A Watchin' of the People

I have been meaning to record this. One day, perhaps a month ago, I drove past the large bus stop in downtown St. Paul between the library and the Landmark Center. There was a woman standing there, rotund, obviously not completely with it, holding a can of Pringles. She appeared to be having a food fight with someone I could not see, behind the shelter. She would throw food, then skitter back, almost into the street, giggling. As I nearly have an accident trying to see what’s going on, she reaches the point of exasperation and chucks the whole can of Pringles at the offender. It is then that I realize she has been food-fighting with a flock of birds. She would jump back when they all jumped on the food, scattering it, which was why, from my viewpoint, it looked like a food fight.

(Another day)
Went to the Irish fair yesterday, oh my lordy. So many kilts. You ave your average pretty tartan kilt, your black heavy metal kilt with studs, pumpkin butt kilts, and last but not least. THE CAMO KILT. No one will ever notice you. Other observations: We saw our good friend shirtless-kilt,-and-lei man, eating fish and chips under a tree, muttering away and shaking his head. His kilt is green plaid, and we see him all over. He is present at Irish Fair, always, as well as the Harriet Island bandshell. If he weareth not the kilt, he weareth overalls with the straps undone, staying up most dubiously. There was also a pair of people in full Renaissance gear, King and Queen.

(YET ANOTHER DAY)
8/15/11 I had a good time on the bus today. There were these two silly women in the back. I may try to draw them later. There was no one else on the bus, and they kept pointing/staring. They were likely just talking with their hands, but it was funny because there was no one to point at besides me and the bus driver’s mirror. I will try to describe them before I forget. One was tall, everything about her was narrow, her skinny body, her hawk nose, her face. She had no glasses, but that kind of long, overbrushed, trying-to-be-curly hair that isn’t huge, but still makes you want to knit a sweater with it. Her khaki pants were a little bit above her natural waist, and her maroon Subway-style polo was tucked into it. It had some kind of work logo on it. She was wearing tennis shoes, and looked annoyed/nervous.
The other woman was the physical opposite, except for her hair, which was similar, pulled back in that half-medieval, unflattering way one associates with old-maids-to-be. She was round and staring. Her glasses were as round as her face, making her rather bulbous blue eyes look even bigger, and her mouth was disapproving and thin. She was wearing a blue t-shirt that fit her poorly, and I think jeans. She sat hunched into herself, always staring at something. They huddled together and talked in this funny, quiet, intent, almost angry way. For some reason it tickled me.

8/16/11
I just remembered a charming incident from way back when I worked at Perkins. One day, as I was waitressing, a man paid for an older woman’s meal. She did not look wealthy, though I don’t think she was poor. He told me not to tell her who did it, and then told me that he had traveled the world, and in every place he ate, he would anonymously pay for someone’s meal. He himself looked like your average blue-collar workman, not what you think of when you hear “travel the world.” Just goes to show, you never know till you’ve talked to someone. I wish it would rain: it looks like it, and nothing is as cozy or productive as rain. You feel like a bear all snug in your cave. P.S. It did rain: poured for an hour actually.

YESTERDAY
was sitting on the balcony, some dude walks by. Looks up, says hi. I say hi. He asks if I’ve ever heard of an eyeglass brand called Kate Spade. I have, so I say yes. He asks how much a pair of glasses would cost. I waffle. He says thanks and walks on.

Weather. The most Minnesotan topic in the world.

I love weather. Specifically storms, but Minnesotan weather in general. Weather that is not calm, predictable, boring. It is a force to be reckoned with. It's uncontrollable. Wild. We can try to predict it, prepare for it, be afraid of it, revel in it, but we can't any more control it than we can control when we die. As they say, "wait five minutes and it'll change.

I feel like relating anecdotes. Here we go.

I'm four, sitting on the livingroom floor, at ten in the morning in Minneapolis, and the world outside is dark as midnight. The storm hits, then a doozy of a lightning bolt. That crack remains to this day the loudest noise I've ever heard. My dad was standing at the upstairs window and saw it hit a tree not 25 yards from our house. The electricity made his heart skip, and it beat irregularly for days. In getting to the tree, the bolt vaporized part of the chain-link fence. Bam. gone.

I'm twelve or so. We live in Wisconsin now, and it's December. There is a blizzard of LauraIngallsWilder proportions raging outside. We eat beef stew by candlelight and feel archaic and unspeakably cozy. Grateful.

I'm sixteen, I think? At summer camp. I come to bed in the staff cabin at about 2 am. Miss Allison Steddom is sitting on the porch. She sticks her head in. "Lucie, come outside. You have to see this." I go outside. The lightning is unearthly. No rain, just blazing light from horizon to horizon, stronger and sharper than any strobe. The world is alternately bright as noon, then tar-black, every single shaking twig on the trees in brilliant detail. hardly knowing what I'm doing, or why, I start to sing How Great Thou Art. we sit there and sing, Alli and Callie and I. "I see the stars/I hear the rolling thunder/Thy power throughout the universe displayed/then sings my soul/How Great Thou Art."

Just last month, Heather and I sat on the front stoop in Dinkytown, on a weekend night watching the world get cleaned by rain and thunder and light. People run by, laughing, enjoying the force of the storm. The lights are on in a few windows across the street, a dude in a towel walks by his open window. The light is odd, warm, expectant. The street looks tropical, like Jamaica and New Orleans do when it rains.

and now here i am, with the branches thrashing outside the window, when i should be sorting the laundry and packing my lunch. That's all.
-gyp

Le London

So I booked a flight to London last night. I am just here to say that it is WEIRD to look at a screen and put in times to tell people I've never seen when I'll be in a place I've never been. It is stranger still to look at those times and think "On that day, in that place, at that time, it is guaranteed that my life will change. Permanently." I have never been to another country that did not somehow permanently alter how I look at the world.

I. cannot. wait.

And yet I can wait, I need to wait, because there are loans to be signed and lodging to be booked and class schedules and adresses and roommate names to get, stuff that needs to be bought, paychecks that need to come in, mini-trips to plan, belongings that need to be got rid of. Believe it or not, I am really looking forward to packing my life into four bags and hopping on a flying machine. It will be refreshingly minimalist, I think.

I'm still processing all this. It's not real. I get to go to the place where Charles Dickens lived. Where Fleet Street is. Where the Romans accidentally dropped their coins into the mud of the Thames. Where Shakespeare's plays were performed while he still lived. Where Alexander McQueen and Burberry and innumerable other brands are based. Where the Black Death killed off way too many people. Where The Clash and The Beatles and ever so many more great bands are from. Where....I could go on and on and on.

All right. Freaking out over. For now. Till the plane touches down on the Heathrow tarmac.

Books. Springtime. Observations.

First you get to hear the weird things i observe.

the other day I saw an elderly lady reading a bodice-ripper paperback on the bus. Ah, juxtaposition.

Rosie and I found three pennies on the ground yesterday.

And there are three trees growing out of the grates in the ground across from Hard Times Cafe on Riverside Ave. It's spring.

I dyed my hair blue. Well, part of it.

It's time to read, to get rid of the library fines I inevitably run up at the city library by getting all these good books from there and then school gets so crazy that I don't return them on time. School ain't about. All I gotta do is go to work tomorrow. Wooooooooot.

Yo. What book have you been liking? spit it out.

There are several people whom I should email. If you know who you are, and you're reading this, (highly unlikely), I swear my email WILL NOT CONNECT. I'm tired, so I think I'll leave you all alone and go freewrite, where I don't have to use grammar and good syntax. Be back when I have something to write about.

-Lu

this be a short one.

I miss my gypsy side.
I miss doing thing without knowing exactly why or how they'll end.
I'm sick of deadlines.
I'm tired of my own attitude towards said crap.
I miss being playful, and not always thinking about what I'm supposed to be DOING.
as opposed to who am i BEING.

The funniest part is, when I have a more relaxed attitude, I get more done. Do you have any idea what a waste of time stress and worry are? I'm not debasing responsibility here, just the tendency to take everything way too seriously, and forget the funny things. The important things. The things that make doing all that responsible stuff worthwhile. Because if all that stuff isn't working towards some worthwhile goal, why do it?
worthwhile goal for me sometimes comes down to: I want a bike, an open road, and a day to myself. And maybe a buddy, depending on my mood. Sometimes that's a really good goal.

in short
I have got cabin fever. Welcome to Minnesota. Spring is coming. I can smell it.

complete random tangent. Here I sit, in the St. Paul Student Student Union, and they're playing Carrie Underwood(pants)'s before you cheat song, or whatever.
Now I am listening to the lyrics. Basically, she considers shooting whiskey and pool the criteria for being a real woman.
you can shoot whiskey and pool if you really need to. But is that all you can do? Besides write and sing songs about said VERY IMPORTANT THINGS.
If so, no wonder you spend your days wrecking the cars of men who get women drunk so they can get lucky.
But perhaps I take her too seriously. Maybe I just won't listen. EVER.
That's all. I gotta go draft things.

There once was a boy name Eustace Clarence Scrubb...and he almost deserved it.

I think The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is mostly about Eustace, and unfortunately, we're all a bit like him. So...you may turn into a dragon. (I always envied him that bit.)

At the beginning of the movie, Eustace and his cousins Lucy and Edmund are staring at a picture of a fantastical ship on a tossing sea. Lucy and Edmund think the ship looks Narnian.

Eustace thinks they're nuts. His words to his cousins: "It's people like you, reading fairy tales, that end up becoming awful burdens to people like me, who read books of actual facts."

Then the picture on the wall starts to move. To drip. Then to pour. And skeptical, factual, sarcastic, ridiculing, pansy little Eustace is in for the ride of his life. If you've read it or seen the movie, you know that he reforms, but I'm going to stop right there.

Besides going to movies, I'm also reading Madeleine L'Engle's book about faith and art, Walking on Water. Among other things, she talks about the lie that stories aren't true. On the contrary. They are. Not in the factual sense, but in the sense that they remind us of truth, retell the stories our overly practical, factual, naturalistic world squishes out of us. We are like Eustace. We refuse to believe what we cannot fully understand. And then, guess what? We're unhappy. Not for that reason alone, but partly, partly because we aren't purely factual creatures. The very existence of inumerable "untrue" stories attests the fact. See? fact. I do it too. Don't get me wrong. I love facts. Try me. I am good friends with a lot of facts. But that's only half of me. The other half of the iceberg likes mystery, loves paradox, relishes what you cannot put into words.

There is another part in that movie that struck me very deeply. Lucy is standing, looking in a mirror, talking to Aslan. Her character throughout the movie is self-doubt personified. Aslan tells her "They never would have found Narnia without you. Don't run from who you are." I felt like he was talking to me. I am, whether I like it or not, an artist. I tend towards creative insanity, or just insanity, when nobody's looking. And then it spills over, and it's not just in private, and the looks and comments start. What do you do with that? I think, if it is ridicule or teasing and not affectionate banter, you should both ignore it and take it as a compliment. Don't let it sink in the way they want it to. Weirdos who tell stories are deeply, thanklessly necessary. Take care that you tell your stories with others and the truth in mind as well as your own pleasure, but don't ever listen to the lie that the things you can't explain are somehow inferior. LIES ALL LIES. The great Storyteller made you, and He makes no mistakes. You've got to help people "find Narnia", be it in a movie, a book, a picture, a song, whatever thing you make.

And for the folks who worried, as I did, that my favorite Narnia story would be ruined, fear not and relax. Making movies out of books is like translating poetry from other languages. If you go word for word, often you lose the rhythm of it. It takes serious skills to translate a book like that, particularly a rambling book like Dawn Treader, but they did a bang-up job. It didn't follow the book exactly, but they caught the soul of the story.


Aight. Bai.

Hi. I went to bed four hours ago. Also I'm twenty.

It is snowing outside.


This is the end of the longest not-blogging stretch since this thing began. Be aware the following post may ramble. I woke up ten minutes ago from a four hour night's sleep, and sandy beaches macaroni and cheese beeswax.

This part is for everyone who works in food service and likes it just a little bit. You have a thankless, essential job. You FEED PEOPLE. If you make coffee, you are arguably even more important. You keep them from killing others early in the morning. You make them happy. If you didn't wash your hands and be sanitary, you could kill them.
I know what you are thinking. Where on earth did that come from. Well, I have worked in food service ever since I started working. I have worked at the State Fair, Perkins, Panda Express, Einstein Bagels, a fancy Greek restaurant, and will soon add Starbucks to that list. Pathetic, I know. And that's just the food service jobs. Also I didn't get fired from any of them.
Point being: I like food service. I like setting food down in front of people or handing it to them and watching their faces light up. When I worked at the Greek place, they had this salad. If that salad were a person, it would be the sort who stops traffic. It had hot grilled salmon on top and all these different colors of fresh greens and veggies on it. When I brought that to hungry people, they looked at me like I was a savior.
On a more serious facet of it, food service provides strange opportunities sometimes to encourage and comfort people. Some of the people I've served were sad. I don't know why. Perhaps I never will. But I had the chance to be kind to them, show them respect and sympathy even without knowing their sorrow. And sometimes I did know it. Even the jobs that have a much shorter customer interaction time give enough time to smile, compliment them, whatever.
Enough of this tangent. Point is: If you work in food service, I don't care what people imply or treat you like, you're important. Somebody has to do it. You may impact them, you may not. You will probably never know. Personally, I like the mystery.

Other thing. I'm twenty today. I know that's not that old, but whatever. It's a fifth of a century, a quarter of my probable life span, two decades, the end of teenagerhood, one year away from legal drinking age. I read somewhere that when you reach twenty, your character is pretty much formed, for better or worse. I agree and disagree both. I do see myself forming a character and developing habits. But I never, ever want to stop changing, to stagnate, to get senile. I want to be curious till the day I drop dead. I want to take an interest in other humans till that day. I want to make compassion a habit that stays with me. I want to create things my whole life, things and art that communicate what words often can't. I want to pay atttention to culture. I'd like to be like those wonderful, alive older people I know who've not lost contact with the world, who care about what goes on in it and why. And that won't happen unless I keep it up now, today, this very precious second, because that's all I've got.
Credit where credit is due, now. Maybe you know who Michael "Eyedea" Larsen was, maybe not. If you do, you're probably thinking come on, he's old news, that was October. Well, hush up for a minute. He was an emcee from St. Paul, a rapper/spoken word artist. He died in October at age 29. By his own estimate, he left between 300 and 400 notebooks full of writing. His lyrics tell me he thought existentially, compassionately, intelligently. Some people go through life never ever asking why, just how. Here's the paradox. In my opinion, if you don't know why, how is pointless. He asked why. I don't know that he found an answer. That makes me want to cry.
For no reason, hearing he was dead bothered me more than I expected, almost more than it should have. I think it was the senselessness of it. All death is like that, but the thought of all his potential and how I'm not sure he found comfort or peace makes me angry. Yes, angry, what's more, angry at God. Angry in a silly way, because yes I know and believe He's got a plan, a reason. My experience tells me that. But sometimes I don't understand. WHY. why whywhywhywhy. Please don't tell me "but He knows better than you, He's sovereign, He's God" I KNOW THAT. sometimes I've got to ask why. There are things I do not understand, because I am finite, and He is not.

What I'm saying here is, the pat answers do not kill the pain. And how dare I write that about a man I did not know, who died intoxicated and life-threateningly, manically, depressedly sleep-deprived of the combination of alcohol and sleeping pills. I dare. that's how. Music and writing and art allow you to know someone you've never seen, who may have died before you were born, who may live a thousand miles from you. It makes me realize the incredible amount lost when someone dies, all the personhood that no longer keeps us company, welcome or not.

Death angers me. That's all.
In the end, though, I must not stay angry. That's counter-productive and wrong. I have to learn what I can from him and keep it. Follow the example he and countless other people have left, and in that way, they keep living. Their work and art and love outlive them.

Rosie Carlson. You once wrote a post about how some people who are not Christians are kinder and more loving than some that are. I concur. It's just a fact. Love them all anyway. Love them because He first loved me.

the end.

-me