The Thinker in the rain.
I discovered the word for removing the flesh off of bones: flensing.
I've found the root of my neurosis about breaking things. For as long as I can remember, I've always hated when things got wrecked because, even if you can mend it, I knew it was never really the same. A folded page in a book always has a crease forever, even if you can't see it anymore. A broken vase has cracks were it was glued back together. They are weak spots. They were effectively ruined in my mind. You cannot unbreak something that has broken.
I was wandering the Legion of Honor when I realized it was my childhood of museums that had taught me these things. Keep away from the paintings, the oils on your fingertips could rot away the art, the mere breath from your dirty mouth could fade away those painted smiles, the glare of a million lights and the unforgiving sun could wipe out these treasures forever. Water damage. Smoke damage. Acid-free paper. Cold storage.
I never touched anything. I was horrified when parents didn't keep an eye on their children or bother to teach them the same, letting them run a hand along the side of a bronze sculpture. Not that I hadn't always secretly wished to do the same. Of course I wanted to touch the cold metal of some of the Rodins, grasp one of the molded hands or poke at the carefully formed faces, to go right up and feel the thick brush strokes on the Van Goghs. Of course I wanted all these things. But I knew better. Plus, none of the artworks were mine to wreck. Maybe one day, if I'm a bazillionaire, I can buy a Van Gogh and rub my face in sunflowers. Just to see how it feels. Buy the Mona Lisa and kiss her lips. HA. How do you like that, da Vinci?
Anyway, I hadn't been to the Legion of Honor in ages. I went last Wednesday with my best friend from 2nd-8th grade (until high school split us up). I don't know if I had been to that museum since the 8th grade. I only saw Ong-Dee about twice a year now, if I was lucky. She was always insanely busy, so I eventually stopped calling to see if she wanted to hang out. She rarely could. I chose the museum because we had gone there a few times when we were younger and she said that she wanted to absorb some art and I thought it would be better than a movie because we could talk.
We only spent about two hours there and we actually didn't talk all that much. We moved at different paces and I was too absorbed in looking at everything to chat. Museums are always strangely the same, so most everything was familiar from all the weekends I had spent there. I was surprised at how much I remembered. I missed the few paintings that were gone and examined the things that were new to me and noticed how they had moved certain things around. A lot of the same old paintings didn't mean the same to me as they did when I was 13. Some of this was good, some of it was saddening.
I heard a voice that sounded a lot like Eugene, the guy who had run the free art program I attended every Saturday afternoon for a year or so. But I was too afraid to see if it really was him, so I didn't turn around to look. It was weird to think that he still worked there after six years, still guided kids around the portraits and still gave them tips on the finer points of drawing.
There was a really cool photo exhibition on San Francisco. [ http://www.thinker.org/legion/exhibitions/exhibition.asp?exhibitionkey=495 ] It meshed too perfectly with the feelings of change and sameness I was having. I'm definitely going to go back to look at it some more. But next month, I'm going to go on the free day to MOMA to check out the Chuck Close portraits. But it's really crowded on the free days (obviously) and I really like it when it's big and quiet... so maybe I should just cough up the measly $7 student-discount price and go on a regular day.
At the museum, I had been lagging behind her. "I just don't have the time to read all those little labels," she said after. I remembered the joke about how someone should start a gallery just of labels because when you go to any art museum, you'll just see a bunch of people staring intently at the labels instead of looking at the paintings themselves. But I needed the labels now, to find the place and time and credit. I didn't care about that stuff when I was younger, but now I realized how important it was to the meaning of the painting.
Afterward, I hungered for Indian food, so Ong-Dee drove us over to the Naan n' Curry on Irving. I forgot that she works at an Indian restaurant in Davis. Oops. On the drive, we somehow got into a discussion of politics, which is rarely a topic I volunteer. She readily admitted that she knew very little about it, and I claimed the same. But as we started getting into it, it seemed like she knew even less than me and had very few stands on the matter. Maybe all that compulsive newspaper reading is worth something, even if I've been ignoring any articles with "Delay" in the headline. It was mildly distressing. Of course, she's been elbow deep in stuff like organic chemistry... something I couldn't know less about... so she has an excuse not to be up with the current events.
We drove past the big houses up on the hills with all the palm trees in the streets. It was weird and extravagant and felt more like So Cal except for the grey skies and constant drizzle outside. When we passed the Tea Garden, she said, "My cousin filmed Memoirs of a Geisha here."
"Oh, is your cousin a filmmaker?" I asked.
"What? You mean I've never told you?!"
"Uh... Told me what?"
"My cousin is the geisha!"
It was strange and made even stranger by how they were related. "Our grandmothers are twins." Maybe all Asians are related after all.
While eating, she said that she felt "very San Francisco right now." I thought this was kind of funny because the city is so etched into my identity... When do I not feel San Franciscan? I am San Franciscan, then a girl, then Chinese. Of course, she is technically from Daly City. I take it for granted. Oh, and Alex's girlfriend Daisy told us later that her friend had said that Naan n' Curry recycles their curry from leftovers on people's plates. This sounds vaguely untrue, but I don't think I'll be able to eat there again without wondering. Dammit. That coupled with my general fear of pronouncing unfamiliar words will likely starve my belly of delicious & CHEAP food.
It was really nice catching up with her. I wish we could have hung out longer and talked more; she had to get home at six. But I did notice that we didn't have a lot of passions that overlapped. I saw the latest Hot Hot Heat album in her car, and I remembered when I played her H3 before they were really big and she was like, "This isn't bad." I asked her what she'd been listening to recently. Music could be my currency. It would be relatively easy to talk about. The radio, she said. She had no time to check out new bands anymore. Anyway, Davis doesn't get many shows and it doesn't even have cheap record stores like Amoeba, she explained. I was wearing an OK Go shirt. "Oh! I like that video they have!" That was all she had heard from them though. I'll have to get her their albums.
I wondered after she had gone, Does it matter that most of our touchstones are in the past? We share a history. That is probably enough. I don't know very much about her friends now or what she does every day, but I still care about her. I'm not sure how much we have in common and I am not able to be there when her boyfriend breaks up with her. Six years of childhood together, six years that are now more than six years apart from then to now. Is that enough to keep this friendship going?
It made me think of this paragraph from this movie review that had struck me so much that I clipped it out even though I had no intention of seeing the movie it was written about:The immediate intimacy of the characters has both the ring of truth and a sadness about it. The sadness is that it's not at all phony, but it's not real, either. What feels like closeness, a true meeting of minds, is in fact just coziness, an expression of the desire to connect, not a real connection. Robert and Elaine, talking at the end of a movie screening, have their heads almost touching, and they look like best friends. They even think they're becoming best friends. What they're becoming is, in fact, something a lot more complicated. [Mick LaSalle, The Chronicle]
It made me wonder, and afraid that maybe all my friendships are just that... groping attempts to connect but maybe no real connection. What if I didn't know that difference? Had I ever felt a real connection?
Our parents became friends. But when I one day finally divorce myself from my family, what line will keep the communication going? I usually hear about her from my mom talking to her mom.
All that aside, I was finally getting into the Christmas mood. I love Christmas. All the good will, the festiveness in the air, the baked goods and warm food. I also got a supercool Xmas gift from the Guytons. A kiddie button maker! Stand in awe of my potential button making powers! I can put any such slogan on anything a button can possibly fasten onto! Plans and cackling are in the works. It is perfect in its 'I never knew I even wanted this but oh man am I psyched to own one now!'-ness.
I wish people would just tell me what they wanted! I am terrible at buying things for people. I am not a mindreader. I know it spoils the surprise factor, but I absolutely hate giving someone something they don't really like or need when there's something out there they really wanted. Missy says I should just go out and if I see something that makes me think of someone, buy it for them. Shelley just likes to buy things that she wants to give you. Both of them are right. Expect your Xmas presents sometime in July when I have finally find something. And remember then that it's the thought that counts...
But, on the presents mishap side, one family of relatives decided to actually buy us presents instead of the usual, lazy-but-practical tradition of red envelopes of money. It was kind of a disaster. Kalinda, the only one unscathed, got a pretty bracelet. Alex got a man bracelet. THE WOMAN REPELLENT, we called it, using a Chandlerism. He's lucky he already has Daisy. And I got a scarf of bunny parts. Seriously. It was from Hollister. It had pom-poms of fur attached to the ends. I thought, faux, of course. I'm a vegetarian. I looked at the label and was horrified: 7% rabbit hair. My aunt chose that moment of discovery to ask what I thought. I didn't know what to say. "Thanks. It's really soft," I managed. My look of shock probably betrayed me. I'm not a throw-red-paint-on-fur-wearers vegetarian but getting BUNNY BITS in a gift kind of freaked me out. Ha, they know nothing about me.
Meg: I just want to kill myself. I'm gonna go upstairs and eat a whole bowl of peanuts.
(Peter and Lois stare in silence)
Meg: I'm allergic to peanuts!
(Peter and Lois keep staring)
Meg: You don't know anything about me. (runs upstairs)
Peter: Who was that guy?
Hilarious. I watched some Family Guy DVDs. That's what you do during the holidays, watch a ton of DVDs.
I regret that I didn't listen to more Christmas music and that I didn't look at the Christmas tree lights more. Well, with any luck, there's always next year. I really wish I had seen more movies. There were so many good movies I wanted to see this year. I meant to see Naria with my sister on Christmas Day, but it was raining and we are procrastinators looking for any excuse to stay in PJs. Maybe some time this week. But really so many good movies: Brokeback Mountain, Capote, Transamerica, Walk the Line, Good Night and Good Luck, Munich, Aristocrats, Shopgirl, A History of Violence, Mysterious Skin, Breakfast on Pluto, Everything Is Illuminated, Pride & Prejudice... Maybe I should stop being so cheap about movies. All I ever spend money on is shows though, and that gets me broke enough.
2006: I am hoping for some actual progress next year. Onward, ever onward.
*Why do I keep misspelling 'museum' as 'museam'?! GAH. Thank goodness for spellcheck.
I haven't been online for almost exactly a week. There are things I've been meaning to write.
I've found the root of my neurosis about breaking things. For as long as I can remember, I've always hated when things got wrecked because, even if you can mend it, I knew it was never really the same. A folded page in a book always has a crease forever, even if you can't see it anymore. A broken vase has cracks were it was glued back together. They are weak spots. They were effectively ruined in my mind. You cannot unbreak something that has broken.
I was wandering the Legion of Honor when I realized it was my childhood of museums that had taught me these things. Keep away from the paintings, the oils on your fingertips could rot away the art, the mere breath from your dirty mouth could fade away those painted smiles, the glare of a million lights and the unforgiving sun could wipe out these treasures forever. Water damage. Smoke damage. Acid-free paper. Cold storage.
I never touched anything. I was horrified when parents didn't keep an eye on their children or bother to teach them the same, letting them run a hand along the side of a bronze sculpture. Not that I hadn't always secretly wished to do the same. Of course I wanted to touch the cold metal of some of the Rodins, grasp one of the molded hands or poke at the carefully formed faces, to go right up and feel the thick brush strokes on the Van Goghs. Of course I wanted all these things. But I knew better. Plus, none of the artworks were mine to wreck. Maybe one day, if I'm a bazillionaire, I can buy a Van Gogh and rub my face in sunflowers. Just to see how it feels. Buy the Mona Lisa and kiss her lips. HA. How do you like that, da Vinci?
Anyway, I hadn't been to the Legion of Honor in ages. I went last Wednesday with my best friend from 2nd-8th grade (until high school split us up). I don't know if I had been to that museum since the 8th grade. I only saw Ong-Dee about twice a year now, if I was lucky. She was always insanely busy, so I eventually stopped calling to see if she wanted to hang out. She rarely could. I chose the museum because we had gone there a few times when we were younger and she said that she wanted to absorb some art and I thought it would be better than a movie because we could talk.
We only spent about two hours there and we actually didn't talk all that much. We moved at different paces and I was too absorbed in looking at everything to chat. Museums are always strangely the same, so most everything was familiar from all the weekends I had spent there. I was surprised at how much I remembered. I missed the few paintings that were gone and examined the things that were new to me and noticed how they had moved certain things around. A lot of the same old paintings didn't mean the same to me as they did when I was 13. Some of this was good, some of it was saddening.
I heard a voice that sounded a lot like Eugene, the guy who had run the free art program I attended every Saturday afternoon for a year or so. But I was too afraid to see if it really was him, so I didn't turn around to look. It was weird to think that he still worked there after six years, still guided kids around the portraits and still gave them tips on the finer points of drawing.
There was a really cool photo exhibition on San Francisco. [ http://www.thinker.org/legion/exhibitions/exhibition.asp?exhibitionkey=495 ] It meshed too perfectly with the feelings of change and sameness I was having. I'm definitely going to go back to look at it some more. But next month, I'm going to go on the free day to MOMA to check out the Chuck Close portraits. But it's really crowded on the free days (obviously) and I really like it when it's big and quiet... so maybe I should just cough up the measly $7 student-discount price and go on a regular day.
At the museum, I had been lagging behind her. "I just don't have the time to read all those little labels," she said after. I remembered the joke about how someone should start a gallery just of labels because when you go to any art museum, you'll just see a bunch of people staring intently at the labels instead of looking at the paintings themselves. But I needed the labels now, to find the place and time and credit. I didn't care about that stuff when I was younger, but now I realized how important it was to the meaning of the painting.
Afterward, I hungered for Indian food, so Ong-Dee drove us over to the Naan n' Curry on Irving. I forgot that she works at an Indian restaurant in Davis. Oops. On the drive, we somehow got into a discussion of politics, which is rarely a topic I volunteer. She readily admitted that she knew very little about it, and I claimed the same. But as we started getting into it, it seemed like she knew even less than me and had very few stands on the matter. Maybe all that compulsive newspaper reading is worth something, even if I've been ignoring any articles with "Delay" in the headline. It was mildly distressing. Of course, she's been elbow deep in stuff like organic chemistry... something I couldn't know less about... so she has an excuse not to be up with the current events.
We drove past the big houses up on the hills with all the palm trees in the streets. It was weird and extravagant and felt more like So Cal except for the grey skies and constant drizzle outside. When we passed the Tea Garden, she said, "My cousin filmed Memoirs of a Geisha here."
"Oh, is your cousin a filmmaker?" I asked.
"What? You mean I've never told you?!"
"Uh... Told me what?"
"My cousin is the geisha!"
It was strange and made even stranger by how they were related. "Our grandmothers are twins." Maybe all Asians are related after all.
While eating, she said that she felt "very San Francisco right now." I thought this was kind of funny because the city is so etched into my identity... When do I not feel San Franciscan? I am San Franciscan, then a girl, then Chinese. Of course, she is technically from Daly City. I take it for granted. Oh, and Alex's girlfriend Daisy told us later that her friend had said that Naan n' Curry recycles their curry from leftovers on people's plates. This sounds vaguely untrue, but I don't think I'll be able to eat there again without wondering. Dammit. That coupled with my general fear of pronouncing unfamiliar words will likely starve my belly of delicious & CHEAP food.
It was really nice catching up with her. I wish we could have hung out longer and talked more; she had to get home at six. But I did notice that we didn't have a lot of passions that overlapped. I saw the latest Hot Hot Heat album in her car, and I remembered when I played her H3 before they were really big and she was like, "This isn't bad." I asked her what she'd been listening to recently. Music could be my currency. It would be relatively easy to talk about. The radio, she said. She had no time to check out new bands anymore. Anyway, Davis doesn't get many shows and it doesn't even have cheap record stores like Amoeba, she explained. I was wearing an OK Go shirt. "Oh! I like that video they have!" That was all she had heard from them though. I'll have to get her their albums.
I wondered after she had gone, Does it matter that most of our touchstones are in the past? We share a history. That is probably enough. I don't know very much about her friends now or what she does every day, but I still care about her. I'm not sure how much we have in common and I am not able to be there when her boyfriend breaks up with her. Six years of childhood together, six years that are now more than six years apart from then to now. Is that enough to keep this friendship going?
It made me think of this paragraph from this movie review that had struck me so much that I clipped it out even though I had no intention of seeing the movie it was written about:The immediate intimacy of the characters has both the ring of truth and a sadness about it. The sadness is that it's not at all phony, but it's not real, either. What feels like closeness, a true meeting of minds, is in fact just coziness, an expression of the desire to connect, not a real connection. Robert and Elaine, talking at the end of a movie screening, have their heads almost touching, and they look like best friends. They even think they're becoming best friends. What they're becoming is, in fact, something a lot more complicated. [Mick LaSalle, The Chronicle]
It made me wonder, and afraid that maybe all my friendships are just that... groping attempts to connect but maybe no real connection. What if I didn't know that difference? Had I ever felt a real connection?
Our parents became friends. But when I one day finally divorce myself from my family, what line will keep the communication going? I usually hear about her from my mom talking to her mom.
All that aside, I was finally getting into the Christmas mood. I love Christmas. All the good will, the festiveness in the air, the baked goods and warm food. I also got a supercool Xmas gift from the Guytons. A kiddie button maker! Stand in awe of my potential button making powers! I can put any such slogan on anything a button can possibly fasten onto! Plans and cackling are in the works. It is perfect in its 'I never knew I even wanted this but oh man am I psyched to own one now!'-ness.
I wish people would just tell me what they wanted! I am terrible at buying things for people. I am not a mindreader. I know it spoils the surprise factor, but I absolutely hate giving someone something they don't really like or need when there's something out there they really wanted. Missy says I should just go out and if I see something that makes me think of someone, buy it for them. Shelley just likes to buy things that she wants to give you. Both of them are right. Expect your Xmas presents sometime in July when I have finally find something. And remember then that it's the thought that counts...
But, on the presents mishap side, one family of relatives decided to actually buy us presents instead of the usual, lazy-but-practical tradition of red envelopes of money. It was kind of a disaster. Kalinda, the only one unscathed, got a pretty bracelet. Alex got a man bracelet. THE WOMAN REPELLENT, we called it, using a Chandlerism. He's lucky he already has Daisy. And I got a scarf of bunny parts. Seriously. It was from Hollister. It had pom-poms of fur attached to the ends. I thought, faux, of course. I'm a vegetarian. I looked at the label and was horrified: 7% rabbit hair. My aunt chose that moment of discovery to ask what I thought. I didn't know what to say. "Thanks. It's really soft," I managed. My look of shock probably betrayed me. I'm not a throw-red-paint-on-fur-wearers vegetarian but getting BUNNY BITS in a gift kind of freaked me out. Ha, they know nothing about me.
Meg: I just want to kill myself. I'm gonna go upstairs and eat a whole bowl of peanuts.
(Peter and Lois stare in silence)
Meg: I'm allergic to peanuts!
(Peter and Lois keep staring)
Meg: You don't know anything about me. (runs upstairs)
Peter: Who was that guy?
Hilarious. I watched some Family Guy DVDs. That's what you do during the holidays, watch a ton of DVDs.
I regret that I didn't listen to more Christmas music and that I didn't look at the Christmas tree lights more. Well, with any luck, there's always next year. I really wish I had seen more movies. There were so many good movies I wanted to see this year. I meant to see Naria with my sister on Christmas Day, but it was raining and we are procrastinators looking for any excuse to stay in PJs. Maybe some time this week. But really so many good movies: Brokeback Mountain, Capote, Transamerica, Walk the Line, Good Night and Good Luck, Munich, Aristocrats, Shopgirl, A History of Violence, Mysterious Skin, Breakfast on Pluto, Everything Is Illuminated, Pride & Prejudice... Maybe I should stop being so cheap about movies. All I ever spend money on is shows though, and that gets me broke enough.
2006: I am hoping for some actual progress next year. Onward, ever onward.
*Why do I keep misspelling 'museum' as 'museam'?! GAH. Thank goodness for spellcheck.
I haven't been online for almost exactly a week. There are things I've been meaning to write.