An ordinary girl befriends a blog.: 2011

I never had anything to say because

6:00 PM

I've shifted to deviantart. Whoops.

Though I will. The other blog I'm managing will one day hold JPop songs I've translated and anime quotes and suchlike.

In the meantime, until the next fanciful shift in blog host, something I don't remember writing.

Maybe I repressed it. It sparks my old idealism: This was me:

             The  future is the best thing about life because it can be written like a  good story, and good stories are simple, hopeful, clear. This humble  creator would make her future a fairytale, suitable for little children,  and like all good fairy tales, it would begin, “Once in a land, a long  time ago…

    

…A  girl graduated from Bronx Science, magna cum laude, born in a shower of  confetti and board hats. She packed her suitcases, loaded up her car,  and painted her face maroon and white—the Stanford colors. She got an  education, picked her favorite flavor major, and waltzed out quickly  with merry memories, a duffel bag, and a camera. (This is where things  get interesting.)

     This girl had been born with a horrible brain disease. Her parents  despaired of her; the doctors were unsure what to do. The disease  manifested in her thoughts; they gave her reality a soap-bubble tinge  and sometimes she hallucinated. After all, she thought she could  ‘capture beauty’ by trekking across America’s fifty states on foot. She  thought this endeavor would encompass a ‘bohemian lifestyle.’ She  thought she could be happy delivering newspapers, mowing lawns, or  washing dishes in small towns far from home, she believed in hospitality  and human goodness, and she even  thought her sole pair of sneakers would last over miles of snow, mud  and campground outhouses. They had diagnosed correctly; she was clearly  insane. Yet they received postcards from her and read her blog, and  indulged her fancies. They let her go. (This is the utopian version of  the future, after all.)

     One day she filled a thousand pages of a thousand virtual photo  galleries, she looked at her videos and no longer remember where each  one came from, and she frowned at the stranger beside her on the park  bench because she wanted him to remind her of a comfortable old  childhood friend. The friendly truckers and the sympathetic mothers no  longer applauded her highway-sprinting exploits and chalked them up to  the beautiful audacity of youth. They glanced away from her grinning  shoes and said, ‘Maybe you should settle down. Maybe you should go  home.’

     So she did and she wrote a book. After that, she drew a story. Then a  scene from Corpus Christi or Albuquerque would tickle her in her dreams  and out of her fingers danced a little movie. Or a little song. In  between, she dug up the scraps of cloth she found in Boise and sewed  dresses. She walked her dog, and her cat. She dressed up as a hippie on  spring mornings and spoke in a false accent to random people on the  subway. Sometimes she sat by the window of a 24-hour café and painted  the shifting shafts of streetlight and the slouching shadows that passed  back and forth. She never hid her age for vanity. If she had children,  she would spoil them rotten.

     She would enjoy living forever; she would not resent dying either.  Either way, despite her nonchalance about life, she signed up as an  organ donor, bought copious amounts of sugar-free candy for the  trick-or-treaters, and tried her best to be good. At her funeral, they  sang ‘Yellow Submarine’ and ‘Puff the Magic Dragon,’ after they  commented on her eclectically colored fingernails. Her gravestone read  ‘She Lived’ because that was what she did. 

    …She lived happily ever after.”

     The creator is satisfied but the child has a problem with the story, as  most children do. (Recall, if you may, “But why didn’t the three bears lock the door?” “But XYZ?”)

“Did the girl ever get cured?”

    “Cured of what?”

    “Her brain disease.”

     “Oh.” There are good diseases. The creator has heard of a man who was  born without any talent at standardized tests and academics, but he  could sculpt the perfect likeness of anything he saw. She has heard of a  woman who could see the color of any melody. And isn’t love a disease  what with its feverish bouts of anxiety and confused passions? “No, she  was never cured,” she replies matter-of-factly. “She was Idealistic  until death.”

     The child is satisfied and the creator goes back to her stories. She  reads hunched over, because the shackles around her wrists are heavy  after time. “Family” is engraved on the right cuff, “Fear” on the left.  For the moment, though, external biddings of “Don’t go to a college too  far. You must talk with us when you pick a career” and internal whispers  of “You’re the biggest fool. What do you know about taxes and bills?”  diminish into subconscious pattering, like the millionth raindrop’s  half-hearted tap. Hans Christian Andersen, Charles Dickens, and Neil  Gaiman all turned out all right, after all. She owes them her sanity;  she will repay them with paving stones of words sealed with concrete  devotion. Their merry path will continue through the dark woods of  reality. She will repay them with her life.

     When she gains possession of it. She sits on a blue chair, leafs  through magazines and surreptitiously sketches unusual details. The  creator is waiting to be born.


One of my favorite scenes is when Maude (*SPOILER ALERT*) steals a motorcycle. I also enjoyed when Harold and Maude dance. <3

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