sorry, this is not a 'best of' thing at all.

(the following update will be littered with various photographs from 2005)


alright. okay. must write. something. anything. i am not in any way addicted to the internet, and my week to month sabbatical is proof. not that it is a shameful thing to be addicted to. it could be a lot worse: a sports team, a gym membership, nicotine. but it is still not immensely attractive. not that i long to be immensely attractive, but that is neither here nor there.


so i am in massachusetts right now.

massachusetts feels like a whole different paradigm. when i am in massachusetts i live a completely non sequitur life to the one i live in new York. i talk differently, i sleep differently, i eat differently, i dress differently. i am not faking anything in either state i currently live in, but it is important to notice the dynamics of one's own personality.



HEY! IT IS ALMOST 2006!
its going to be a pretty exciting year, for several reasons.
-i am moving to Brooklyn in less than a week. meredith and i signed a lease for an apartment on hooper street, in williamsburg. yes, i am moving to williamsburg. i once wrote a poem about how much i hated brooklyn, especially that area. i read it at a reading and i think it made everyone uncomfortable. NOW I AM A SELL OUT.

-i will be graduating from hofstra in may. thank god. you know, everyone tries to convince me that i love hofstra, but i really don't. i love the people i have met and stayed close with, the experiences i've had, the lessons ive learned...but the actual place itself can burn like a hairspray in hell for all i care.

-i will be starting graduate school in fall 2006 (hopefully!). thus far i have applied to berkeley, columbia, and nyu....i need to finish applying to fordham and then the CUNY grad center. then i am done and waiting. which, as we all know, is the worst part.


HEY! ITS ALMOST MY BIRTHDAY!

my birthday is saturday, december 31st. i am turning 22, which is uh, great, considering i still look like i am 15... i still have no huge plans except that i will be surrounded by friends and moving into my new apartment. i have a small birthday wish list, in case you are feeling generous:
-old maps
its a little known caitlin fact, but i am really into vintage world maps. the more inaccurate the better.
-poetry
i have decided that when i move to nyc i am going to start writing poetry. i think i might even do an independent project on poetry relevant to nyc. i also have an affinity for bukowski, no matter that anyone says. see below for proof.
-transportation
this is going to be very necessary.
-pleasure
if i could wake up every morning to regina spektor's "us", i would probably turn into scientologist. meaning, i would be so unexplainably happy it would be disconcerting.
-humor
clearly, this is a joke
-a validated conscience
my hatred runs deep
-warmth
in olive green. if this is something you are interested in sharing, please let me know. maybe we can work something out.
-energy
i will be needing a lot of this in the upcoming months. and i plan on becoming something of a coffee connoisseur.
-closure
i don't really need closure with anything. okay, maybe some things. but not the video that link directs you to. i just wanted a clever way to incorporate that video as it is proof of what my high school boyfriend, andy, is up to these days. he is the blonde one with the glasses. go figure. ladies! he is single, and i have his number if you are interested.

i think that is all. i mean, of course there could be more. but for now...yeah, any variation of any of those things would be nice too. oh, and i didn't even list one book! aren't you proud? i am a greedy motherfucker.

anyways, i want to leave you with a poem. last year around this time i wrote about the year as if it was a eulogy. i had just started a new relationship, and really, that was all i was excited/cared about. this year is a bit different. instead of reflecting on last year, i am acknowledging the experiences i had as a way of getting to where i am now. one could not have happened without the other. even (or perhaps, especially) the bad stuff. so here is a poem, entitled the crunch by charles bukowski.
love it.

the crunch

too much too little

too fat
too thin
or nobody.

laughter or tears

haters
lovers

strangers with faces like
the backs of
thumb tacks

armies running through
streets of blood
waving winebottles
bayoneting and fucking
virgins.

an old guy in a cheap room
with a photograph of M. Monroe.

there is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock

people so tired
mutilated
either by love or no love.

people just are not good to each other one on one.

the rich are not good to the rich
the poor are not good to the poor.

we are afraid.

our educational system tells us
that we can all be
big-ass winners

it hasn't told us
about the gutters
or the suicides.

or the terror of one person
aching in one place
alone

untouched
unspoken to

watering a plant.

people are not good to each other.
people are not good to each other.
people are not good to each other.

I suppose they never will be.
I don't ask them to be.

but sometimes I think about
it.

the beads will swing
the clouds will cloud
and the killer will behead the child like taking a bite out of an ice cream cone.

too much
too little

too fat
too thin
or nobody

more haters than lovers.

people are not good to each other.
perhaps if they were
our deaths would not be so sad.

meanwhile I look at young girls
stems
flowers of chance.

there must be a way.

surely there must be a way that we have not yet
though of.

who put this brain inside of me?

it cries
it demands
it says that there is a chance.

it will not say "no."

Atavism

my first application for graduate school i due in less than a week. i am in brooklyn every night apartment hunting. i cut my hair like carol brady.
i bought a new winter coat. i have a 20 page paper about sin and syphilis due monday. i am still around, just very busy. so, in lieu of a substantial post, i present you with the essay: On Nothing, or rather On Atavism, by one Caitlin P. Me. enjoy the eel part.

-caitlin

On Nothing, or Rather, on Atavism

A friend of mine once showed me this video of two Japanese women using live eels as devices for sexual pleasure. Woman A was using a funnel to insert the eels into the puckered anus of woman B. Once all the eels were in, the funnel was removed, and woman B used all her strength to push the eels out of her anus, in some sort of strange shooting fashion. Woman A then rubbed the eels over her naked body, and ate one of them. The entire video lasted only about four minutes, but I will never regain those four minutes I lost, watching eel porn. While I believe my friend to be a good person, I sort of resent him for thinking that not only would I enjoy watching such a video, but that I did not have anything better to do with my time.

About a week later I confronted him on the issue.

“Reid,” I said, with an inquisitive nature only common in those who don’t know if broaching a question is a good idea.

“Yeah?” He said.

“Why did you gift me the eel porn?”

“I thought you would think it was funny…it is funny, isn’t it?” He stared at me blankly, as if there was only one response I could have.

“Well, yeah, I mean, it’s strange…and I don’t much appreciate the idea of people being forced to put slimy creatures in their bums.”

“Ugh,” He sighed. “Well, now you can say that you saw an edible eel enema. Isn’t that good enough?”

I laughed. “I suppose so.” And we went on watching cartoons and eating Tostitos.

What Reid was getting at, and what I do believe to be true, is that the time we spend wasting is often the time we spend doing things that are not entirely relevant to our systematic lives, but ultimately crucial to our personal development. That is, while I may have neither gained nor produced capital in those four minutes of eely-squealy, I did however see something I never really expected to see. And this, while irrelevant to school, money, reproduction, or health, is ultimately still an undeniably important asset to our own happiness.

It has been noted that I often spend too much time doing nothing. I can sit in front of a computer screen for hours and be entirely unproductive. I am often caught Google image searching things like tacos, puggles, and giant squids. Occasionally, I find a picture that sparks my fancy, and I save it to my documents. To date, I have an irrational amount of random pictures that are just too irrelevant to deal with. My closest companions and inamoratas are aware of this, but if some lucky stranger was to ever rummage through my hard-drive there is a good chance that they would later consider me one of the strangest, most asinine, useless people our gracious God has ever produced. But I am an artist of boredom, and a queen of procrastination. And puggles are absolutely adorable. And I reckon that once you are done reading this essay, you yourself are very likely to Google image search the glorious puggle.

Humans, especially Americans, tend to spend a lot of time doing what a standard drone would consider absolutely nothing. Lazing about, dirtying their hands and mouths with sloppy food, staining their knees on grass, watching the same repeat episode of The Ashlee Simpson show for the umpteenth time. Of course we don’t take pride in this unless we are in a competition of who is more unproductive than whom. And in a competition like that, we may consider the winner to actually be, the biggest loser of all.

But are we to feel guilty for this? For our fort building, our coffee drinking, our extracurricular protected sex? I don’t believe so, no. It is truly common, and I would argue, entirely human, to want to laze about and to relish in a day of nothing. Some of my best days have been spent with the knowledge of a lack of responsibility, followed by a sense of freedom only youth can grant. Dangerous and unpredictable is this freedom, but all together worthy of praise for it is the greatest things that come out of having a day of guiltless laxity.

I’d hate to have you think I am lazy and somewhat useless. I do think that productivity is relevant to the equation. I am just trying to help you conceptualize a world wherein ‘doing nothing’ is as equal as ‘doing something’. But as the very least, you are doing something for your own tattered psyche. You are in away curing your mundane with boredom; if that doesn’t make any sense, you are napping with your eyes open.

What you gain in the time where you are not really doing anything of importance is a sense of clarity about your own place in the world. Reid might argue that those four minutes we spent together, watching eels as snacks are four minutes that nobody else was telling us what to do and we did not feel guilted or shamed or enslaved into a productivity only inherent in capitalism. We were outside playing kickball, we were indoors staring at the ceiling. We were laughing, we were young, and there should not be guilt associated with the dumb things we do out of boredom.

In a perfect world, this boredom leads to creative surges, and ultimately productivity. However, we should not feel it necessary to be brilliant in our free time, nor should we find it common. Brilliance comes and goes, but boredom always remains. And in that concept we can finally come to terms with our fort building, our Google imaging searching, and our eel fetishes.