributing the health of our friendship to whether or not I've got this rock on me.<br />
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Obviously all these things are crazy. Only a crazy person would believe they were true, and I know they are not true, but....I feel they're true. I know they're not; I feel they are.<br />
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And lately I think I've come to a decently solid interpretation of this contradiction, which is that I don't believe in God, but I believe in the Narrative. I believe in the human brain's infinite capacity to turn anything into a story, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. I believe that the practice of drawing those lines between events in order to sequence our experiences is the creation of time, and the constant evaluating of our memories creates place, and the position of hero or villain in our stories creates our sense of identity, creates us. We honor the great Narrative in our lives when we create these stories and recognize them.<br />
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In my particular story, I am apparently boy crazy. Anyone who knows me will tell you it's true. I don't really know why, I'm just that kind of person and always have been, I relate everything in my life to sex. I take a morning supplement that is basically what they give to guys to increase virility, and honest to god, it's the healthiest for keeping my coat shiny and my teeth sharp, the sex plant simply works on my cells best. I think some people are just based in certain emotions, like the humours of the body or the elements. And to write it off as just an excess of lust, like it's something a little common decency could fix, is oversimplifying and naive. There's a lot of emotions and actions and choices and beliefs that play into my kind of personality. It's a very vulnerable and risky thing to be - the kind of powers you choose to fuel your life say a lot about you, and sex (not as the act, but as the mindset) is one of the most uncontrollable, but also one of the most potent. When you choose to use it to try and relate to the universe, to let it be your key into understanding reality, your filter or translator or however you want to take this metaphor, then you are saying "It's more important to me to be powerful than it is to be safe."<br />
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My point is, I'm a girl who knows about spells, and it doesn't surprise me at all that I would seek out the most dangerous power source for my own magics. I don't know how you're supposed to be a priestess of the Narrative otherwise.Bridget Callahanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06729980008876962813noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9077624495684601002.post-1141179205206013552013-11-10T00:27:00.001-05:002013-11-10T00:27:51.347-05:00Can't Undead the Dead<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I had a weird thing happen to me yesterday. I hooked up with this guy, just strictly a very casual thing, but he's a nice guy, and so hanging out with him was naturally very sweet and affectionate, and it all sort of happened as easily as it could have - there was none of the "does he like me?" or "what's going on here" tension that I've been flooded with this past year. I mean, there was a little, because there should always be a little, but only for an hour or two when we first met, and then everything was very obvious and mutually acknowledged. It was, one could argue (especially any "one" that read that post a few days ago when I was in the thrall of disappointment), exactly what I needed. Wilmington, and maybe North Carolina as a whole, has this spell where it does that - it waits exactly until you've hit rock bottom needing or wanting something, and then it drops it in your lap. You just have to stick out the desperation. Ran out of my savings - needed a job - came down to 2 dollars in my bank account and the next day got a job at a place that gives you free food. Couldn't afford my apartment, was going to be homeless sleeping on my friends' couches - Teresa and Steve suddenly need to get a place too. Fallen deep into the self-loathing hole of rejection and vanity - meet some nice guy who doesn't tell you that you're so smart or confident, but instead tells you how sexy and pretty you are. North Carolina's versions of miracles - or maybe this is how homeless people live.</div>
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So this morning I should have been in a good mood. But as soon as I got to work, as soon as, in fact, my fingers wrapped around the little pink rock I've been keeping in my pocket as a worry stone, I felt this terrible melancholy sit on my chest. I couldn't shake it, it got heavier and heavier. I was just flooded with this sense of focus-less guilt and shame and mostly missing - it was as if my psyche, once it was away from the nice, comforting petting, became irrational aware of the hole of being in love. I mean, I'm always a little in love, with something or someone or everything and everyone - I'm one of those plastic molds they poured love into when they were making the diorama, and I've just been slowly melting in other people's heat since. And like, my head finally fell off or something, just another thing broke inside. I was inexplicably distraught. I think I may be addicted to touch. I think once I get it, I become a junkie, and the withdrawal is that much worse. One heavy petting and I'm off like a powder keg, I explode in affection, and then for another six months I'm depleted and raw. </div>
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It reminded me, no wait, it was exactly the same feeling I used to get when Sean and I would break up and not see each other for a few months, before running into each other out, and then right back into the habit of being in love.</div>
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Then, of course, it got really busy at work, and I got really stressed out (which is dumb, because even the most stressful day at the co-op isn't really stressful at all). I have a button on my apron at work that I write different sayings on each week and this week it was " Sincerity is Underrated". It's been good for reminding me, and customers, to talk to each other like people who see each other every day, rather than just cashier and customer - I've learned lots of interesting things about people, especially older ladies who could be my mom, my mom is exactly the sort of lady who will respond to that sort of thing thoughtfully, and so I guess it makes sense her daughter wrote it in black sharpie to wear on her work apron, like David used to write on white t-shirts to wear to shows. A guy I have a crush on - a really smart guy I always feel the need to impress, and probably fail at miserably every time - came in, and he asked me how I was doing and I actually told him. I mean, I didn't tell him the boy stuff, but I told him about school, and life, and how I felt off kilter with my whole life at the moment, like Jere's visit had shaken all the silt in me around, and at the moment I just felt muddy and unclear. And he told me about work stress, and then at some point we talked about rainwater reservoirs being water jugs for huge animals, like if there was giraffe rescue, like how much better my life would be if I could just drive by the giraffe rescue and see their heads poking up among the pine trees. Because sincerity is underrated. And then another boy, a friend of mine, came in, and he was on the phone the whole time he was in the store, but as he was leaving we gave each other a huge long hug, and see, sincerity is underrated. Then I realized I was dehydrated, drank a large glass of water, and eventually felt better. </div>
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That picture up there is from a battlefield around here. It was the first place I walked around and really felt the blood in the sand. There's a church there, or the ruins of a church, and on the older plaque inside the church, it talks about how the settlers of the fort tried to save up for ages to build the church, tried a lottery and everything. But then one night, a Spanish galleon crashed on the coast, and the villagers took the loot that washed up, sold it, and were able to afford the church. Cute, right? Only later on as you're walking through the ruins of the fort, there's another more modern plaque, the kind Park Services builds under pavilions, and that plaque pointed out that the "cargo" which had washed up on shore during the storm, was actually a boatload of slaves. So basically the slaves that managed to escape the sinking ship, and survive to swim to shore in the cold Atlantic during a storm, were then captured by settlers and sold off, and then they built that church, and I swear I've never stood in a building I wanted to see completely torn down and disintegrated as much as that one. </div>
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So yeah, you can smell blood everywhere in that place, dead bodies everywhere. The trees have drank off it, the vines have grown through it, the little tiny sand crabs have eaten it. That's why everything in this place is so predatory, it's because we gave it a taste. </div>
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But I correlate the way that place made me feel, and the way I felt today, standing at the counter with my homemade life sayings pins, ringing up almond butter and gluten free cake, knowing how ready I was to be in love again. Not with that guy. Not with any guy I know. But with someone. It's like, you can feel the past destruction, the past loves, the past murders, and the sense of the impending long slow march pools at your feet and tries to suck you into the bloody sand, but you know this is just how this place is now. This is just how you are now. You can't unkill soldiers, and you can't unlove love. </div>
Bridget Callahanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06729980008876962813noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9077624495684601002.post-22544662385268471612013-11-08T11:37:00.003-05:002013-11-08T11:38:58.434-05:00History Lessons<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEianlZ-vvltWdQTwhjCiMpOGRhpJz3e5igi1juma2OUXAJbkmw2AZKqk1bTOkSoqgO4QsABaZHkTPS1mO7w7dmEj1hmzRj4LvhX3USboIWCAE1jMtxbpjADOAA2d14zzGW9pRY1L-XABU4/s1600/004.JPG" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEianlZ-vvltWdQTwhjCiMpOGRhpJz3e5igi1juma2OUXAJbkmw2AZKqk1bTOkSoqgO4QsABaZHkTPS1mO7w7dmEj1hmzRj4LvhX3USboIWCAE1jMtxbpjADOAA2d14zzGW9pRY1L-XABU4/s400/004.JPG" /></a><br />
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This is one of the most beautiful places on Earth. Of course, every place is one of the most beautiful places on Earth. But this particular place, at noon on a hot Sunday in August, getting lost with Eric looking for a place called Sugarloaf, this stands apart in a history of beautiful places. Place and time are inextricable, you can never go back to this place, it's never the same light or smells or clouds or person.<br />
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I might have said this earlier, when I first moved here. I remember thinking it at least - that one very obvious thing different about this landscape was how detailed it was. All these little shards of color and shadow, broken up in contrast as if someone had applied one of those HDR filters to the entire world, and then used their flash because everything is So Bright. I never thought about it, but Ohio is much more watercolored and smudged.<br />
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There's just so many leaves everything, thin leaves. It's all thin here, instead of broad and flat.<br />
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In the state parks, the sand lies hard packed into hilly wooded dunes, covered with pine needles and decomposing plants. It's a weird texture to walk on - like you can't really go barefoot cause it's rough, but also you can't wear sneakers because it's all sand and there's nothing worse than getting sand in your socks and having to still walk 2 miles back, in more sand. I have learned to hike in flip flops which seems really really unhealthy, though for reasons I just can't pinpoint. I was always so self conscious about my feet, I like how quickly that fell away, like, last January. Anyway, you have to wear flip flops, or straight up boots, or one of those expensive hybrid shoes they sell in camping magazines.<br />
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There are little pockets of the smallest cypress groves ever. Like, as if we are wandering in a diorama of the Pleistocene era at the Natural History Museum - trudging through the ground up shells of mollusks and the worn away bones of mammoths. There are giant sloths watching us from the trees, and everywhere the acid of evolving life is bubbling and churning away, sending it's DNA stink into the clouds and into our lungs.<br />
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I don't know how I'm expected to *not* fall in love with everyone here. I'm living in the same primordial soup as the people who first created language.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdaHpoYOvkc5pQtGpwRCPz5XU2XCyEl0mmoXpz-IPvCkUr6vmkzuSLaNfZ2BOWB6CcIhgF4PRiBWUJX96w-df90oVhMDCHjxS56cp_xwrIiCHUUcAcp-CqEiVW3nhAvZ8oohF6sMVdK5k/s1600/028.JPG" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdaHpoYOvkc5pQtGpwRCPz5XU2XCyEl0mmoXpz-IPvCkUr6vmkzuSLaNfZ2BOWB6CcIhgF4PRiBWUJX96w-df90oVhMDCHjxS56cp_xwrIiCHUUcAcp-CqEiVW3nhAvZ8oohF6sMVdK5k/s400/028.JPG" /></a>Bridget Callahanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06729980008876962813noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9077624495684601002.post-84065940184297486862013-11-06T10:58:00.000-05:002013-11-06T11:00:07.873-05:00Wilmington Vasectomy<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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There's a guy I know who just got a vasectomy.<br />
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It's bad, because at first when he told me about it, I was all supportive and sympathetic, because I had a boyfriend once who got one, and every time I say that out loud to myself, I feel this dark twinge of "Oh geez, he *really* didn't want to get me pregnant..." I mean, no matter who you are, you're going to have some deep pyschological reaction to the idea of a vasectomy or hysterectomy.<br />
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So anyway, I was the good, sensible, positive friend. And then he told me about how since he only had one ball, from a previous trauma, the doctor had given him a half price vasectomy. Because they only need to do half the procedure, right? See? And now I can't stop laughing every time I see him. Which is not what you should do to a man who just got fixed.<br />
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His girlfriend (and let me tell you, it was a bit weird having casual frank conversation with a couple about their vasectomy) knew a girl who had to have a c-section, and she had them do a hysterectomy at the same time, cause hey, you're already in there. Two for the price of one hysterectomy and baby delivery.<br />
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There's a Wilmington Vasectomy Commercial. When Mom came to visit, she was particularly impressed by the soft core porn style billboards for plastic surgery all around town, and also we have local commercials for vasectomy services.<br />
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A bunch of women at the co-op where I work just had babies. They are all the cutest babies ever, and not just cause they are babies, but because the general attractiveness of everyone in this place is so much higher, and that also applies to babies. It's gotten to the point where I feel bad when I see a not so cute baby in the place, because it must feel self-conscious next to the virtual Gap ads being carried around in swaths of Egyptian Cotton by their yoga model mothers.<br />
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Look, the thing is, I'm not against yoga as exercise, I mean, I have a neutral opinion about it. Certainly everyone I know who does it is much prettier than normal. But the culture of it? With all the clothes and mats and headbands and blissness - it's creepy. I call it Yoga Brain. People come in after class, and they are blissed out on an exercise high, and they're half asleep, wandering around, getting into their cars and driving. Sometimes it's hard to have a conversation with someone who is *really* into yoga, because that weird calmness makes it hard to read the normal physical and social cues. On the other hand, it's pretty easy to convince people with Yoga Brain that you're awesome, because you just have to be sweet and friendly to them, and they think you embody happiness in the universe at that exact moment in time and existence.Which is why I always feel bad when a Yoga Brain's card gets declined, it seems so mean to harsh on them like that. It's usually just cause they entered their pin wrong. But sometimes it's because they've been taking a 20 dollar class twice a day.<br />
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I don't know why vasectomies and yoga go together in my brain, but they really do.<br />
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I bet there are a lot of old rich men in this town who get vasectomies specifically so they can fuck whatever girls they want to and not have to worry about any illegitimate bastards coming after their fortunes, which are already divided up enough between three alimonies and child support. I bet that's a thriving industry here - the vasectomy that frees you to enjoy the fruits of your manhood and early retirement. A vasectomy you deserve.<br />
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If I was an old, rich man, I'd get one.<br />
But also if I was an old rich man, I'd look homeless, so it wouldn't matter. I'd probably *be* homeless.Bridget Callahanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06729980008876962813noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9077624495684601002.post-50550092402756132972013-11-05T12:33:00.000-05:002013-11-05T12:33:56.989-05:00The One Where We Try This Again<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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This weekend, Jeremiah came to visit me.<br />
We drank a lot with people in Halloween costumes, and went to the chilly beach, all around the big old mansions and hidden gardens, into the hipster house party and the southern polish festival and down the Cape Fear river on a flat boat with a piano and a dog. I made grits. It was the best I could do for him.<br />
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Every time a good friend of mine from Cleveland comes down here, I feel a conflict of personalities - a deep insecurity about how the Past Me will measure up to the Present Me. The Past Me was riddled with bad emotional decisions and squashed ambitions. The Present Me has sun bleached long hair and no money ever and the vulnerability of a small puppy that's just been weaned and needs someone to hug it. I'm not saying one is better than the other - no, actually that's exactly what I'm saying. But I need approval, I crave it constantly, and so a visitor will bring out a need to show them why I'm here. And every time, it works. They all love it here. They all say they want to move down here with me. I seem so happy here, they say. And I'm left feeling drained by my internal conflict, unable to process the validation, and somehow feeling rejected by the world. I want to follow them back to the safety of my neighborhood. I want a world that embraces me and loves me.<br />
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People have been repeating a refrain to me lately - how much Wilmington loves me, how amazing it is I know so many people, how great I'm doing for only a year here. I remember hearing the same refrain in Cleveland, and there's something about that kind of praise that makes me feel worse. Because I know it isn't true. I know it's just a facade of confidence I've put on, a persona that is still a persona no matter how hard I try to keep it real and true, and they see what they want to see. I mean, I get this is what we all do, present our good and sane face to the world. But in Cleveland, I had people who had seen me at my worst, for years. Here, that hasn't happened yet. My worst has been lying curled up in a tight little ball inside my chest, and just because I've learned to put a leash on it and teach it to sit doesn't mean it isn't there and it doesn't also need love. That's where the disconnect, the deep unhappiness I feel sometimes, comes from with this place. Most of the time, I'm fine. Half of the time I'm ecstatic here. Some of the time there is a gray heavy fog of despair, and I'm lost in it, and I don't understand why no one else can see it.<br />
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One night, I said to my roommate, as we drove back from the bar, "I don't understand it, I'm fuckable, right? I'm not hideous, right?"<br />
And he replied, "Bridget, you're the most confident person I know."<br />
Which is not the response any girl wants to hear. <br />
But there's only a few adjectives Wilmington knows to describe me with - confident, brilliant, intimidating, hilarious. I know I should be grateful to hear those, and I am, but it's only ever those four, ever. Over and over until they lose their meaning. In Cleveland, people threw beautiful or sexy in there occasionally. I haven't heard either of those in over a year. That makes me feel like something is horribly wrong.<br />
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And this is what Jere said to me, he said "Bridget, all the men who have fallen in love with you, it's been through your blog. That's how you get people to want you. You are never going to be the one they look at and fall for, they have to read you."<br />
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I think that's depressing as shit, but what can I do?<br />
They don't know, but I know that anyone who loves me for my mind is going to eventually have to deal with the worst of me, that isn't house trained and jumps on people and barks at passing cars all the time. So that'll never last anyway, and the only obvious conclusion is I'm just one of those people the world will love, who will never actually get love. That's a conclusion that tows the fine line of realism versus nihilism. Because sure we all know it's the *wrong* thing to say, that several good souls will try to console me and feed me lines about hope or whatever, but also it's a Very Real Possibility. It happens to people all the time. Especially really smart people who have ambitions of not settling, who are incapable of settling because they know it will turn them into a bad person. It's why having such a reliance on love like I do is a deep personality flaw, and one that will inevitably let you down again and again. <br />
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A friend of mine is going to a spiritualist conference this weekend, and the theme is "The Question That Drives You" - figuring out your personal koan. From their website:<br />
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<i>"<span style="background-color: white; font-family: verdana, helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18.71875px;">When we take all our life-actions into consideration, what primary drive are they trying to satisfy? If we want to increase our chances of fully satisfying that primary drive, would it make sense to pay more attention to the feeling of it, our interpretations of it, and how we could phrase it to ourselves in question form - in effect finding and working with our personal koan? Does it take great doubt to arrive at certainty?"</span></i><br />
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It's becoming increasingly obvious that one of the main stories in this town is the seeking of spiritual clarity. I think that must go along with the ocean thing - people attracted to the Great White Noise are seeking respite from the harsh daily noise of the physical real world, and so it makes sense they would be seeking emotional respite as well. There are a million churches here, and they are not all traditional Southern baptist. There is a growing collection of non-denominational, meditation based, yoga based, crystal and oil faiths - all the little closet ones that exist to help the bourgeoisie find a semblance of wisdom by talking to them about their favorite subject - themselves. All human beings love talking about ourselves. It interests us the most. It makes us feel special and important, to be the subject of introspection and critique. Tell me what my soul is like. Tell me what color it is, and what plan it has for me. Tell me how my heart should feel, how to forget I have a mortgage and kids and insurance bills, because I have enough money to cover all those, so I can afford to forget it for a while. Teach me how to be special, how to become superior to the other lost souls around me, and how to find all the other superior people so we can hang out together and talk about how great we are.<br />
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In that respect, Catholicism will always have a special place in my heart, because they just get together to talk about how non-special and awful they are. It's refreshing, that old school self-hatred.<br />
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I was somehow, almost completely against my mother's will, raised to believe I require no other moral structure than the one already in my head. I am weirdly unimaginative that way - I don't long for a god, or think to myself when I look at a beautiful sunset that there must be one. I don't believe in an afterlife, or anything other than decomposition, and I'm not scared of that, death seems totally normal and non-traumatic to me. My heart stands on a solidly concrete floor where it doesn't feel the need to ask questions of the universe that can't be answered. My heart thinks if there are other answers, I'll just learn them as they are presented, but why bother wondering about them until then?<br />
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But I do want to figure out why other people are so obsessed with them. I naturally come to that from a place of superiority, where I think "silly people, don't you know this is futile and doesn't help poor people, and maybe if we all just stopped thinking about ourselves for a few minutes and thought about real world things that would help people, maybe capitalism wouldn't exist." (As a counter-point, I offer this entire blog entry - but I know I would be a better person if I thought about myself less.)<br />
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That isn't a helpful attitude to have towards spiritual folks if you're trying to suss out where they come from and what they're about, and why people choose religion. Just like only thinking about yourself isn't helpful to life, thinking you're just naturally smarter than 90% of the population isn't helpful either. I have a fear of coming off like the biggest rube - the one missing some essential part of the human experience and just assuming it doesn't exist cause I don't see it.<br />
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So yesterday I was thinking about my own personal koan. What is the nonsensical statement that sums up the inspiration of my self-doubt the most? What is the clutter stopping me from seeing my own personal drive? Or do I already know it, and yes, actually I'm just more intuitive and well-adjusted? And HOW WILL I EVER KNOW IF I KNOW IT?<br />
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Is that it?<br />
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I mean, what is it that I want? Do I want love more than anything? I have lots of love around me, maybe it's to be desired that I want most. Or do I just want to be sure of what the hell is going on around me? Just to have a real knowledge that how I see reality is pretty close to the truth, and therefore some camouflaged cosmic angler fish isn't going to lunge out and surprise me and chew me up with sharp little teeth. If modern man has become aware that what he perceives as reality is a construct of only his experiences and therefore not reality at all, then isn't it just a primal form of self defense that we try to figure out if we're right or not?<br />
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A guy told me recently my desire to never be bored was intimidating. I thought to myself when he said it that he didn't understand where the truly interesting things about knowing someone lay, that when I really like someone, they are never boring to me - that really no one is boring if you are really looking at them and not just at yourself.<br />
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Last night, I watched something called John Safran vs. God - it's on Youtube, go find it, all 8 episodes are amazing. But in particular, the Buddhism episode. He goes to a monastery and tries to learn to meditate, to answer the koans correctly, and hold focus. He ends up getting beat with a stick a lot. And in the end he says he doesn't understand why Western Buddhists have left behind the best part of this ancient Eastern religion - which is getting to beat people with a stick a lot.<br />
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Maybe if American Buddhists beat each other with sticks, instead of buying 80 dollar yoga mats and burning 20 dollar beeswax candles of the Buddha, maybe I would like them more.<br />
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<br />Bridget Callahanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06729980008876962813noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9077624495684601002.post-71311152183363060372013-07-03T23:07:00.002-04:002013-07-03T23:07:50.107-04:00Leave of AbsenceI've been gone for a long time.<br />
It's my first summer by the ocean, and it turns out that the worst place in the world to have writer's block is by the ocean, because it's a giant white noise machine designed to get you addicted to cooking in your own sloth. But even worse, everyone tells you how healthy and awesome it is you're going to the ocean every day, because they don't understand you're using it to run away from the 5 stories you owe that you can't seem to write, and the bills you struggle to pay every month, and the general lack of affection in your life that's slowly becoming more of an obsession because sex is more interesting than the novel you were supposed to spend all summer working on that you no longer feel worthy of.<br />
<br />
If you're interested in what failure looks like, it turns out it's very, very tan.<br />
<br />
After this last full moon, I felt this release of frustration, a venting of sexual energy fed by disappointment and shame, and it came roaring out into the night, almost threw up in the parking lot of Blue Post, and caused me much mortification the next morning when I checked my text messages. But then, as if a boil had been lanced, the paralyzing shame of my own ineffectiveness drained away, leaving room for resolve to be better, and I can feel my head clearing up from the pheromones, and the twenty thousand crushes I had slowly being replaced by the much more useful desire to be a good writer. So I think we're back on track now, or getting there. But I won't be attempting to get back to this blog for a while, because I have those stories, and that novel, and then school starts in two months again. And I am SO far behind.<br />
<br />
In the meantime, as a marker for anyone who's googling me and seeing this defunct site (which I still love very very much), here is a story I recently had published in the UNCW literary magazine, <a href="http://www.atlantismagazine.org/">Atlantis. </a><br />
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<b id="docs-internal-guid-68b38092-a7a0-bd66-aebf-3e9f1fce6feb" style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Deer Eggs</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Gladys comes into the office holding a carton of eggs in her hand. The office is very modern, all the walls are painted happy shades of yellow and white, and the furniture is pale blonde. Gladys is not pale blonde, she is dark mahogany, and her figure is very trim. She wears cotton skirts and cute button up blouses. The effect of her walking across the tastefully gray carpet towards my desk is very neat and professional. Except for the eggs.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> She puts the eggs on my desk, and I can see they are larger than chicken eggs, very large in fact, and cracked all over. “You need to take these,” she says, and it is not a request. One of the eggs shakes a little, quivers on its axis in the plastic carton. There is a new crack. Something is moving around.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> “What is it?” I try to remain calm. Everything is always a crisis around here.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> “Deer eggs. I found them in my backyard, and I can’t have them in the house, Gary will go apeshit if we get deer. He loves his chrysanthemums.” She stands there with her perfectly formed hands on her trim little hips, and for a minute I am consumed with hate for neat little Gladys and her neat little yard and her neat little husband who gardens and has the same first initial as her. But it’s fleeting. I actually like Gladys a lot. I just wish she wasn’t so pretty.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> “What am I going to do with them?” Everyone in this office comes to me with the weird stuff. I suppose it’s because I don’t dress like I belong there. I tried at first, but then my entire wardrobe became work clothes, and I felt boring when I went out socially, so I decided it was better to not fit in at the office than not fit in with my friends. And if it’s not my clothes, it’s probably the mousepad on my desk, which is blown up photos of viruses and bacteria I got from a friend of mine who works at an animal hospital. Being the weird one is okay. It keeps the serious stuff off your desk, and it’s important to not let things land on your desk. Once it’s physically on your desk, the problem is yours; that’s the golden rule here.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> “I thought maybe you could take them out to your mom’s farm. Let them live there. They’re mostly deer eggs, but I think there’s a few chicken in there too. Doesn’t your mom have chickens?”</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Pushing aside the absurdity of the situation, the fact that Gladys has just brought me a tray of living breathing about to be born animals and that she brought it as casually as one might bring in a jello salad to the company picnic, my nurturing sucker instincts take over. If there are chickens in there, they need heat. I pick up the tray and position it under the small sun lamp I have for my cactus. Gladys seems satisfied that I’ve taken ownership by my act of touching the damn things, and walks away.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> I’ve never heard of deer eggs. I sit there in my office chair for a minute studying them. They are large, almost the size of ostrich eggs. I pick one up carefully with two hands. It is hot and disturbingly smooth, like a child’s hand. It gives a violent shake and I almost drop it, so I put it safely back. But they will need to be moved. I have a bread basket on my kitchen counter, I think I can line it with a towel and that should do. It is impossible to work after that. I try to type, but the slightest movement of the eggs distracts me. I google “deer eggs” and find nothing. I feel a fear building in me, a worry, I have no idea what’s actually in those things. Are they hawks? Ducks? Platypuses? Obviously I know it’s not deer, I’m not an idiot, I know how mammals work. But it’s hard to fight the instinctual excitement of something being born. Whatever’s in there, I want them to survive.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Finally the day is over. I drive home carefully, the eggs cradled in my coat on the front passenger seat, my hand hovering over them in case I have to stop suddenly. I feel infinitely relieved when I get them upstairs to my second floor walkup and they are established safely in my smallest laundry basket, the bread basket being too small after all. They sit there, on my kitchen counter under the sun lamp for the rest of the night. I lock the cat up in the second bedroom. I drink a beer and sit there on my only stool, watching them, gently touching, tracing the cracks with my fingertips. I can tell which ones are the chicken ones, there are two of them and they are much smaller. They don’t move nearly as much as the four larger eggs and I worry they are dead, but maybe they are just not ready to come out.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The next morning when I wake up, I’m ecstatic to see one of the chicken eggs is cracking too. All of them are moving like crazy, it shouldn’t be much longer. I remember something about turning the eggs, to make sure they are coming out right side up. Sticking my hand in the basket to gingerly move them is the same as sticking it in a basket of scorpions. I recognize there is now a terror weight in my chest, a large beast breathing slow hot air into my cheeks, which are vivid and red. I call off work, tell them I have a fever. I have a little fantasy while I'm eating cereal that Gladys wonders why I'm not there, wonders if something happened. But better that it be me, the girl living alone with no husband or kids to worry about. I start to feel more charitable to her, but only a little.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It's a beautiful warm sunny day. I take a book with me to the back yard, and the basket. We lay in the sun. I'm vaguely aware that an actual mother would never do this because of hawks and vermin. "Lucky eggs, you. You landed in the arms of a superior predator, " I say to them. They are being still at the moment, it must be hard work, hatching. Especially if you're a little deer, trying to kick out with your spindly little knocky knees all tied up in knots. Someone close by is cutting the grass, and it smells warm. I fall asleep briefly.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I dream of the pulsing red beats of life, of the color of your thumb when you hold a flashlight to it, of the spark of livesavers in my mouth late at night around a school trip camp fire. I dream of falling off my bike, and first dates.They are dreams of being afraid and full of awe at the same time, a euphoric lack of control over the universe’s laws and regulations. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When I finally open my eyes, my body is cold and stiff. The sun has gone down, way down, and the yard is night time dark. There are crickets chirping in the blue shadow leaves, and the memory of the sun still lingers but has chilled considerably. I sit up. Even the grass feels sharper. Looking down by my side, I can see the eggs are lying broken, empty. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">They are stumbling in the weeds, a few feet away. Tiny, delicate, and awkward; only a few inches tall and glowing a faint moonlight green. The hooves of their stumbling glass feet must be smaller than my fingernail. My eyes trace the contours of their arched necks, their pointed fawn ears laid back in confusion, their big dark eyes wide with introduction. The babies stumble and climb up unsteadily again, the strong ones are fairly walking already. Among the stalks of grass that are barely taller than their heads, the light from their bodies sparkles and drifts, interrupted like glitter. I stay incredibly still, and barely I catch the soft high pitched squeals and murmurs. It sounds like pieces of chandelier glass knocking against each other. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Then I catch a different sound, a very ordinary cheep, a chirp, from a little closer. By my knee, the one little chicken to survive. She is shivering in the evening air, curled up against a fold in the blanket. I reach down and cup her beating weak body in my hands, hold her up to my cheek. She settles into me immediately, and falls asleep. I think to myself that I’ll give this one to Gladys in the morning, she and Gary can take care of a chicken, they’ll probably like that. A pet chicken playing among the chrysanthemums. The chick and I watch the deer, keeping each other warm. </span></div>
<br /><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span>Bridget Callahanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06729980008876962813noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9077624495684601002.post-5912342267753382042013-04-18T16:29:00.000-04:002013-04-18T16:30:31.801-04:00Desperate Times Call for Desperate Confidence<a href="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8243/8661671968_f697f9cdc4_z.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8243/8661671968_f697f9cdc4_z.jpg" /></a>
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<br />
So I'm in a self inflicted bind. I need some way to get at least 700 dollars in the next two months in order to stay afloat with school, and an apartment. It's not as bad as it was a month ago, when I was basically fantasizing about mild acts of prostitution as a possible solution (I'm sorry Mom, but we're all adult women here and we've all had those holes.)Thanks to the fact that I have some superpower when it comes to finding really amazing friends wherever I go, the fog of "Oh my god, this is so fucked up I can't even imagine it ever changing, good or bad, like I can't even conceive of the very worst result", that fog has lifted a little. But...there's not a very large margin for error, and I want to be able to stay in school, so I'm not fucking around with this.<br />
<br />
I don't think of myself as someone with very much to offer this planet, but I do think the one thing I know how to do with semi-reliable accuracy is write a short short story. Especially when I have a very specific audience. Like, you guys know, you've read those posts that were very obviously intended for one person, usually a boy. I'm not a good typist. I'm not a particularly good comedian. But I can be a good writer.<br />
<br />
So for a donation of ten dollars, I will write you a 300-400 word story, about anything you ask me to. Anything at all. I'm sort of hoping you will get creative with it, but I will not promise to write porn. I won't *exclude* it, but I reserve the right to ask for a new subject. And then you will own that story. If I ever want to use it again, I'm going to have to ask and possibly pay you. If I was a painter, this would be the equivalent of me painting caricatures for tourists on the beach. If I was a musician, it would busking on a street corner in Ann Arbor.<br />
<br />
Also you can totally buy more than one story, but you can't buy a longer one for more, like I'm not writing a 1000 word story for 20.<br />
<br />
After you buy one, I would ask that you come back to this post and leave a comment telling me if you like it or not. I will allow you one edit - I will go through and change things you ask me to.<br />
<br />
As an added selling point, I would like to remind you <a href="http://www.bridgetcallahan.com/2012/05/40-facts-about-charlize-theron.html">I wrote this. </a><br />
(I love that post so much, I will pretty much link to it at every given chance for the rest of my life.)<br />
<br />
I really really didn't want to start a kickstarter, because this is isn't 2009. So I'm just going to request you use paypal. My email is sharpshinyclaws@gmail.com. So make a payment and then email me what you would like. Within 5 days I will email you back a story.<br />
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If nobody does this, and this was a stupid idea, I'm not going to tell you guys either way, so there.Bridget Callahanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06729980008876962813noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9077624495684601002.post-57540873094195126132013-04-12T11:31:00.000-04:002013-04-12T11:55:41.433-04:00A Conversation Between My Dad, Dorothy Day, and Cesar Chavez<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGvGq4hKiJbxwih_94K6OukiSHJNuTkKv6h7PCJcKMaAnjtzaWXyqxEgzTFUcjB2Gd4mam7K_pKdH0VOsKL8p_cbXFFm9bSfdWwTgEsDx4lvU2qLxxDNaLYpVOFdtMcZzS-QNb_wSPyCw/s1600/how-smart-dolphins-vi.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGvGq4hKiJbxwih_94K6OukiSHJNuTkKv6h7PCJcKMaAnjtzaWXyqxEgzTFUcjB2Gd4mam7K_pKdH0VOsKL8p_cbXFFm9bSfdWwTgEsDx4lvU2qLxxDNaLYpVOFdtMcZzS-QNb_wSPyCw/s320/how-smart-dolphins-vi.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>This is what Dorothy and Cesar look like when I try to put them in the same room in my head. </i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i><br /></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i><br /></i></span></div>
<br />
Today is my dad's birthday. He is not dead, just to clarify, this isn't some conversation taking place in heaven. I just thought I'd bring two dead people back, because when I think about who I'd like to see talking to my dad, these are the two foremost names I associate with him. That may not be completely his fault, the choice of pacifist urban catholic hippie school they sent me to had a large part to do with it. Remember, before environmentalism, how we used to celebrate Peace Day by writing presentations on Day, Chavez, Ghandi, and MLK, and then sending off large amounts of dangerous balloons careening into the atmosphere? It was very pretty though. And they stopped it, a while ago. We were just so innocent then.<br />
<br />
So anyway, my dad is not dead, and looks like himself. Chavez is dead and now thanks to Google is irrevocably illustrated in my head as a Dora character. Dorothy Day, for reasons best kept to myself looks like a combination of Dorothy Parker, and Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz. In real life, that's not that far off. She's also dead.<br />
<br />
<i>Scene: A Parma Pizzeria, with green vinyl chairs and little red votive candles on the table. </i><br />
<br />
<b>Dorothy:</b> Food for the body is not enough, there must be food for the soul. In the spirit of that sentiment, I would like to suggest we order the Vegetarian Lovers.<br />
<br />
<b>Cesar:</b> If you really want to make a friend, go to someones house and eat with them. The people who give you their food, give you their heart. So we should probably just get the House Special. I can pick off the peppers. Also, extra pepperoni.<br />
<br />
<b>Dad, to Waiter: </b>Can we please get one large, with half green peppers and mushrooms for the Saint here, and the other half pepperoni?<br />
<i>(aside to Dorothy)</i> Cesar's not such a fan of vegetables unless he knows where they come from.<br />
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<b>Dorothy: </b>Don't call me a saint, I don't like being dismissed so easily. But whatever.<br />
<br />
<b>Cesar to Dad:</b> The fight is never about tomatoes or peppers, it is always about people.<br />
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<b>Dad:</b> I know. You said that.<br />
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<b>Cesar:</b> I mean, it's never about ferries.<br />
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<b>Dad:</b> Very funny.<br />
<br />
<i>(The pizza comes. Dorothy covers hers in red pepper, and Parmesan. Cesar eats his plain, with a fork. Dad gets a slice on his plate, then stands up at the bar a couple feet away to eat it.) </i><br />
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<b>Dorothy: </b>So, I don't understand facebook.<br />
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<b>Cesar: </b>I can see how social media has the potential to be a powerful organizing tool, but the last rally we held, we had 217 replies that said they were coming, and only 20 showed up. That seems like an irrational proportion.<br />
<br />
<b>Dad: </b>Well, that's why getting low income people internet access is so important - the people who need the organizing don't have those lines of communication yet. And you cannot get a job in today's workforce if you don't know how to use a computer, you can't even be a mechanic anymore. And it's why it's so important that we fight for keeping the internet unmonitored, without corporate regulation. Because this is how the world talks to itself these days, this is the beginning of a new era in human connectivity, and we can't let people be kept behind. Facebook is just a sort of commercial infancy, but it has it's uses. For instance, my daughter has never been able to remember my birthday ever, her entire life. It took her twenty years just to get it in her head it was in April. But this year Facebook told her. She's still super poor, so she can't get me anything, but I'm sure she'll call at least.<br />
<br />
<b>Dorothy:</b> I'm sure part of her inability to remember you or her mom's birthdays is because somewhere in her very active childhood imagination she associated your birthday with you dying one day, and we both know if you or Bonnie ever die, she is totally screwed, she needs at least twenty more years to be okay on her own.<br />
<br />
<b>Cesar: </b>Maybe she'll marry someone rich and get them to build the ferry for you.<br />
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<b>Dad: </b>That's enough Cesar.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<i>The Plain Dealer gave a birthday present to my dad today, <a href="http://www.cleveland.com/business/index.ssf/2013/04/digital_divide_exists_in_cuyah.html#incart_river_default">go read it here.</a> </i>Bridget Callahanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06729980008876962813noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9077624495684601002.post-14594663676126606292013-04-09T11:55:00.001-04:002013-04-09T11:57:32.597-04:00Missed Connections<a href="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8465/8385888055_2b1dc8d899_c.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8465/8385888055_2b1dc8d899_c.jpg" /></a><br />
<br />
<br />
Guys, I'm obsessed with Missed Connections on Craigslist.<br />
And I'm not the only one. I keep meeting people, one here, one there, who all admit they read it every day.<br />
I recently referred to it in a set as the Romantic's Lottery, which no one found very funny.<br />
But a couple people did.<br />
In Cleveland, for a minute, for a good six months, I got really into writing fake ones. But like, obviously fake ones. One to every hipster boy in the ABC on a Thursday night. Another one to all of my ex boyfriends at once. I usually got a lot of responses to those - boys who just wanted to say how funny they thought it was, others who obviously trolled the boards writing every single w4m ad trying to arrange apartment trysts in the time between their girlfriend leaving and their shift at Olive Garden.<br />
In Cleveland, you always saw a lot of Missed Connections posted for pregnant women, there were a lot of pregnancy fetishes - or maybe men in Cleveland are just obsessed with fertility in the face of crushing economic depression.<br />
Here in Wilmington, there's not as many, and most of them are for bartenders or college girls. Not a lot of people use craigslist. I've become a cheerleader for it, in the hopes of making it more active, I tell people about it constantly. It's 2004 again, and I'm still hoping someday all the regional craigslists will take off, as I wander wistfully through the NYC boards.<br />
I've never had one posted about me, except maybe this one that I think was from my ex boyfriend, about how much he never wanted to see me again and how much my book sucked. I'm not positive it was him, but I read it and thought immediately it might be, which is how these things work. If it's not him, then somewhere out there is another girl writer whose ex also hates her, and that scenario massively appeals to me too, especially cause I want to know if her book really does suck.<br />
Recently there was an ad posted on the m4w boards here with the title Bigfoot was a Republican, and was a "literary" ad, which basically just described his dream girl as a barefoot hippie with a lot of trash in her car who picks up hobos and reads a lot of Tom Robbins, and then threw his vision out into the universe, waiting to see what stuck to it.<br />
I wrote him and told him I liked reading it. We emailed each other a few times. It died off, like these things do.<br />
But the point is I am skidding on the line between just reading and actively participating.<br />
The other day this very cute guy was at my friends house, and mentioned he read them all the time too. he has a girlfriend, but if he didn't, it would be incredibly tempting to write him a real one. Except how does one even do that?<br />
Yesterday a customer brought a professor from school in who I hadn't met, and introduced me, and he made a really good impression. Then I googled him, and found this hilarious local paper article about him, that made me like him even more. But the teachers are never searchable on facebook really, so I wrote him an email at his school address that was basically like " this made me laugh a lot, sorry this is creepy I googled you, if you want to talk to me here's my real email." And I keep feeling like I've done something untoward, even though I don't think I have really? He's my age. We're adults. But before I actually wrote the email, I actually thought about writing him a Missed Connection, just to see if he was the type.<br />
Because there's something nice and a little crazy in a comforting way about someone who reads them, to me anyway.<br />
<br />
But they are so crass mostly. It reminds me of the people who pick up civet cat poop to find the coffee beans. Just digging in shit for some caffeine.<br />
<br />Bridget Callahanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06729980008876962813noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9077624495684601002.post-68964359802336538262013-04-06T12:10:00.001-04:002013-04-06T12:17:14.316-04:00Wait, Kurt Cobain is Dead?<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRaXqle_2y2W8OyHwuYTSDaCWYS2Ouuex7I830Pks1HnS7sbD6KfIK4oQn69TeAI1kSMAYMbAyNqhByvtLr_9IrBcBOY6-qN4Gfwwg54I0uiiKnN0xh0o0fWcew5nsIet2v8sNbJHH42Q/s1600/kurt-cobain.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRaXqle_2y2W8OyHwuYTSDaCWYS2Ouuex7I830Pks1HnS7sbD6KfIK4oQn69TeAI1kSMAYMbAyNqhByvtLr_9IrBcBOY6-qN4Gfwwg54I0uiiKnN0xh0o0fWcew5nsIet2v8sNbJHH42Q/s320/kurt-cobain.jpg" /></a><br />
<br />
Something like Kurt Cobain dying, I guess
I wasn't old enough for it to really be anything to me, but it seems like it means a lot to everyone else my age. I don't know why this is, except for the way I was culturally behind all my classmates cause of my parents being hippies/hipsters/weirdo nerds. I mean, don't get me wrong, all the hippie/hipster/weirdonerd parents I know now, my taste turned out awesome, I think it's properly bloomed in all the right places. But be aware that you are automatically sending your children through the same cultural growing pains you went through. And maybe they won't care about Kurt Cobain the way they are supposed to.<br />
<br />
Nirvana Unplugged is the album that meant the most to me because it was the one I had consistently in every car or radio I was regularly around. The first album of theirs I actually got was when I was in eighth grade and I signed myself up for one of those Columbia club things - my credit was doomed even then. It was one of those deals where you get five free cassettes for the price of one, or you have to cancel in thirty days or something like that. I ordered Nevermind, The Blue Album, Whipsmart, Dookie, Flood. Flood was the only one I actually knew I liked. The rest were guesses. They were pretty fucking good guesses for an eighth grader.<br />
<br />
Kurt Cobain's sweater probably influenced me more than anything else.
If they make a time capsule of the nineties, that sweater should be in it.<br />
And then they should burn it, the whole thing.<br />
<br />
I don't understand why the nineties have come back into style.<br />
I'm not ungrateful, I understand that as a single woman in my thirties, I have a unique opportunity to actually know a little bit more about dressing in that particular crushed velvet style better than the girls who are awkwardly struggling through how to wear floral print right now. But I don't want to. I hated that style even then. The only good things that came out of that were plaid shirts, doc martens, and army jackets. Frankly, it's a little cheating to claim army jackets for the 90s instead of the 70s, but you guys are old, you're not going to argue. You're more worried about your taxes.<br />
<br />
I'm in my thirties, I should be worried about my taxes too.
But maybe that's one of the reasons why everyone still talks abut Kurt Cobain's anniversary even though there are far more important things going on in the world -( like for instance last night I learned my moon is in Capricorn, which apparently tells me that I'm constantly trying to be pragmatic about my emotions, which totally explains my fling with open relationships.) Anyway, no, that's not one of the important things, but my point is why do we bother nineteen years later to conjure up any emotions about this short lived singer who while very influential musically, hardly taught the world anything meaningful except how we all have weird fucked up sexually ambiguous lyrics bouncing around in our psyches. We've all moved on to more self involvement - we've clarified our selfishness over the years. I guess that's an important lesson - Kurt's championing of self involvement definitely influenced the blogosphere and Twitter. But not Facebook, it didn't influence Facebook, that's a whole new kind of self awareness or lack of, and that to me proves that he's sorta defunct in this time. It's not far enough away from the turn of the century for us to be idolizing our turn of the century monsters yet. Give it another thirty years and I'm sure Kurt will feel more relevant.
To me Nirvana, and the early nineties, was about a large part of the population discovering culture. Now we've got too much culture, our society hasn't figured out even how to process it correctly yet, we're lagging behind our accesses.<br />
<br />
But we've run out of fashion styles to fixate on (there are far many less styles of human dress than we like to think, it is only a fraction of the internet), in this day and age where it's more about costumes of self than ever. So the nineties got resurrected, because it's cheap and easily replicated in Targets. All the loose cuts mean it's easier for clothing manufacturers to mass produced the patterns and prints. Pleather is cheap.
Plus, honestly, tights and leggings are never going to go away. Once it become socially acceptable to wear them without dresses, girls were never going to wear pants or pantyhose again - because we like being comfortable but we all hate our legs.
I'm hoping what will happen is the cuts of the nineties will stay and the prints will change.<br />
<br />
Maybe that's what Kurt did - and that's why even little grade school me liked him - because he kept all the same cuts but changed the prints - made them solid lime green wools that beaded up easily in the washer, and were impossible to wash blood stains out of. That's why I resent him being thought of so importantly, because to me the lesson was the singer was totally unimportant, what mattered was an entire group of people growing up in the same economic class, dressing the same, in the same country, the same TV culture, all understanding what he was saying and feeling that potential in ourselves, both to be great and to be a colossal failure of a grown up who does too many drugs and ends up killing themselves out of pure spite in like, the most selfish way possible. A messy way.<br />
<br />
In summary, I think this is all about clothes.And also about how we worry as adults that the kids won't be as angry as we were, that the world will run out of time for anger, like we have in our always exhausted adulthoods. Which I guess also is all about clothes, but in a more sweatshoppy way.Bridget Callahanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06729980008876962813noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9077624495684601002.post-31148046668715672052013-03-29T13:05:00.002-04:002013-03-29T13:16:33.033-04:00The Breaks in Communication<a href="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8508/8360122758_be0308a59e_c.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8508/8360122758_be0308a59e_c.jpg" /></a>
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<br />
Things that stop me from talking to you like I would talk to myself, washing dishes in my kitchen on a sunny afternoon, listening to the water pour over porcelain bowls and into the metal of the sink, with my cheeks and hair warm from the light, and the thoughts that lay heavy but quick on my mind, drumming:<br />
<br />
1) I cannot stand the way your hair looks, the patterns and teases it takes on. Him with the fractalized mop of muppet coal, Him with the thick golden brown mane of dog hair, Him with the silvery patina carefully sculpted and trimmed. Your hair silences me, it takes all of my concentration to not touch it, and then there is no energy left for being witty. I feel my own lank oil pan brown tresses, which are soft in my fingers, but overall disappointing aesthetically, and I want you to want to touch my own hair the same way, but doubt that many people in the world feel the need for touch the way I do, and therefore out of deference, I never do. He once accused me of not being affectionate enough, but when I heard that, I thought of all the times I had looked at him and thought about kissing him, thought about touching his face or his shoulders, and had refrained because what if it wasn't right? This is how I feel most of the time, like I am a vast being of air and wind which longs to caress everything, and I am bottled up inside a short squat rubber mold, disconnected even from the nerves that flow through this plastic skin, cut off by the habit of courtesy. Of not wanting to make people uncomfortable.<br />
<br />
2) I am not witty. I string any witticisms that come out of my mouth from the fragmented broken bodies of other better thoughts. I cut and pare and pair, until a thought has become a joke, but I never like my jokes as much as I do the messy convoluted things I say to myself, out loud, or to you, stoned on a Friday night, trying to explain how I can be personally offended by you calling your ex crazy, not because I'm actually personally offended, but because on a universal level all women are offended by a man who judges them crazy without attaching the caveat of his own craziness, and all older women, we recognize we have been brutalized by this, we shy away from the suggestion of it as if you had raised your hand against us. But if I explain this to you, you will merely nod and think to yourself that I am crazy too. Which of course I am, we are all crazy, we long for punchlines instead of discussions so we can easily compartmentalize the crazy and quickly judge it, because crazy is okay as long as it produces art, and only then, and even then not for sleeping with.<br />
<br />
I am exactly like every other girl. When I was younger, I pretended I was not, and I got laid a lot more. But I don't have any interest in lying anymore.<br />
<br />
3) I am awkward. I fumble with my body. I overthink how I look, how you look, the distances with which we're sitting, the surrounding people, the position of the car seat, the smudge of my eyeliner, the little curl by my ear, and the proportion of skin to cloth. I think this way because I want you to love me, guy or girl, dog or bird or car, I want you to love me enough to keep me close by always, I need protection. I collect people like armor. Despite my attempts at being correct, this desire to be loved seeps through the best intention and artifice. It is thick and gray and like fog or cilantro, some people have the yen for it and others only smell fire and taste soap. He told me that it was a problem for me, this wanting to be loved so much. I told him I knew, but I couldn't change it, the way you can't change current or the natural color of your hair.<br />
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4) I don't look up to you. I don't look up to anyone. Therefore, if you won't give me escape from this awkwardness, I won't beg for it, and it will harden and cement, as if affection and ease were a liquid to be mixed in slowly with the dry, folded even, tablespoon by tablespoon, and once the bread bakes up flat there is no saving it.<br />
<br />
5) I have assumed things about you.<br />
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5) You should understand that these charges of emotion that hurl around me, while volatile and vulnerable, are not the things I subsist on. You take my pronouncements as seriously as if I had just cut my wrists in front of you, but I only articulate these thoughts for entertainment. I was only heartbroken once, when it broke for months and I ate nothing, and did nothing, and felt dead. You weren't responsible for that, and you will never recreate that, and I'm sorry that black stain exists in me now because it is definitely the immovable dark part. I purge these happy flitting emotions, the every changing crushes and angers, vanities and rejections, like blistering fireflies boiling up from my skin, and then they float away and I'm still here, the large dark purple squid floating in a black ocean, nameless with unknown intent, waiting. I breathe in a larger hope, living on it, and when I breathe out, anger and lust are the gaseous rejects of my body digesting love. Not your love, necessarily. Love. The thing larger than ourselves that breathes hot on the back of our necks and makes it hard to talk to you. <br />
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The point is, I don't know how you're supposed to talk to a squid either, so I forgive you and I'll just be floating over here when you realize you are bored.Bridget Callahanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06729980008876962813noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9077624495684601002.post-59601814425249746402013-03-26T11:57:00.000-04:002013-03-26T12:17:42.273-04:00Blood Week<a href="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8366/8506498169_0849d4f7cc_c.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8366/8506498169_0849d4f7cc_c.jpg" /></a><br />
<br />
I'm going to try like heck to start posting on this blog at least twice a week. Because when I don't, I notice I start to measure my self worth by things like how shiny my hair is, or did anyone come over to talk to me at the party. This blog acts like a time stamp, a brand marking my true worth, and so when you see it lying dormant for a little while, the world has come between me and myself and that way lies madness. Lots of cigarettes and madness.<br />
<br />
So here's what I got so far.<br />
<br />
1) House of Cards is awesome. Question: Did I have a Southern accent fetish my whole life, and this is actually why I wanted to study writing down here, because I wanted to meet Kevin Spacey and let him mind fuck me into a vaguely euphoric kudzu infested sleep of submission? Answer: possibly. What I do know is that my predilection for grossly stereotypical Southern blowhards means I have to stop criticizing people with a Louisiana vampire fetish, cause basically they're the same thing.<br />
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Last night the Prince called me at 1am to tell me he thinks Kevin Spacey's character has directly influenced his life, because he was super productive and unfeeling yesterday.<br />
<br />
2) My taillight on the car is out and I can't afford to fix it right now, so the next few days will be full of cop paranoia. Which is like money paranoia, except worse, cause I'm already full of car breaking down paranoia.<br />
I vaguely miss not having a car, but once the financial hole I got myself into by taking that Cleveland trip is resolved, my natural ability to turn stress in a water soluble digestible fiber should take over.<br />
<br />
3) The first day of my period this month was also, coincidentally, the first day of Passover. I don't know, possibly not a coincidence at all. Maybe my body was all like "Hey God, I don't actually own a doorway, but the vagina is a metaphorical doorway, so I'm going to just smear this blood on it and hope you metaphorically leave my firstborn alone." I love the story of Passover because it's all about communicating with a higher power directly through blood, as if God was a lurking sneaking stealthy beast who speaks no human language, and we can barely control it enough to sic it on our enemies, but it also might turn on us at any moment if we don't appease it with blood. Spring is a good season for Blood Holidays - Passover, Easter, International Workers Day. Spill the blood and take the blood and make the universe listen to you with it.<br />
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I also love that it's the one holiday where we're all like - hey, god could kill you whenever he wants, like, immediately, with no reason or circumstance, just by being like boom! gone! So don't eat any yeast.<br />
<br />
This menstrual connection is really fleshing out here.<br />
<br />
4) My voice has somehow gotten much better in the last year. I mean, not great, but for a while there I wasn't really able to sing at all, and now I feel like I can at least as well as I could in high school. This makes me incredibly happy, and I'm singing all the time now, whenever I can. That's a big difference between the bus and a car - you can't sing on the bus but you can sing the entire time you're driving. Everyone make me CDs okay. Not itunes playlists, I can't play those in the car.<br />
<br />
5) If it weren't for the inconvenient messiness of it, I would actually enjoy my PMS week/ period a lot, because in these two weeks I can actually feel the waves of hormones and emotions, good and bad they become physical and real instead of just health book hypotheticals, and I can imagine the drugs my body naturally produces coursing into my brain and making all the little electric neurons go frantic, like a Lite Brite had sex with a Simon Says. When it's so real you can actually taste the pennies, it's makes it so much easier to know your own intentions. Like, tonight my intention is to go to sleep, forever. In twenty minutes, my intention is to stand in a hot shower for an hour. Later today I will become effusively happy, and then dead tired, and it will be entirely predictable and minutely controllable. When I'm not a churning bag of hormones, who knows what the fuck I want. Certainly not me, most of the time.<br />
<br />
If you want a straight answer out of me, I try to give that all of time, but there's one week in particular where I can't do anything else, and that was last week. So...save them up for next month? I think I just like myself more when I'm bleeding. It feels so much more true, like whatever mask I'm trying to wear for your sakes doesn't even fit that week. And then the blood actually starts, and happiness returns to my cells, and life flows on again, having sated the blood god one more fertility season. Women are springtime incarnate once a month, that's a gift.<br />
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But also, I am the firstborn. That means something. Plagues and sacrificial desirability. Inheritances. Staring down the Beast, who isn't Kevin Spacey, but if Kevin Spacey were to play the Beast in a movie, none of us would blink at the image of him growling dark and incoherent around doorways, waiting to drag the eldest off for the sin of being born to his enemies. Someone make me a CD of Kevin Spacey coming for the Egyptians, and I'll learn to sing along to that.<br />
<br />
<br />Bridget Callahanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06729980008876962813noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9077624495684601002.post-61255053335374901652013-03-22T13:16:00.000-04:002013-03-23T08:21:24.881-04:00The Love That Remains After the In Love<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkN_XRKkk1NjP_0zFziMWyZvr8DLlNOEoB7e-_YYmtLJZE9WjpQmmAF4h9vT-Uz8AdYSnnjwyHkCvi2uh7fJjeVtg2zwExwxFDiQWoR2JXv7bXBeK8_hIMrl-De51UVToeYYD-iDRzPZ4/s1600/575979_10200613628764026_796275272_n.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkN_XRKkk1NjP_0zFziMWyZvr8DLlNOEoB7e-_YYmtLJZE9WjpQmmAF4h9vT-Uz8AdYSnnjwyHkCvi2uh7fJjeVtg2zwExwxFDiQWoR2JXv7bXBeK8_hIMrl-De51UVToeYYD-iDRzPZ4/s320/575979_10200613628764026_796275272_n.jpg" /></a><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The temptation to let the entire month of March go by without acknowledging it is overwhelming. It's already the 22nd. I had Spring Break, and I had Midterms, and I had shows and taxes and got a car and got laid by some very nice people and one terrible person. But I knew he was a terrible person before it happened, so that was fine. I did my taxes and made sure my FAFSA was in and worried about school bills. I missed a lot of work, and then worked a lot to make up for it. My hair got super long and I started wearing very dark smudgy eyeliner again. Today for instance, I'm dressed in what I call my 1970s Italian summer outfit. This year I'm just going to try and channel Sophia Loren. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br />
</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I used to go to this place called The Tower, which was an apartment above a storefront on Lorain Ave. In the storefront was a tax prep place, with only one sign to advertise that, and windows covered with butcher paper and dirt. Across the street was a convenient store, and when I walked over there to get cigarettes, the old Syrian guy who worked there would check my I.D. and exclaim "Oh! Brigitte Bardot!" Every. single. time. So I've got to just start with the first name and next learn French and Italian (not or, and. Let's be honest about this.) And I'm going to have to get kinda tan but not too tan, and wear nothing but black or white underwear, and never run out of mascara. Get it? Mascara? Run?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br />
</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Fuck you March. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br />
</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">"<span style="background-color: whitesmoke; color: #333333; line-height: 17.99479103088379px; white-space: pre-wrap;">"In North Carolina, it's 60 and I'm cold. In Ohio it's 30 and you're angry." - Scott</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: whitesmoke; color: #333333; line-height: 17.99479103088379px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: whitesmoke; color: #333333; line-height: 17.99479103088379px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></span><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSKKO8luXUTt40ou2SdMzCg4bPs_UTnXtCSIS6feEB_2nnwsgeni8YA8Y_X8iXodMW5o7E5qk-6Xv4X9oYVehp9IFWHu6RpDj9CMN76iGocK0HgAFxQS8JqtTabLJ7rxEiuVp4xHGBs-g/s1600/63193_10200527047199541_54254859_n.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSKKO8luXUTt40ou2SdMzCg4bPs_UTnXtCSIS6feEB_2nnwsgeni8YA8Y_X8iXodMW5o7E5qk-6Xv4X9oYVehp9IFWHu6RpDj9CMN76iGocK0HgAFxQS8JqtTabLJ7rxEiuVp4xHGBs-g/s320/63193_10200527047199541_54254859_n.jpg" /></a><br />
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<br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 17.984375px; white-space: pre-wrap;">There is a moment where you look at someone and you see them very clearly. Exactly what measure of asshole they are currently, and what kind of sweetheart they are, and the veil of whatever tolerance you were willing to give them lifts. Any excuses, any lust for power or affection, and forgiveness you gave them in the name of circumstance - it all disappears and you're left with the naked fact. How much exactly do you like this person, and how important are they in your life?</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 17.984375px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 17.984375px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Most of the time, the answer is not very. Sometimes you realize you hate them, other times you know you love them. Sometimes you see that they used to be really important, but you shouldn't make decisions including them anymore, that period of your life is over. </span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 17.984375px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 17.984375px; white-space: pre-wrap;">And that's what happened with me and Cleveland during Spring Break. </span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 17.984375px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Not Cleveland the people, the people were fine. I saw friends I missed a lot, and family, cats and dogs. I didn't get to talk to anyone as much as I would have liked, I wanted an entire day for each person and then I would have just had to move back home. </span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 17.984375px; white-space: pre-wrap;">But Cleveland the city? </span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 17.984375px; white-space: pre-wrap;">You know how that's not always a bad thing, to see and know a thing clearly for what it is? In fact, it's the best thing right? The Love that remains after the In Love is over.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 17.984375px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 17.984375px; white-space: pre-wrap;">I saw my old cat Eddy of 13, 14 years? for the first time in six months, and realized I was genuinely not a cat person, but that I was going to cry a lot when she died, because she was the last part of 20s me that remained, hanging on tenaciously, refusing to get older. </span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 17.984375px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 17.984375px; white-space: pre-wrap;">I saw The Prince and realized I was always going to be in love with him, and that we would make the worst couple ever, and that I'd be lost without him in my life and I was never going to stop talking to him again. </span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 17.984375px; white-space: pre-wrap;">As soon as I articulated this to myself, I missed my Hitman like someone had just swung a cinderblock at my head. But once the worst of the pain was over, it was okay. That's how it works, just deal with the pain and then it will be over and you will hardly remember except every time you fall in love with anyone ever again. </span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 17.984375px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 17.984375px; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Prince took me to Cafe Miami, finally, after never successfully going there with me our entire whirlwind summer last year, because we never got up in time. That was crazy as shit. I can't even begin to explain it, because you aren't me or the Prince, and so therefore when you go, you'll appreciate it in your own way, but definitely not our way. He complained the whole time about how fucking cold it was, and it was horribly cold. There was this white stuff on the ground and all this frozen water, and it was practically unlivable. But he also, somehow, without planning to, took me to the library, and to walk on the breaker rocks, and to the coffeeshop I loved, and managed somehow to give me the best kind of Cleveland non-tourist experience. Which I don't usually need any help with, in my own city, but I was just SO COLD. And that's why he's so good with couchsurfers, I guess. </span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 17.984375px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 17.984375px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Everyone who saw me at shows asked me where the old confident Bridget had gone. I thought about how the only thing people in NC ever told me is how they wondered at how confident I was, and then I got very quiet. </span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 17.984375px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 17.984375px; white-space: pre-wrap;">I saw Jere, and discovered that moving away from him has made him infinitely more valuable to me and I want him to move here please and be my exploration partner again. I can't talk more about that here, but it's absolutely imperative he do this. </span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 17.984375px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />
</span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I had sex in an abandoned church made yoga studio, and realized I got off more on it being a yoga studio than a church even, as far as desecration sexiness goes, because I find yoga just as creepy as church, and sex in places that creep you out is a power grab. I think that's why I want to tell everyone about it, because I deal with yoga as a presence in my life every day at work, and I don't hate. I even respect it. But I am scared of it. It tries to tell me every day how ugly and unworthy I am, because I'm fat and not rich and drink and smoke. So having sex in it's own lair is kind of a coup for me. </span><br />
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</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">All the shows went pretty well I think. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I made some money, I sold some books. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I saw Mom and Dad at the farm, the dogs came back covered in horse manure. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Then I drove back the 14 hours by myself in a car that I had been convinced would leave me to die in West Virginia somewhere, only it didn't, and instead I just drove through the mountains singing for an entire day and it was kinda easy and amazing. Turns out I like driving by myself a lot. I'm sure that's not a surprise to anyone who's ever had a veil lifting moment about me.</span><br />
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</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And then I came home, to North Carolina, and it was actually coming home. Which is disorienting, but a relief at least, that it turns out I made the right decision. The first trip back to the city of your birth is always a test. </span><br />
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</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Whenever I think about Austin renting a car and driving all the way down to North Carolina to come get me and take me home, I feel so incredibly loved. Austin, Scott, Jere, Lou, Don, Ramon, David, Sean, Peter, I know all the best boys.</span><br />
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</span><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwmmeI9c3BPof4L8JwcvBrvboGK-7OcuKvjpoeJ7BOfsMA9FZzP1TrmU1CF9cgztfvssGisBjUC0sq_WBiJhMaayAWy7lvAd6GgtyBmdFtl766YsTyx0IUmDLfYD6-CqBPfs4zIYlWxBs/s1600/488_10200613647284489_327440951_n.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwmmeI9c3BPof4L8JwcvBrvboGK-7OcuKvjpoeJ7BOfsMA9FZzP1TrmU1CF9cgztfvssGisBjUC0sq_WBiJhMaayAWy7lvAd6GgtyBmdFtl766YsTyx0IUmDLfYD6-CqBPfs4zIYlWxBs/s320/488_10200613647284489_327440951_n.jpg" /></a>Bridget Callahanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06729980008876962813noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9077624495684601002.post-83989071557765456932013-02-25T11:50:00.000-05:002013-02-25T11:51:48.698-05:00Houses Don't Have Sex<br />
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I think this is the most Southern place I have been so far. Whether or not you think that's correct, it's true. This place is an apex of everything pretty and good and loving that I wanted from the South when I came here, all frosty and doe eyed from the Rustbelt. Here, the light makes everyone attractive, makes their flaws seem sweet. The wood changes the tone of their words so that everything sounds relevant and real. There's the right amount of clutter to make neatness seem unimportant.<br />
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There's a river. If there wasn't water nearby, I don't know how I would feel differently, but I definitely would. There's a bridge down the river that lights up gold at sunset, and later when it's dark, you can see the semi-truck running lights flashing over it in the distance.<br />
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And the people that were in the house with me, they are important no doubt, for other reasons. But maybe it could have been anyone, because the house will make you a better person as long as you're willing to succumb to it. I guess if Gatsby weren't there, standing like a guardian or a welcome wagon, I can't tell how much of the spell is him and how much is the house. Like, I know he built it and all, but aren't houses like children? If you build them right, then you no longer own or control them.<br />
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I remember crawling into my darling abandoned Masonic Hall, and I knew immediately, I could feel it, that it had become it's own creature. People had left it, and it had developed it's own sentience. And it was sad a little, it was lonely, but tough and predatory and beautiful all the same. This house, it developed it's own intelligence before people abandoned it, it's like...it's like the Masonic Temple was an orphan, a refugee, and this house is a healthy first world child, loved and with a liberal arts education. And maybe I'm all torn up from loving the orphans so much, from feeling the personalities of the Rustbelt all hard and starving for love, and I'm so used to just immediately giving those abandoned building all my love, I've made so much room in my heart for buildings, that this one comes along not even needing my love but swelling into my over-stretched heart all the same and I'm drowned in it.<br />
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And so I declare this place the first of My Southern Monsters. It eats the hearts of little girls and boys, and spits them out gold, all wrapped in vines and plant spit.<br />
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I don't know why I can love buildings so much harder than beings. I mean, I have heartbeat loyalty, I would never choose one over the other, I think, I'm pretty sure. Mammals 4 Life. But oh thick stone and leaded glass. Surely this is from growing up surrounded by old skyscrapers and packed together Victorians, surely this is a gift, I'm not saying that it isn't. Seeing the life in buildings is a gift, hearing them talk is a blessing. But still, they are scary huge alien creatures, like elephants and mountains. Their intentions are so glacial and foreign. People, our intentions are so fast, we make them clear and act on them almost immediately - though to us it might seem like a lifetime, our lifetimes are so quick and gnat like, we are instantaneous creatures - therefore fickle. Buildings are not fickle, their desires are slow.<br />
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It might be different if I knew how to handle them properly, not just break into them with sneaking and smashing, but how to fix them and bandage their wounds, how to make homes for them. Like a lion tamer, earning respect from the creatures he takes care of. Right now I'm still only a spectator, so the house, and the hall, and the church, and the school - they have no reason to pay attention to me - I'm neither threat nor friend. If I want buildings to love me back the way I love them, I guess I should learn to talk back instead of just listening.<br />
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But that's what I'm particularly good at - loving things without them loving me back. That's also a gift.<br />
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<a href="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8390/8506446603_0e098f1e9c_c.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8390/8506446603_0e098f1e9c_c.jpg" /></a>Bridget Callahanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06729980008876962813noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9077624495684601002.post-70740938885730929392013-02-24T09:32:00.003-05:002013-02-24T09:32:45.647-05:00Wrightsville Beach Lions<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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There was a pack of lions swimming in the water. Two adult lions and several smaller adolescent cubs. She could see them only 500 feet down the busy crowded beach. All around her the brightly colored striped tents of the permanent beach vendors, hawking fried things and frozen things, swirled and crusted and crumbling with sugar, were shining golden and red in the dying sun. The tanned stretched out plastic bodies of Wrightsville Beach lounged everywhere, on the splintery picnic tables that had been beaten gray by ocean wind, young people laughing and flirting with each other, old people sitting quietly in groups, and then those angry middle aged people freaking out over everything - their kids, other people, the fact that the earth was turning in space and they would soon have to go home because they were no longer free to stay in the drunken wilds of the beach after dark. People in general seemed happy and good natured until they hit middle age, that weird vast void between being pretty and not caring about being pretty anymore. No one seemed to notice the lions swimming out in the waves, but especially the middle aged people didn't notice, they deliberately didn't notice.<br />
She was caught between the tide of people not watching, and,the pull of the lions in the waves, and with a short tug she pulled herself out of the thicket of the main drag and onto the empty coastline stretch, into the real sand. Behind her, humanity murmured, in front of her the water was humming, and for a moment she could hear the sound of her own breath before one sound or the other overwhelmed, she hovered on the threshold between the two atmospheres. Then she was free of the swell, and trudged towards the waters edge. The lions were playing only a few feet deep, and a young man stood on shore by them, watching them, a handful of leashes dangling by his side. She instantly resented him being there, it was the illusion of wild lions that had drawn her, now she knew they were only tame cats, but still they were impressive - their dark heavy bodies soaked in sea water, heaving and jumping and all their muscles were defined by their wet fur, monstrous animals with the face of kittens and the joy of killers. The sunset light caught the edge of their hair, and lit it up in gleaming gold neon outlines of their ears and snouts and thick necks, the soft pussy willow tips of their tails. Only predators have the capacity to be as happy as these cats were, herbivores can't relax long enough to smile. She walked up to him, her eyes transfixed on the lions. He smiled at her, also never taking his eyes off the cats.<br />
"They're yours?" She had to shout a little into the wind. He had coffee brown skin and little black ringlets blowing around his half shell ears. His shoulders were very wide, and he gave the physical impression of being immovable by wind or weather. She could feel his concreteness through her hoodie, as surely as if she was standing next to a pillar of stone, the cold and wet air masking any smell of human that he had. It made sense that he was the lion tamer, if they tried to bite him they would only break their eyeteeth.<br />
"Sure." He didn't turn his face to her when he answered, and the word almost completely escaped, she had to reach out and grab it from the air. She took out her phone to take a photo, and only this action seem to poke him, he turned and looked at her with disappointment. She was vaguely aware that she very quickly decided she didn't care about his opinion of whether or not she should be enjoying the moment as it happened, she wanted a photo to remember this by, and as she focused the camera and stared at them through the screen, she thought about when she had turned into this person, someone who sometimes didn't care. She was proud of herself, in another time she would have felt a stab of shame, and done whatever his large brown eyes were pleading her to do. But there would be no more boys making her feel ashamed, not lion tamer strangers or anyone. If he didn't want anyone taking photos of his cats, he shouldn't bring them swimming at the public beach. The photos of course bore no resemblance to the scene in front of her, but only because there are qualities of light we will never capture, just like there are qualities of lions and qualities of boys that aren't tangible.<br />
She watched the rest of the time in silence, until the light was really almost gone. He gave a short guttural bark, and the pack came bounding back, rushing towards them in doggish obedience, the cubs following in kind only because they didn't want to lose their parents. The sensation of lions running at you is hard to recreate without risking death, and the experience of lions running at you with a complete sense of safety is reserved for only very special people, ones who have decided to live their lives in close proximity to beasts - zookeepers and vets, circus trainers. They stood around shaking the salt water off in arcing rainbow spatters while he attached the leashes to the giant collars that impossibly circled their huge primeval necks. She was obsessed with their necks, tendons the size of her arms tensing and flexing underneath the smelly wet animal hair. She had a deep need to lay her hand on them, put her head down against them, be cheek to cheek with their huge quiet faces.<br />
He took them home, and she walked back towards town. The throng of the beach city had turned to the nighttime crowd, tanned lithe girls in white shorts and shiny cheekbones, smiling flirting boys buying them beers, the few middle-agers left who were nice, well on their way to old people status, already gathered in their social groups. The tents were strung with colored lights, the glows were green and blue and pink, and they cast theatre shadows against the high dark stone walls that separated the sands from the city. She stopped under the colossal arch of one of the dozen walkways, leaned against the cold dirty masonry, and watched the two sides - on the other side of one arch there was the beach with lights and loud wantonness, and then on the city side - streetlights and well dressed women in heels leaning on the arms of their dates, getting in and out of taxis, the antique storefronts lit up like a period movie set. She had salt and sand curdled on her skin and in the folds of her jeans, her hair falling stringy and wind tangled, any traces of makeup she left the house with completely bled off by now, and she belonged in neither of these places, but the only way out was one or the other, you couldn't go up.<br />
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<br />Bridget Callahanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06729980008876962813noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9077624495684601002.post-46061709590854122452013-02-17T08:39:00.000-05:002013-02-17T09:15:24.176-05:00The Church of Instagram<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Last night, I was sitting around with two friends of mine. It was cold and rainy, early late evening, like 9 or 10. We had opted to stay in drinking slowly, watching snowboarding movies, and eating Chinese food. I had worked all day, and taken the bus downtown in actual snow, so I was wet and cold and huddled in a blanket. I know I looked bedraggled because when I had stopped to get cigarettes on my way over to his house, the clerk at the Village Market asked me if I was okay. I felt beat up, and happy to not be at work or doing homework. Both of them are smart and interesting, it's really nice to just sit around with smart, interesting people, it's one of the most important parts of my life.<br />
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So my one friend recently went on a date with a girl to a mega church. When I expressed my absolutely amazement, because I would never in a million fucking years go to church with a boy as a date, he got wild about it. "It was great, it was amazing, it was so unbelievable, even more so than what we thought it was," he said. "But I don't need to go to church. The sermon was this thing about how if a whore comes to your door, and she's like, struggling, then you have to take her in. I don't need someone to tell me to be a decent person. But, you know, they do."<br />
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We all sat around for a moment, gape-mouthed and considering. "That's terrifying," I finally said, "to think that they do, like we actually need religion as a society in order to tamp down the psychopaths who have just never learned what decent is."<br />
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"Think how many more murders there would be..." my other friend said.<br />
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But also I think it's terrifying we haven't progressed enough as a species to be beyond these primitive forms of crowd control.<br />
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And so, with this in mind, I want to talk about the phenomenon of selfies on Instagram.<br />
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The other day I asked my coworker if he thought my Instagram feed was too vain.<br />
He replied he thought I had one of the lesser vain feeds. Out of my last 25 photos, six of them were selfies. I think that's pretty vain. It disturbs me that I'm no good at Instagram, because it takes so long to come up on my phone, and so I can't just like, snap it out. So I take a lot of photos of buildings, and some of trees, and some of myself making stupid faces. My mother gives me shit over it, because they ARE stupid looking, I can see how dumb my expressions are, thank you. But I don't think she realizes how much of our culture IS looking at ourselves now. I think older people write it off as selfishness, but that's just a side of it, a facet of an entire shift in perspective. A perspective that also includes self-awareness, and an evolution of empathy from understanding your own emotions to being aware of other people's emotions. I'm not saying it's better than the last perspective, which was much more nationalistic, and had good parts too, like New Deal parts. There is no right or wrong, when it comes to how societies grow up, it's impossible to pass complete and fair judgement on all people all at once. That's why God doesn't exist.<br />
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And so I guess what I'm saying is taking pictures of yourself on Instagram is like going to church, in the most child-like way.<br />
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In the spirit of confession, I thought it might be a good exercise to show you a few of them and tell you exactly what I was thinking and doing in that instant I decided to take a photo of myself. This might just be another excuse to be vain, I can't tell , I think that might be one of the first sacraments in this new world order, developing the ability, the wisdom to know when you're being too vain, and I'm not there yet. That might be the demarcation of taste here too, taste in what you like about yourself and therefore other people. Isn't there something about how babies are supposed to look at themselves a lot in a mirror, to develop their concept of self? That their body is a controllable unit? Isn't Instagram just looking at ourselves in the mirror and studying ourselves harshly? I just can't get behind that being a bad thing.<br />
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Unfortunately Instagram only tells you vague times of when you posted a photo, so even though it would be really interesting to know what time or day it was, all you get is an annoying "1 wk" label. I had worked all day, and I had been wearing the same makeup for 48 hours. I had a bunch of homework due the next morning, it was after 9pm and I had to do this paper and then get up at 6am to catch the bus to school. I had gotten compliments on my nail polish all day. I have also been trying to cut gluten out from my diet and this was only a few days in. A co-worker had given me a Sammy's Millet and Flax pizza crust that was expired, and I bought some mozzarella and prosciutto, mushrooms and garlic. My roommate and I devoured that pizza, and I was feeling extremely grateful to find such a good pizza crust. For some reason, the light of my computer screen always makes my eyes looks extremely blue, and because I didn't want to do my homework, I was taking photos with my phone of my face instead, idly, flipping through the entire Marina and the Diamonds catalog. And...I just liked this one a lot. I just think it's a good photo. I have pretty eyes. I have the worst hands though, it's impossible to make them look good. And that color blue? I wear blue like every day now guys. Bright bright blues. I live in that hoodie.<br />
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This was two days later, on my way out, but I don't remember where I was going. I was feeling pretty good body-wise, but I couldn't quite bring myself to take a full length shot of myself, I spent ten minutes in the mirror, trying to decide if I was brave enough. I was listening to Marina's Teen Idle on repeat that day. I remember adjusting my bra straps over and over again, to decide how I liked them best. In the end I wussed out, and posted this with some lame caption about this being my expression while I tried to decide if I liked my body. It's interesting to note I didn't.<br />
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On Thursday night I stayed up too late and wasted at the comedy club. At 2am, I ate an English muffin. I woke up actually feeling fine, but looking terrible and feeling even guiltier. I didn't have the money to spend on drinking, and I know I did a bad set because of how drunk I was, and I was mad about the gluten. So I went from almost liking my body to using it to publicly shame myself, glasses and all. But it felt really good to have a bad photo of myself out there, because I feel sometimes like every single photo anyone online ever sees of me are these close up face shots, almost all from the same two head tilts, the same two half smiles. It feels like a lie, especially because I know lots of people online that I never see in person. I think this entry is starting to make me come off as a masochistic. </div>
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Sometimes when I wake up, I take a photo of myself just to see how I look that morning, but I never post those. I'm pretty much just using the phone as a mirror, it would be exactly like keeping a compact next to my bed. I keep meaning to go find some mirror app, cause there has to be one right? Someone must have thought of that right away, right?<br />
I just like this picture. I like that it looks like the eye against the pillow is all swollen, like I've got a black eye, when really it's just me getting old and not always looking good in the morning. In the morning when I wake up, I have to sit in bed for at least twenty minutes, putting my thoughts in order. If I don't get that time, then I am scattered all day, I never get it right.<br />
I think sometimes another reason I am looking at my face all the time is because I am getting noticeably older, things are changing, and I'm obsessed with that. Maybe babies just feel the same way. If every day you are supposed to wake up and be prepared to be a completely different person by the end of the day, if you're going to let the universe make it's impressions however it chooses, then maybe it's not so different from the people who take the same shot of themselves every day at the exact same in the exact same way. Just the lazy version of that, not so dedicated.<br />
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On Valentines Day I went with a co-worker Bethany to see The Birdland Orchestra, they were playing at school, and I forgot that the benefit of being a student is now I get student rates on all the concerts and lectures that come to Keenan. So these thirty dollar tickets were like 5 bucks, it was awesome. I'm totally going to see an astronaut speak next month. Afterwards we ran into this saxophonist I've seen before, and all three of us went to the most anti-Valentines day bar we could think of, which is a place called Barbary Coast. I hadn't been in there yet, it was on the list, but I'm so glad the first time was that evening. Within five minutes of being there, someone had put Love Stinks by J.Geils Band on, and it WASN'T ME. Anyway, I was wearing all blue again, and I felt pretty good about the way the holiday had played out this year, so there you go. </div>
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I wanted a new facebook profile picture, I had looked at the other one too long, and I had started to hate it, with it's dumb cross eyed expression, and goofy weird pose against my pillow. So instead I took another goofy weird pose against my pillow, and made a dumb looking away expression instead. There is nothing to justify about this photo, my nose looks awesome and I like my hair, and I like the curve of my cheek, and in the end is there really something that terrible about an entire society of people learning to like how their faces look and think that they are pretty? </div>
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Isn't that all vanity is, thinking we are pretty looking? The problem is not us, but all the people who don't think they're pretty. We need to figure out a way to work that into church without making it a superiority thing. God, guys, you make everything a superiority thing, don't you?</div>
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Finally, the most interesting side effect of constantly having these photos of yourself around and accessible and out there being commented on is that after a while of seeing them side by side, you realize that every single image up there is of an entirely different girl. And not a single one of them is really me. That's something you can't capture. Silly aborigines, you had nothing to worry about, and now we're going to forget what you looked like eventually. </div>
<br />Bridget Callahanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06729980008876962813noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9077624495684601002.post-38363358606434189152013-02-12T19:08:00.002-05:002013-02-12T19:08:23.459-05:00Update on the State of Me<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>I look like I have a black eye in this photo, hidden by the pillow, </i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>but in fact I'm just getting old and sometimes I look all puffy.</i></span></div>
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1) I am a terrible person who only updates her blog once a week now, and when I do that, often it is just to promote my book (which you should buy) or to cryptically talk about things that cause my mother to send me passive aggressive emails in which she begs me to never drink again, or tells me she will never give me another cent if I get another tattoo. I hope my mother, possibly the only reader of this blog left besides Mark, understands that I do in fact censor myself quite frequently for the sake of her heart. Just recently I even uttered the words "out of respect for my mother" at a party. I hope this gives her solace. I understand that my life at 33 and her life at 33 are now irrevocably different, and she must feel some of that separation, of no longer being able to relate to her eldest daughter's lifestyle from any perch of experience. That pains me too, a little. Part of me very much wishes that at 33 I was married to some community activist, with a pretty little blue eyed baby girl, delivering home births and planting an urban garden. The fact that I now know several very wonderful people who do have this lifestyle is nice, and reassures me I'm not a completely sinful bastard. But alas, Mom, I still can't bring myself to get a dog because it means having to come at certain times, and also limits my moving options. So husband? babies? The last email my mom forwarded to me was some chain letter about the joys of having grandchildren, and she very noticeably mentioned that my SIBLINGS might relate to it, which I think means she is at last giving up hope. This next bullet point should assist with that.<br />
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2) I recently found myself in bed with a 32 year old North Carolina boy who is kinda country, has smiling blue eyes, is a non-fiction major who wants to write about race, and who raps. Like, musically. Also in bed with us were two huge bear dogs. Dogs that were actually bears, swear to god, giant huge shaggy bear dogs. He is a very nice man, who I hope I will be friends with for a long time, so his nickname here will be The Columnist. When he confessed that the music link he had sent me which I had not listened to yet (because I intended on sleeping with him, and didn't want to be persuaded otherwise by whatever was behind that link) was him rapping, I laughed. It is to his credit that he understood I was laughing out of the sheer weirdness of the moment, and not directly at him. He handles his ego very well. If I was lying naked in bed with someone and I told them I wrote, and they laughed? I would probably hit them and then start crying. I feel like that has actually happened in the past...<br />
He told me he had a crush on my nose. I'm not in love with him, but I do love that.<br />
I still haven't listened to his rap though.<br />
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3) This was not the first moment this week that I had that feeling, like I now lived in an entirely different dimension than the one I came from. The dimension made of wood and ceramic tile, instead of steel rebar and stone. The first was actually last Thursday, when I did two stand up comedy mics - first at Nutt St, which I do every week, and then right after at a gay club called the Toolbox. I had just posted a promotion on facebook, and I had this moment of thinking - here I am, I'm 33, I'm single, I'm childless, I work at a co-op and go to school with 21 year olds, and now I'm standing here drunk on Long Islands on the dance floor at this Southern gay club which is located literally across the street from the port, in a sequin dress, a microphone in my hand, telling jokes about dating, and cats to an audience consisting entirely of old gay guys, and comics. WHAT. At no point ever in my life, not as a little dorky child or a weird freaky high schooler, not even during my Raver Kid days, did I EVER conceptualize this is where I would be at 33. It's not bad, it's just so weird. Almost like there were no clues this was coming, but I guess anyone looking at my nail polish this past year would know differently. Also, I did already own that sequin dress.<br />
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4) School is going really well. I love it passionately. I turned in my first horrible terrible no good paper. Every other paper I've done has been an A. This one, if there is any fairness in the universe, will be a D. I'm not worried about it, I know my grade in the end will be fine, but I'm embarrassed about it, because I just read a short story my teacher sent me, and it was really good, and I want her to think I'm pretty good too because she's my age, and if I wasn't in her class, we would be peers. It's weird being friends with your teachers, because when you turn in dreck like that, it feels like I just let one of my friends down. Like, if Sarah had asked me to bring a birthday cake to a surprise party, and I forgot, and then bought a bunch of Little Debbie snack cakes at the corner store to make up for it. So now I'm working extra hard on this next paper, which is a case study of McSweeney's Publishing. When I read through these websites and journals now, I have this strange sense of this no longer being some inaccessible art form. Like, when I watch television, I don't think to myself - I have to participate in this world. But now any form of literature I read, I'm thinking exactly that, it's a combination of ambition and guilt which causes me to work it turns out. Maybe this is all happening now because that's how long it took me to build up enough guilt in my life to motivate me. Which, geez, between Mom, the Catholicism, the lying thing and the fat thing, how much fucking guilt do you require as my sacrifice, Universe? I'm just a very large river stone I guess, and I require a flash flood of guilt to budge me from the riverbed, but once I start going, there's no stopping my momentum and there's no predicting the amount of damage I'm going to do once I start hitting the villages.<br />
I have started being worried I am a terrible writer. Also, simultaneously, I am worried I am an amazing writer who will never work hard enough to show anyone that. It's like my ego and my shame are inflating at the same rate, and they are both terrible black cloud bubbles that will rub up against each other until the friction causes them both to pop, and then I'll disintegrate into some clear blue vapor or mist. I keep wearing lots of blues, to make myself more real and valid, but in fact blue is the color of skies and water, things that don't hold a shape.<br />
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5) I am coming home for Spring Break. I'm still not sure how I'm getting there, but I'll be going up at <a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/299500430154842/">Reddstone on 3/4 for Chucklefuck</a>, and then the next night I'll be back on the<a href="https://www.facebook.com/AwkwardCallahanGirls?ref=ts&fref=ts"> Awkward Sex Show with Carey</a>, so you can come to those to see me. Expect me to be pretty much exactly the same as you remember me, except way more tired and way more broke and pretty happy.Bridget Callahanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06729980008876962813noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9077624495684601002.post-10174583461085945662013-02-10T07:55:00.000-05:002013-02-10T08:00:39.910-05:00The Second Party<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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She was off the entire day before the party, and she didn't accomplish anything. She could actually not remember what happened, it was a blur of absolute exhaustion, alcohol poisoning, and spiritual sloth. Her roommate was driving, they had arranged to leave at 8:30. She had a brief moment of ambition and changed the time to 8. At 7:45, she realized she hadn't even showered. In the end, she was ready at 8:40. She felt bad, because she had told the boys to be ready at 8:30, and she was always late. Instead of getting punctual as she got older, like almost every area of her life, she found herself getting less and less responsible, just letting things take her when and where they did.<br />
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They grouped up when they first got there, because they got there first, of all the people they knew that were coming. There was the initial moment of just walking around looking, saying hi to people they maybe knew by sight, and then we settled into a building outside the main house, which had a large table and a basket of kids blocks. The boys sat around the table awkwardly for a moment, none of them knowing the others all that well.<br />
"Playing with blocks is not how you get laid," he said to her.<br />
She thought to herself, wrong, that's exactly how you do it.<br />
Eventually the conversation changed to God and String Theory, and everyone relaxed, the particles between them settling.<br />
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Her roommate and her were standing at the keyboard to the grand piano. She put down tentative fingers. When the key depressed, a low quiet tone sounded throughout the room. It rolled against the windows and light bulbs, and lapped silently against the tideline of their bones. She tried one key and then another, and slowly worked out the first bar to Fur Elise, which she had played as a child. When they were sure they had it right, she excitedly dragged over Sweetgrass and Gatsby, who were probably not as impressed as they pretended to be.<br />
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It was while sitting in the trailer, which was planted in the garden like a very large metallic rutabaga, all lit up in warm orange and yellow lights, laying open in the cold night air, that they realized they had been grouping.
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Her roommate disappeared, passed out in some corner somewhere on the property, car keys in pocket, and there were so many places he could be, really it just made sense for him to drive her home so she could go to work in the morning, and the other boys took up the cue and volunteered to crash there and find the passed out roommate in the morning.<br />
Knowing someone is going to kiss you at some point is a combination of anxiety and thrill.<br />
"I can't have you come in, my room is so messy you won't like me again."<br />
Which everybody thinks is silly until they actually see my room.<br />
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When she went to work the next day, the back of her head hurt from being pushed up against the car door. She told her co-worker who drover her home that day that she was worried that the soft spot on the crown of her head had never fully sewn up, that there was an open vulnerable spot in the back of her skull. Which made her think about trepanning, and how she had never bothered to look up if trepanning was a real thing or something he had might up to put in the book. Some concepts her brain was okay with not defining as truth or fiction, as if once the idea had been made up that made it truth regardless in some dimension.
Bridget Callahanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06729980008876962813noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9077624495684601002.post-18697204471471227992013-02-05T12:24:00.002-05:002013-02-05T12:24:24.430-05:00Free Books!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Happy February! It doesn't look like that where I am right now, cause it's like 70 degrees here and I'm sitting outside work in a tshirt drinking an almond milk latte with agave and macca. Sorry. If I said I missed the ice sculptures on the Lake, would you believe me? Lorraine the barista at work told me macca is good for the libido and that I don't need anymore of it. I told her she didn't know me. But hey, Valentines Day is coming up, and it's shitty and cold in Cleveland, so maybe you need it? It tastes like malt and is pretty awesome.<br />
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Hey, do you love me? Then I want you to write an Amazon review for one of my books. Here's the kick - it doesn't have to be about the book. Instead, for the next nine days, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Cleveland-Your-Best-Friend-Things/dp/1481014366/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1360084601&sr=1-1&keywords=bridget+callahan">leave a review for Cleveland is Your Best Friend</a> about something you love most about Cleveland. On Valentine's Day I'll pick my favorite and send them a free copy, and then whoever wins can write me an actual review.<br />
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If you'd like to win a copy of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Little-Book-Sexts-Bridget-Callahan/dp/1481801228/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1360084601&sr=1-2&keywords=bridget+callahan">The Little Book of Sexts,</a> same deal. Nine days to leave the funniest, sexiest review, and my personal favorite gets a free copy. Also remember, at 6.99, it's a perfect Valentine's Day present that is cheaper than wine and makes you look cooler than your average significant other.
Get to it my darlings!
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<br />Bridget Callahanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06729980008876962813noreply@blogger.com2