October 2006            

The college whopper: bet you didn't see this one coming
Posted Tuesday, October 31, 2006 @ 08:06 PM

For the past month or so I have been trying to shake a sore throat, which first appeared during a weekend of yuck. At the end of September, I caught the crud that had been going around campus for a while, and was in bed for two or three days, getting up only to check email and make more hot tea. I consumed nearly half of the tea I'd brought with me to school (at a rate of two or three pots a day), which, if you know anything about my tea collection, is no small feat. If I find an excuse to stay in my pajamas for a few days drinking tea, reading, and sleeping to my heart's content (all without feeling too bad), I usually don't complain. I didn't think anything of it.

I've not been sick very much in the last few years, but when I do get sick, sometimes one infection leads to another and another. As my mother said to me today during one of nearly two hours of conversations we had, my health is sort of like a house of cards—either everything is holding up remarkably well, sturdy for someone with such a fragile structure, or a few cards fall and the whole house crumbles.

Even though I hate talking about it, my mother and I bond, in a way, over my health, usually as it deteriorates. As a fourth and fifth grader I suffered from a mysterious chronic illness which was diagnosed as everything from IBS to hypochondria, with a range of symptoms that included vertigo, hot flashes, severe headaches, fatigue, and chronic stomach pain. With my ability to attend school obliterated, Mom and I spent most days in specialists' offices and hospital waiting rooms, or else we stayed home doing what we could to make me feel better. Gastroenterologists, psychologists, pediatricians, ENTs, x-rays, endoscopies, stomach ulcers, terrible drug side-effects, special mail-order fiber juices, vitamins, milk and yeast and sugar-free diets, bed rest, acupressure bracelets, preservative-free foods—we tried them all.

After two years of mostly home-schooling and my fluctuating health, Mom felt like the real doctor, trying to piece things together as much or more than any of the specialists we visited. As the illness dragged itself out and no conclusions were reached, less and less people thought anything of it, as I had ceased most regular activity and spent nearly all my time in the house. What's that expression? "If you're gone one week, people will notice, two, and they'll miss you, three, and they'll learn to live without you." Finally, after a CAT scan, we discovered I had a severe sinus infection. A week later I had surgery, and gradually made a full recovery.

I blame the whole experience for my current attitude toward medication and my own health—a process which begins by denying I have symptoms, and then, when something even remotely serious develops, freaking out and thinking I'll never feel well again and be on medication forever. If an illness lasts longer than a few days, I get bored and restless with the "vacation" time, and quickly become despondent or depressed.

Anyway, after the initial weekend of yuck, I developed a secondary infection, and after a month and two rounds of antibiotics, I still haven't beaten the sore throat. Rather than drive to see my doctor in Birmingham, I got up early this morning to brave the Student Health Center, which has a reputation on campus for long waits and terrible help. Having already suffered through a purgatory of waiting rooms and flaky doctors, I didn't look forward to visiting the building which I have heard called "The Student Death Center" by people around campus. However, I found motivation, as usual, in procrastination: I'd not yet finished As I Lay Dying for this morning's English discussion, and could skip class legitimately without worrying about getting the reading done on time. To the Death Center!

I filled out the necessary forms and followed a nurse to one of the exam rooms. After asking the usual nurse questions, she left me with Faulkner and a giant mural of one football player slaughtering another by tackle, painted by someone, I'm sure, who took it very seriously. I wish now that I'd taken a picture. It's not the first mural of its kind that I've seen on campus; once Mom and Erin came to visit, took me out for Thai, and we spotted Bear Bryant and a star player painted into a Renaissance-style scene across the ceiling.

My doctor eventually came in and introduced herself as Irma. She speaks with an accent, and she wears expensive perfume, pink heels, and incredible make-up that shimmers along her lower eyelids. I explained the dilemma and she sent me back to the lab for blood work after a negative Strep test.

I don't know why, but I feel like a part of me should think it's a terrible idea to confess this to the internet. Perhaps it's the way she told me the results of the blood test—like I have done something horribly disgusting and awful. She said it with an implied "shame on you," the way I'd imagine a doctor might address a patient with pica syndrome: "Well, you know, the pain you're experiencing in your stomach is probably from all those rusty nails and rocks you've been eating out of the back yard." But, dear internet, it's a good story, even if Irma thinks I should be ashamed. That's right. I've got the college whopper. Irma says to me, totally serious, and with her immaculately powdered nose a little too high in the air, "What you have, they call this the kissing disease. You have disease because you have been kissing someone." I said nothing, but looked behind her at the football mural and tried to appear shocked, like I've never heard of mono and the dangers of contagious diseases.

Irma saw me off with a prescription and an excuse for English class. I'm not supposed to exercise, and I'm to keep an eye on my health until at least December in case something new develops; as it stands I may already have tonsillitis in addition to mono, but we shall see. I suppose if I'm going to have mono, I might as well reap the benefits of doctor-ordered laziness and multiple opportunities to describe the danger kissing has exposed to my spleen. The fact that I've caught anything that allows me to say "spleen" seriously and repeatedly for any reason is pretty awesome. SPLEEN.

So. A broken down car on the first night of college? Check. Keys locked in car late at night? Check. Mono within the first three months of attending school? Check. Anything else you know of that I should look out for? It might be coming my way.

Expect frequent and exaggerated reports about the condition of my spleen.

That is all.

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Digging and filling up holes
Posted Sunday, October 29, 2006 @ 11:07 PM

Lately when I come here, it is because I have turned over some new stone in thinking about myself in relation to my new environment. Sometimes it is because the stone I feel I need to turn over is much too large to lift all at once, and so after some failed attempts at hoisting it away from the earth with my tiny arms, I come here to figure out what I can do better.

Some days I feel like I know a hundred people. We pile into cars and drive the short distance to the movie theater. We compare the amount of school work we have not done, though nothing shall ever compare to ASFA in that sense. Some days I see almost everyone I know as I walk to class or grab a meal at the cafeteria. I juggle lunch dates and movie nights and activities on campus until it's late, when I saunter back to my room to pretend to study. I fall asleep on my books.

Other days I feel like something is broken. Like I haven't been properly synchronized with the universe. I pass no one. I eat alone while staring out the window at cars passing. I check my P.O. box more than can be considered reasonable. My cell phone is vacant, as if its ring tone has fallen out. Sometimes I spend entire days waiting, walking aimlessly around campus hoping to run into someone I know, hoping someone will remember that I exist and call me. I call people who don't answer. No one answers. Or they are busy. Or they say they will call me back and don't. Some days I nap from post-lunch until dark, or I stare at the ceiling, feeling lost.

There are days when I feel I am building something great, and nights when I feel acutely alone.

It's nights like these that I get caught between my own sentences, reading through passages that still live here, but are gone in the sense that this is the only way I can revisit them. I will never be who I was in the spring, or early last year, just as I have not been the little girl climbing my neighbors' trees since they moved away and we grew older.

I suppose the trouble comes with finding that person again in this new context—finding a Glynnis-shaped hole and trying to fill it.

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Nineteen and loving it
Posted Friday, October 20, 2006 @ 12:45 PM

This afternoon I will finally see Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette, which I have been waiting for since it was showing in France this summer.

I am in Birmingham for fall break, and while so far I've accomplished little more than multiple naps a day and reluctantly changing out of my pajamas to venture outside in the miserable weather, things are good. Everyone that I thought would be around this weekend isn't, but even if I can't see people, I feel like I've finally fallen back into some kind of creative groove, where all my photos and writing have been hiding from me since school started. My process is still a little slow, but I remember what it feels like to properly express myself. I've planned photo fieldtrips with friends, and I feel ready to explore Tuscaloosa with my camera—like it is enough my home that I can properly introduce you to it.

As some of you have dutifully reminded me, I have yet to write about my stellar birthday weekend, and the religious experience that was seeing the Yeah Yeah Yeahs live in Atlanta.

Firstly I will confess that as the years pass, the birthdays themselves seem less and less significant; more and more I am becoming the type who appreciates the attention, but gets by without it. I'm sure if a birthday passed with no wishes and not a single gift, it might feel a little unusual, but for the most part a birthday is like any other day. If you expect nothing, you will be pleasantly surprised and rarely disappointed. Nineteen, then, passed with lots of pleasant surprises, and wishing eighteen goodbye was one of the easiest things I've done in a long time. Last year, greeting eighteen felt strangely insignificant, but at the time I hardly realized what a big year was ahead of me. Wishing it goodbye makes me feel grown and accomplished—a real fresh start for myself, my own life as independent as it can be for an unemployed college student—figuring out who I am in a new context, establishing new habits and discarding old ones.

But Atlanta.

Karen O is everything you'd expect her to be and more. The energy on stage is so high and so genuine. Erik and I weren't right on the rail, but there was only one row of people in front of us, and we were right in front of Nick Zinner. Swoon. They played everything I wanted them to except for "Bang."

You can see the rest of the photos here, with more details about the weekend in the captions.

The Yeah Yeah Yeahs on Vimeo

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Returning to passion and The Civil War
Posted Wednesday, October 11, 2006 @ 05:30 PM

I joined NetFlix at the beginning of the month, foregoing icecream or some other expensive treat in exchange for two movies a month. I have since started The Civil War, the Ken Burns documentary, which I began watching in my eleventh grade "Writing America" class while we read Tony Horwitz's Confederates in the Attic. Until that year, the Civil War had always been brushed over or swept aside at the end of the year, oversummarized in history class, or dismissed entirely in the crush before exams. It just so happened that Mrs. Hubbard, my greatest history teacher, taught the Civil War in depth at precisely the same time we studied it in Beitelman's creative writing class. I remember that particular semester with great fondness—we read so much and spoke with such passion between the walls of that one creative writing classroom, whether we discussed the Civil War, The Last American Man, or Malcolm X.

The creative writing department became notorious, in my last few years at school there, for taking the most fieldtrips, seemingly without purpose or direction. True, there was that one fieldtrip we always joke about, when Flynn took us to the wrong college campus to hear a reading, so we drove forty-five minutes back to Birmingham, and forty-five minutes in the opposite direction to the correct campus, only to arrive for the reception following the reading we'd meant to attend. After three hours away from school, none of us had eaten lunch, so we all piled back on the bus and went to the mall, ate for an hour, and drove twenty minutes back to school. All in all I think we spent five hours away from class (or at least that's the number everyone always gives in retellings), and we'd done nothing more than drive around the state and eat lunch at the mall.

One of the fieldtrips I remember best from my time in creative writing was one we took in the "Writing America" class with Beitelman. We drove to Tuscaloosa, where there is an old plantation house called Tanglewood, which is now owned by the University and happens to be maintained and looked after by a friend of mine. She, her mother, and her brother live on the property in a modern house, and are expected to give tours of Tanglewood should any group show up asking for one. She was one of the creative writing department's greatest students, and has since been attending the University of Alabama, majoring in English. Every now and then I pass her on campus and pretend I have something to say. She is softspoken, and I often wonder if she prefers that I just wave.

That day, when we drove up the dirt road to Tanglewood in ASFA's short bus, Naomi showed us the inside of the house, which was built just before the Civil War. The staircase was uneven, the walls covered in old photographs of children and portraits of the families that had lived there. When we'd seen the whole house and skirted the yard behind it, she took us across a great field. We walked to its very center, where a gnarled tree offered just enough shade from the heavy sunlight, which baked the property's red dirt and everything that touched it. We lingered under the tree in a tiny graveyard inside a fence. Some of the graves were marked, some of the tombstones worn enough that you could no longer read the names. But we mostly looked at the unmarked Confederate graves, which had mere cube-shaped stones placed on them. There were at least a dozen.

To see a place the Civil War had touched moved me. After studying it, reading Horwitz's take on the grasp it still has on our country, and watching Ken Burns' documentary, I was not obsessed so much as I felt I'd made a real connection with the past and the way people had lived. That year began my real love for the South—not the Confederacy, mind you, but the state I have grown up in, and the places my great-grandmother (the last redhead in my family before me) told stories about. She grew up on a horse farm deep in Kentucky and showed us pictures of the property at nearly every opportunity. When my parents still took my sister and I to church and she was still alive, we'd stop by her apartment every Sunday before church to cook her breakfast. While Dad cooked her cheese grits and ham, or emptied spoiled milk from the fridge, my sister and I would listen to her stories of the farm. We imagined her there in the nineteen-teens, a teenager in a long dress riding down the front drive framed by two rows of massive trees. She lived to be ninety-eight, but always spoke of how she fully expected to make one hundred.

The next school year, Dad and I made a trip up to Virginia and Pennsylvania to visit colleges, and I remember feeling touched as we sped through the mountains of Virginia, whose valleys still sit beneath old school houses and white wooden churches.

After arriving at the University, I have been starved for the kinds of classes ASFA frequently provided—classes like "Writing America" which influenced nearly every other subject I studied, and crept into pockets of my life I'd never expected a writing class to go—into the hills of Virginia, onto every brown historical sign from here to Canada. Although my (at times, totally) inexplicable fondness for American literature has lived on, I've failed to find the same kind of passionate discussion here, even in my sophomore level class. Frequently I feel like I've traded that kind of passion for free time. I have loads of it, and after going so long through high school as president and participator in everything, I've forgotten how to use it. Each afternoon my bed calls to me, and I should be ashamed to admit that I've often passed a majority of the day by sleeping, with two three- to four-hour naps punctuated by a meal, some late night reading, and more sleep until class the next afternoon. Homework is something that gets done in the minutes before class, or while I'm waiting to meet a friend, and (since old habits die hard) papers are written at five in the morning when they're due at 9:30 the same day.

All of this, I suppose, is a way of saying that I am trying to fill my free time with the kind of ardor I used to find in the classroom, and I am beginning the experiment with The Civil War. Today I finished the first disc, which ends with a letter I thought I'd share with you. You can download an audio version of it (the same as what's on the DVD) in iTunes; it's called "Ashokan Farewell / Sullivan Balloo Letter." I highly recommend it. Anyway, here 'tis—a bit of historical passion for the day:

A week before the Battle of Bull Run, Sullivan Balloo, a major in the Second Rhode Island Volunteers, wrote home to his wife in Smithfield.

July 14, 1861, Washington D.C.

Dear Sarah,

The indications are very strong that we shall move in a few days—perhaps tomorrow—and lest I should not be able to write you again, I feel impelled to write a few lines that may fall under your eye when I am no more. I have no misgivings about or lack of confidence in the cause in which I am engaged, and my courage does not halt or falter. I know how American civilization now leans upon the triumph of the government, and how great a debt we owe to those who went before us through the blood and suffering of the Revolution, and I am willing—perfectly willing—to lay down all my joys in this life to help maintain this government, and pay that debt.

Sarah, my love for you is deathless. It seems to bind me with mighty cables that nothing but omnipotence can break. And yet my love of country comes over me like a strong wind and bears me irresistibly with all those chains to the battlefield. The memory of all the blissful moments I have enjoyed with you come crowding over me, and I feel most deeply grateful to God and you that I have enjoyed them for so long, and how hard it is for me to give them up and burn to ashes the hopes and future years when God willing we might still have lived and loved together, and see our boys live and grow up to honorable manhood around us.

If I do not return, my dear Sarah, never forget how much I loved you, nor that when my last breath escapes me on the battlefield it will whisper your name. Forgive my many faults and the many pains I have caused you, how thoughtless—how foolish—I have sometimes been. But oh Sarah, if the dead can come back to this Earth, and flit unseen around those they love, I shall always be with you in the brightest day and darkest night, always. Always. And when the soft breeze fans your cheek, it shall be my breath. Or the cool air your throbbing temple, it shall be my spirit passing by.

Sarah, do not mourn me dead, think I am gone, and wait for me, for we shall meet again.

Sullivan Balloo was killed a week later at the first battle of Bull Run.

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A report from the inside
Posted Monday, October 09, 2006 @ 08:52 PM

I'm not going to lie; dropping off the face of the internet to lead a secret life can be liberating. It is October, my favorite month, and I am nearly nineteen—an age which begs me to consider twenty and the significance of a new first digit. To think that I have only a year of teenagedom left depresses me—my twenties may roar with excitement, but my teens have been packed full of life—a decade which will be difficult to surpass in fun and growth. It makes me feel much like I did following high school graduation—overwhelmed with joy, satisfied with the opportunity to write the closing sentences of a chapter, and sad to see such a happy era end. Sure, nineteen is a year away from twenty, but why else do I write here except to embrace nostalgia or wonder about the future? One can't help but think that things may take themselves more seriously with a two in front of them, just as college (although well-hidden by parties and skipped classes) can't help but be a more serious affair than high school, since you're that much closer to a year not governed by the school calendar—a life framed by more than weekends and class schedules.

The first month of school was much harder than I let on here. Perhaps if you spoke or corresponded with me directly you got a taste of that. I had expected my sense of displacement to continue for some time, but had underestimated the depths to which it would reach. Frequently I found myself wandering the quad at night, longing for distraction and afraid to sit idly in my room, anxious to keep moving, whether it's the Strand or the shark in me. Even now, I wonder if I miss home and high school less because I have taught myself to rarely think of them.

In the past month, I've written almost nothing, and still have hardly touched my camera, but things are coming back, if slowly. I no longer feel lost, and my dorm room really does feel like my home. I have more than just "hello" friends, to the point that every time I walk to class I see someone I know. The food is good (a statement which may surprise some of you who know the place in my heart reserved for my father's cooking). And there is a boy who takes tremendous care of me—the thing that, perhaps, has helped the most.

I urge you all not to give up on this place, which is experiencing one of the rougher droughts seen in these parts for some time. My free time is abundant, and it's easy to forget that I have any responsibility other than hanging out and doing nothing. It's sort of like permanent summer camp, but with much nicer living accomodations, and in order to live here I must occasionally wander into certain buildings and specific classrooms to sit for a little while with a pen in my hand. I am doing better, but still finding my way through this new home.

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