(no subject)
May. 10th, 2004 09:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
godreamIt's nice when things work out. (More or less.)
Of that to-do list from a few days back:
Fountain maybes, layout, poetry reading stuff
AP exams
Creative writing -- progress has been made, six or seven pages of progress, including three or four that will be very painful to read since they're entirely in second person
Limo stuff (I am forever indebted to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
grayrainbow and circusrunaway)
Aquatic bio project -- half done, just need to throw in a couple pictures to hit the page count
New stuff on the list:
Cum laude banquet stuff (find something to read, get Mom to get tickets)
... There's something else, but I can't remember what.
So you say: how can just using the second person make a short story unbelievably annoying?
The Short Story of Annoyingness That Doesn't Have A Title
The first thing you did when you saw her was go into a momentary internal shutdown, red alert, all systems on standby mode, focus all your panicked attention on the stupid question of fairy, as in tale, or faerie or faery or fae or some bizarre Gaelic-looking variant you’d never guess how to spell but that would turn up twenty thousand hits on Google: angsting teenagers searching for something better than themselves that wasn’t their parents’ religion.
You were still walking out of reflex and when your angle changed and you saw her face you dropped back to reality. She looked like a person, give or take an almost-glow about her eyes and the wings wrapped tight around her shoulders, defensive. Somehow the shield of the eight foot wingspan made her look very, very small.
It’d be hard not to pity that. So you tapped her shoulder, gently, trying not to startle her. The image of a baby bird dumped out of the nest kept popping into your mind. You took her home, deliberately ignoring everything you’d ever been told about strange girls, even the ones that showed up sad and pathetic and lovely in the second booth from the back at the coffeehouse where you worked. Left her on the sofa with two blankets and a light, brushed your teeth, went to bed still wondering what had just happened.
.
You wake up slow in the mornings – you don’t need any alarm but the one in your skull but you like to savor the ambiguous moments between dream and reality. So it’s logical that at first you sort her presence into the wrong bin in your mind, and are momentarily startled when you see the wispy edge of a long blue wing draped over the corner of your drab brown couch. You turn around, head back into your room, take three aspirin and try to remember what you were on last night. The details saunter back into your memory smugly, like a cat that’s been up to no good, tail held high in a proud exclamation point. Oh. Is going back to bed still an option?
No, of course it’s not: whether or not the world’s gone crazy, you’ve still got real life to deal with. Your nine o’clock class, to start with. So with a quick glance at the clock – it’s 8:03 – you get dressed and leave your room, vaguely hoping that she’ll still be asleep.
It is now that you get an important lesson about the fae folk: bipolar disorder is evidently about par for the course. She’d been quiet and passive and nervous last night, and you’d thought of her as avian; now she’s decidedly feline. A good night’s sleep has evidently more than refreshed her: she’s not bemused and bewildered any more. She knows what’s going on, and she’s just playing with you.
“So. I imagine you know what you’ve rescued and have all sorts of entitlement ideas,” she says, crossing her legs, leaning forward, aggressively making herself at home.
“Huh?” you say eloquently, thoroughly thrown by the turn in temper.
“Come now, you’re not going to try to tell me that you picked some stranger off the street and took her home out of the sheer goodness and purity of your heart?” She chuckles, and at your lack of response, gives you a hard look before bursting into more unrestrained laughter. “You are!” Her shoulders shake, sending vibrations down to the tips of the long wings, before she finally gets control of herself. “Very well, then, I’ll tell you what. Standard deal. Three wishes, on the spot, anything so long as it’s within my power – which doesn’t narrow it down much, really – and I don’t do dead bodies without a really good reason. So? What’ll it be?”
You sit there and gape. It’s a terribly general and powerful opportunity. The first thing that leaps into your mind is immortality. Never to die. To be able to do whatever risky things pleased you, regardless of their repercussions – travel to exotic and dangerous locales, experiment with recreational drugs, dabble in the most extreme sports. You’d see everything that came over the next years, decades, centuries; you’d watch today turn into tomorrow and maybe understand why.
And your friends would grow old and die around you, and your memories would be footnotes in a history book. You wouldn’t necessarily be healthy or happy, only alive: an eternity in a hospital bed is not living at all, only existing. And if you got bored? Nothing. It’s not such an appealing idea after all.
Money and fame? The possible downsides are myriad. Famous for what, to begin with, and where did that money come from? Besides, the novelty of paparazzi and photographs would grow old pretty quickly, leaving you longing for privacy and days when every word you said wasn’t weighed and relayed to dozens of news stations. You’d try to remember when you only wore sunglasses to protect your eyes from the sun, and not from camera flashes. You’d think with regret of a time when you didn’t even have to wonder why someone was talking to you, if they valued your thoughts for their own merit or if they were just star-gazing, dazzled.
Beauty carries the same downfalls as notoriety. And it would make you a target, you realize, though you never bought any of those “she was asking for it” excuses that people like to ignore reality with. Besides, glancing in the mirror to see someone else’s stunning visage -- you shudder a bit. Better to be yourself, in all senses of the word.
True love, then, there can’t be anything wrong with that. You’ll wish to find your soulmate, your other half, to fall passionately for the exactly right person and live happily ever after. Visions of white picket fences dance before your eyes, and of growing old together, of hands entwined through ages.
But. If it took a wish to bring you together, what kind of love is that? If the only reason you’re in love was some winged meddling? And maybe you’d have come together without it, maybe you’d have met on a romantic evening on the beach and fallen for each other in an instant. Or maybe you’d have hated each other from the first instant, separated and been happier for it. You’d never know, if you wished, if you could have found happiness on your own, if there was anything more to your life than a pretty illusion.
She’s smiling. She thinks she knows how this story ends. You spend a moment wondering how old she is, how many times she’s sat patiently and played this game. Wonder if you’re just too paranoid, if maybe this is really gratitude smiling at you with too many teeth. Wonder if, in the end, it actually matters at all.
“No, thank you,” you say, politely.
She smiles. “As you wish.”
And as promised,
dimensional analysis
0.) making a point
Should the topic ever come up, most people will tell you the bass isn’t a solo instrument. It’s support only, quiet backup beat behind screaming guitar leads.
They’re wrong, of course. Bass is the pulse, and didn’t we all spend nine months contentedly listening to just a heartbeat?
And you can sing to a bass. People don’t try, but you can, and you can fabricate support from patterns woven octaves below. It’s simpler that way, clean, and you can listen, really listen, to the words. That makes it good.
1.) distance to anywhere else
I wrap sandwiches in wax paper, even when there are plastic bags waiting to be used in the bottom drawer by the kitchen sinks. I like the sharp angles, the semi-opacity of the paper, the way all of a sudden peanut butter and jelly is a tiny present waiting to be peeled open.
Four sandwiches fit in the basket like tiles on a floor, and there’s just enough room for a pair of apples next to them and a water bottle. I glance up. “Ready?”
“Whenever you are,” smiles Andrea. She’s wearing sweats and sneakers, hair pulled up into a brisk ponytail, all business. “You want the sunscreen?”
I wrinkle my nose but accept, smoothing the lotion into my skin. When we get outside, I can’t smell the familiar scents of late summer over the artifical coconut. I can watch the greens grow richer and the last notes of birds before they, can run my fingers over tree bark and pine needles, though, so it’s okay, it’s enough.
There’s a little brook a ways into the woods behind our house, just large enough and deep enough to be a little bit of a problem to navigate. Sometimes we build makeshift bridges across the stream and cross them smiling, with our arms held wide for balance. Today we just walk north, though, until the place where an old pine’s roots protrude from the ground, thick and solid enough to provide reliable stepping stones across the brook.
We set up our picnic in a clearing just past the old rusted railroad tracks. Time’s passed since the last time it rained, so the ground is dry enough that we can sit on it without having to worry and squish to both fit on the old blanket we’ve brought. I spread the faded fabric over the grass and center the picnic basket on it.
“I’m actually not quite hungry yet,” Andrea says. “I’m just going to jog down there and back a couple times, okay?” She sets off and I set up the food, sipping slowly from the water bottle while I watch her efficient movements propel her farther away.
From the bottom of the basket, I dig up the yellowed pages that comprise my map collection. I use rocks to anchor the corners, though there’s not much of a breeze. By the time Andrea is back, I’ve lost myself in exotic names, words with vowels in all the wrong places or composed entirely of consonants.
She plops down next to me, a little red from running. “Hythianza,” she says, “it sounds like some sort of bizarre disease.”
“Yeah, but look,” I say, splaying my fingers on either side of the location to straighten the crumpled page. “It’s down between those two rivers, and if the latitudes on this map are right it’s somewhere near the equator. I’ll bet it’s warm and wet, like living in the morning shower. I’ll bet people walk around in bathing suits all day.”
She grins. “You’ve got an explanation for everything. Okay, tell me about Verkush.”
2.) formulae for area
I think there’s a story behind the blanket we’ve brought.
It’s a quilt, really, a chaos of colors and angles. When I was little it was still bright. I’ve been told I was brought home from the hospital in it. It’s been all sorts of places, following me; not a security blanket, but a source of familiarity nonetheless.
It’s probably more interesting where it was before I got it, though. I can’t believe all these shapes came straight from a store, carefully chosen and bought. I think instead they’re leftover scraps from a thousand and one projects, finished or abandoned, and each one of those projects has its own background and story to tell. If you went back that one generation there’d be that many tales, Scheherazade with needle and thread. Each one connects to a thousand more.
My favorite story is this one, though: somewhere there was an old lady, retired probably, smiling and cheerful. Her house smelled like cookies and aging flowers. Her hands were wrinkled and spotted and beginning to be as awkward and uncoordinated as a child’s, but she cared enough to bind together all these tiny pieces to keep me warm.
3.) change in volume
Later, Andrea’s in her room with the radio up high. I’m not sure what’s on and it’s not quite worth enough of my attention to try to figure out. She probably doesn’t know, either: the point is the noise, a dull, comforting roar in the background.
I’m stretched out on my bed, listening to her music through the wall, letting it wash over me. I wonder if this confused mixture of sensations is what they feel in Hythianza.
4.) time enough for
Someday I won’t be here, but the world won’t end because of that. It’s kind of weird, but the bit that really scares me about that is what if I haven’t told all the stories? What if there’s some creative spark that could only come from me that’s extinguished? Does inspiration get passed down, hot-potato style, until somebody can finally write it? A hundred years from now, will someone write about me?
Of that to-do list from a few days back:
Creative writing -- progress has been made, six or seven pages of progress, including three or four that will be very painful to read since they're entirely in second person
grayrainbow and circusrunaway)Aquatic bio project -- half done, just need to throw in a couple pictures to hit the page count
New stuff on the list:
Cum laude banquet stuff (find something to read, get Mom to get tickets)
... There's something else, but I can't remember what.
So you say: how can just using the second person make a short story unbelievably annoying?
The Short Story of Annoyingness That Doesn't Have A Title
The first thing you did when you saw her was go into a momentary internal shutdown, red alert, all systems on standby mode, focus all your panicked attention on the stupid question of fairy, as in tale, or faerie or faery or fae or some bizarre Gaelic-looking variant you’d never guess how to spell but that would turn up twenty thousand hits on Google: angsting teenagers searching for something better than themselves that wasn’t their parents’ religion.
You were still walking out of reflex and when your angle changed and you saw her face you dropped back to reality. She looked like a person, give or take an almost-glow about her eyes and the wings wrapped tight around her shoulders, defensive. Somehow the shield of the eight foot wingspan made her look very, very small.
It’d be hard not to pity that. So you tapped her shoulder, gently, trying not to startle her. The image of a baby bird dumped out of the nest kept popping into your mind. You took her home, deliberately ignoring everything you’d ever been told about strange girls, even the ones that showed up sad and pathetic and lovely in the second booth from the back at the coffeehouse where you worked. Left her on the sofa with two blankets and a light, brushed your teeth, went to bed still wondering what had just happened.
.
You wake up slow in the mornings – you don’t need any alarm but the one in your skull but you like to savor the ambiguous moments between dream and reality. So it’s logical that at first you sort her presence into the wrong bin in your mind, and are momentarily startled when you see the wispy edge of a long blue wing draped over the corner of your drab brown couch. You turn around, head back into your room, take three aspirin and try to remember what you were on last night. The details saunter back into your memory smugly, like a cat that’s been up to no good, tail held high in a proud exclamation point. Oh. Is going back to bed still an option?
No, of course it’s not: whether or not the world’s gone crazy, you’ve still got real life to deal with. Your nine o’clock class, to start with. So with a quick glance at the clock – it’s 8:03 – you get dressed and leave your room, vaguely hoping that she’ll still be asleep.
It is now that you get an important lesson about the fae folk: bipolar disorder is evidently about par for the course. She’d been quiet and passive and nervous last night, and you’d thought of her as avian; now she’s decidedly feline. A good night’s sleep has evidently more than refreshed her: she’s not bemused and bewildered any more. She knows what’s going on, and she’s just playing with you.
“So. I imagine you know what you’ve rescued and have all sorts of entitlement ideas,” she says, crossing her legs, leaning forward, aggressively making herself at home.
“Huh?” you say eloquently, thoroughly thrown by the turn in temper.
“Come now, you’re not going to try to tell me that you picked some stranger off the street and took her home out of the sheer goodness and purity of your heart?” She chuckles, and at your lack of response, gives you a hard look before bursting into more unrestrained laughter. “You are!” Her shoulders shake, sending vibrations down to the tips of the long wings, before she finally gets control of herself. “Very well, then, I’ll tell you what. Standard deal. Three wishes, on the spot, anything so long as it’s within my power – which doesn’t narrow it down much, really – and I don’t do dead bodies without a really good reason. So? What’ll it be?”
You sit there and gape. It’s a terribly general and powerful opportunity. The first thing that leaps into your mind is immortality. Never to die. To be able to do whatever risky things pleased you, regardless of their repercussions – travel to exotic and dangerous locales, experiment with recreational drugs, dabble in the most extreme sports. You’d see everything that came over the next years, decades, centuries; you’d watch today turn into tomorrow and maybe understand why.
And your friends would grow old and die around you, and your memories would be footnotes in a history book. You wouldn’t necessarily be healthy or happy, only alive: an eternity in a hospital bed is not living at all, only existing. And if you got bored? Nothing. It’s not such an appealing idea after all.
Money and fame? The possible downsides are myriad. Famous for what, to begin with, and where did that money come from? Besides, the novelty of paparazzi and photographs would grow old pretty quickly, leaving you longing for privacy and days when every word you said wasn’t weighed and relayed to dozens of news stations. You’d try to remember when you only wore sunglasses to protect your eyes from the sun, and not from camera flashes. You’d think with regret of a time when you didn’t even have to wonder why someone was talking to you, if they valued your thoughts for their own merit or if they were just star-gazing, dazzled.
Beauty carries the same downfalls as notoriety. And it would make you a target, you realize, though you never bought any of those “she was asking for it” excuses that people like to ignore reality with. Besides, glancing in the mirror to see someone else’s stunning visage -- you shudder a bit. Better to be yourself, in all senses of the word.
True love, then, there can’t be anything wrong with that. You’ll wish to find your soulmate, your other half, to fall passionately for the exactly right person and live happily ever after. Visions of white picket fences dance before your eyes, and of growing old together, of hands entwined through ages.
But. If it took a wish to bring you together, what kind of love is that? If the only reason you’re in love was some winged meddling? And maybe you’d have come together without it, maybe you’d have met on a romantic evening on the beach and fallen for each other in an instant. Or maybe you’d have hated each other from the first instant, separated and been happier for it. You’d never know, if you wished, if you could have found happiness on your own, if there was anything more to your life than a pretty illusion.
She’s smiling. She thinks she knows how this story ends. You spend a moment wondering how old she is, how many times she’s sat patiently and played this game. Wonder if you’re just too paranoid, if maybe this is really gratitude smiling at you with too many teeth. Wonder if, in the end, it actually matters at all.
“No, thank you,” you say, politely.
She smiles. “As you wish.”
And as promised,
dimensional analysis
0.) making a point
Should the topic ever come up, most people will tell you the bass isn’t a solo instrument. It’s support only, quiet backup beat behind screaming guitar leads.
They’re wrong, of course. Bass is the pulse, and didn’t we all spend nine months contentedly listening to just a heartbeat?
And you can sing to a bass. People don’t try, but you can, and you can fabricate support from patterns woven octaves below. It’s simpler that way, clean, and you can listen, really listen, to the words. That makes it good.
1.) distance to anywhere else
I wrap sandwiches in wax paper, even when there are plastic bags waiting to be used in the bottom drawer by the kitchen sinks. I like the sharp angles, the semi-opacity of the paper, the way all of a sudden peanut butter and jelly is a tiny present waiting to be peeled open.
Four sandwiches fit in the basket like tiles on a floor, and there’s just enough room for a pair of apples next to them and a water bottle. I glance up. “Ready?”
“Whenever you are,” smiles Andrea. She’s wearing sweats and sneakers, hair pulled up into a brisk ponytail, all business. “You want the sunscreen?”
I wrinkle my nose but accept, smoothing the lotion into my skin. When we get outside, I can’t smell the familiar scents of late summer over the artifical coconut. I can watch the greens grow richer and the last notes of birds before they, can run my fingers over tree bark and pine needles, though, so it’s okay, it’s enough.
There’s a little brook a ways into the woods behind our house, just large enough and deep enough to be a little bit of a problem to navigate. Sometimes we build makeshift bridges across the stream and cross them smiling, with our arms held wide for balance. Today we just walk north, though, until the place where an old pine’s roots protrude from the ground, thick and solid enough to provide reliable stepping stones across the brook.
We set up our picnic in a clearing just past the old rusted railroad tracks. Time’s passed since the last time it rained, so the ground is dry enough that we can sit on it without having to worry and squish to both fit on the old blanket we’ve brought. I spread the faded fabric over the grass and center the picnic basket on it.
“I’m actually not quite hungry yet,” Andrea says. “I’m just going to jog down there and back a couple times, okay?” She sets off and I set up the food, sipping slowly from the water bottle while I watch her efficient movements propel her farther away.
From the bottom of the basket, I dig up the yellowed pages that comprise my map collection. I use rocks to anchor the corners, though there’s not much of a breeze. By the time Andrea is back, I’ve lost myself in exotic names, words with vowels in all the wrong places or composed entirely of consonants.
She plops down next to me, a little red from running. “Hythianza,” she says, “it sounds like some sort of bizarre disease.”
“Yeah, but look,” I say, splaying my fingers on either side of the location to straighten the crumpled page. “It’s down between those two rivers, and if the latitudes on this map are right it’s somewhere near the equator. I’ll bet it’s warm and wet, like living in the morning shower. I’ll bet people walk around in bathing suits all day.”
She grins. “You’ve got an explanation for everything. Okay, tell me about Verkush.”
2.) formulae for area
I think there’s a story behind the blanket we’ve brought.
It’s a quilt, really, a chaos of colors and angles. When I was little it was still bright. I’ve been told I was brought home from the hospital in it. It’s been all sorts of places, following me; not a security blanket, but a source of familiarity nonetheless.
It’s probably more interesting where it was before I got it, though. I can’t believe all these shapes came straight from a store, carefully chosen and bought. I think instead they’re leftover scraps from a thousand and one projects, finished or abandoned, and each one of those projects has its own background and story to tell. If you went back that one generation there’d be that many tales, Scheherazade with needle and thread. Each one connects to a thousand more.
My favorite story is this one, though: somewhere there was an old lady, retired probably, smiling and cheerful. Her house smelled like cookies and aging flowers. Her hands were wrinkled and spotted and beginning to be as awkward and uncoordinated as a child’s, but she cared enough to bind together all these tiny pieces to keep me warm.
3.) change in volume
Later, Andrea’s in her room with the radio up high. I’m not sure what’s on and it’s not quite worth enough of my attention to try to figure out. She probably doesn’t know, either: the point is the noise, a dull, comforting roar in the background.
I’m stretched out on my bed, listening to her music through the wall, letting it wash over me. I wonder if this confused mixture of sensations is what they feel in Hythianza.
4.) time enough for
Someday I won’t be here, but the world won’t end because of that. It’s kind of weird, but the bit that really scares me about that is what if I haven’t told all the stories? What if there’s some creative spark that could only come from me that’s extinguished? Does inspiration get passed down, hot-potato style, until somebody can finally write it? A hundred years from now, will someone write about me?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-05-11 06:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-05-11 11:03 am (UTC)