Blog For Free!
Archives
Home
2004 June
2004 May
2004 April
2004 March
tBlog
My Profile
Send tMail
My tFriends
My Images
Sponsored
Blog
|
| part eight, i think |
| 06.16.04 (5:46 pm) [edit] |
Since Greg was fourteen, there had been few days when he had eaten anything but egg whites, broccoli, strawberries, peanut butter, or ice cream, and few days when he had drunken anything but water diet coke, or alcohol. “I don’t know why it is,” he wrote, “It just is.”
Greg, as we know, had always been a very intuitive person. He imagined that self-understanding, the kind that sometimes requires biting honesty, is an essential element in the search for meaning in life, so he routinely evaluated himself in ways that others didn’t think or care to do.
How is it, then, that such an introspective person couldn’t understand why he felt obliged to stick to a very regular and entirely boring eating routine?
If he were giving advice to someone else, a friend maybe, he would probably say something like: “Most people choose not to reflect, really reflect, on their lives and behaviors because, well, they just don’t want to think about those things. Others, though, take a different route. They build an exterior of apparent intuition and self-understanding so that they can hide from or neglect the things that really matter. There’s a good chance I’m one of those people.”
And if Greg had permitted himself the introspection he claimed to have, he would have recognized that his fear of foods, most foods, is a symptom of, well, perhaps, this particular existential problem:
He was afraid to trust anything or anybody.
He imagined, for instance, that most food, no matter the quantity, would make him fat or sick. And perhaps more direly, he imagined that most people, no matter how good they seemed, were dishonest and, eventually, unfaithful.
And where did he develop this pessimistic outlook on life?
From inside.
He couldn’t trust himself. He imagined, at times, that his feelings and passions were real. But when those feelings and passions waned, as they tend to do, he realized that what seemed so real wasn’t ever so. And if he couldn’t trust his own feelings and passions, then he certainly couldn’t trust anyone else’s. Or even food.
So why do I delve into this mumble jumble? Well, now you understand, I mean, you really understand, why he was such a bad cook.
------------------------- ------------------------- --------------
He fretfully explained his humorous predicament to his mother. “She’s sooo beautiful,” he said. “What else could I do?”
She laughed and said, “You could have told her the truth, and offered to take her to a nice restaurant.”
“But cooking is so much sexier,” he pleaded. She laughed again.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “Everything will be alright. I know some very easy salmon recipes. Salads and sautéed vegetables are a cinch to make too.”
His mother dictated the recipes to him over the telephone. He hung up and drove to the supermarket to buy the necessary ingredients like garlic powder, green peppers and bread—food items he never imagined he’d touch. When he arrived home, he put the food away and frenziedly cleaned his apartment. And as he scrubbed the toilet seat, she called.
“Do you mind if we get together a little early?” she asked. “I told a friend I’d see a play with her later tonight. Oh, and it’s cold outside. I can either freeze while walking to your apartment, or you can pick me up. Umm… and I’d like to buy us a bottle of wine, but I forgot my driver’s license. Can you drive me to the liquor store when you pick me up?”
He didn’t clean the toilet nearly as well as he would have liked.
He picked her up. “She wore a tight black dress that revealed most of her perky breasts and cut off just below her, um, well, panties. And her legs and lips were glistening in the moonlight.” It wasn’t his most prosaic diary excerpt, but for our purposes, it does well.
They went to the liquor store, and, true to her word, she paid for an eight-dollar bottle of wine. “It wouldn’t be right if I didn’t do my part,” she said.
Upon entering the apartment, she spent a few minutes touring its three small rooms. As she left the bathroom, she said, “Even your toilet rims shine. I’m very impressed.”
Inside the kitchen, she uncorked the bottle of wine, poured two glasses, handed him one, and raised hers to toast. “To the beginning,” she said. They clinked glasses. “To the beginning,” he replied.
He had forgotten to buy measuring cups and spoons. So he improvised and said “Measurements are no fun for professionals like me.”
He coated twenty ounces of salmon with a hodgepodge of breadcrumbs, salt, garlic powder, eggs, oil, baking soda, and other ingredients that he knew nothing about. As he was coating, she asked, “How should I cut the vegetables?”
He answered, “Cooking is about self-expression. Cut them however you feel. That’ll be perfect.” And though she followed suit and cut the vegetables into unique shapes and sizes, she wondered whether he was as good a cook as he advertised.
Luckily, by the time the fish, sautéed vegetables, and salad were done, and he couldn’t find the cooking mitten that lay on top of the oven, or the napkins that hid in the cupboard beside the oven, she had already finished two glasses of wine, and she didn’t mind as much as she otherwise might have.
|
|
|
| |
| working out |
| 06.09.04 (12:29 pm) [edit] |
Greg and Tatiana finally started a bottle of wine together a month after beginning their final year of college and twenty minutes before starting their second bottle of wine. Admittedly, I had hoped for something less. I wanted their stories to be more authentic, and never begin, or at least never come together.
What happened?
Before her final year of college, Tatiana decided to be more independent and less reliant on the courtesy of boys. “I want to buy my own clothes,” she told a friend. “Or at least some of them” (Her boyfriend and others had been buying clothes for her throughout college). So she acquired a job working at the front desk of her college gym checking student identification cards and making sure everyone wore close-toed shoes. But she didn’t do her job well. Instead, she studied for medical school examinations and admired the beautiful people that walked by, among the many not-so-beautiful ones, and watched them all admire her.
As he progressed through college, Greg tried to pursue an objective aesthetic ideal in all facets of his life. For instance, he wasn’t satisfied with just any true love, he wanted perfect love. And he wasn’t satisfied with self-understanding, he wanted to understand everyone and everything. And he didn’t just want to be a good friend, or good in bed, he wanted to be the best friend, and last forever in bed, or at least as long as needed. And, of course, he set the same standards for his body. Despite a slight build that made it difficult for him to put on muscle, and hollow cheeks that seemed not to want to fill out, he wanted a perfect body. So he still attended the gym everyday. And it was there that he and Tatiana were again reacquainted.
And though they had once engaged in a wonderful conversation on a park bench, the one I’ve told you so much (or little) about, their gym exchanges were short and trite at first. Why? Well, she had had intimate conversations with many boys, and she didn’t feel the need to extend herself, because she knew that most boys eventually would. And he was embarrassed. Though she had been a learning experience that he didn’t regret, she had also been a failure. “She was my first love,” he had written. “But also my first love lost.”
And unsurprisingly, at least for her, Greg one day furthered the conversation. “I like your short cut mini-skirt and revealing tank top. It brings out the color in your eyes,” he said. But he wasn’t thinking about her eyes at all, and she knew it. Perhaps that’s why she blushed. “I like your eyes too,” she said. And she really was thinking about his eyes. She remembered that those same eyes had fascinated her once before.
And though they both appreciated [i]light[/i], pithy, and shallow conversation, perhaps ironically (or maybe not so, as they both attended an elite liberal arts college), they valued depth, and intellectuality just as much. So when she commented on the upcoming Presidential election, and he alluded to Kant and his view of the aesthetic, conversation was [i]light[/i] and fulfilling, and they remembered how easy things had been at the picnic table years before.
(Though they talked about many facets of life and their lives, I don't want to slow the pace of the story with specifics. You’ll learn everything you need to know as we go. I promise.)
For instance, know this: their political and philosophical views were at times similar and at times different, but even their differences were inherently compatible.
She was passionate about being passionate, and he was passionate about understanding passionate people like her. And they were intrigued by their differences. So when her work shift finished, it shouldn’t have been too surprising when she asked, “When will we drink that bottle of wine that we promised each other so long ago?”
And Though he felt a deep connection with her, the same connection he had felt with her twice or three times before, he was admittedly stunned and, for the first time he could remember, speechless.
Why?
Because he had counted her out: “My existential failure,” he wrote in his diary. Yet she had defied him. And though he imagined he was good, very good, he never dreamed he was quite this good.
“How about tonight?” he responded, wondering if she still had a boyfriend.
“Dinner too?” she asked.
“Sure,” he said.
“Can you cook?” she asked.
“Anything you want,” he said.
“Fish,” she replied.
“Of course,” he said.
“What time?” she asked.
“Seven…at my place,” he said. They shook hands. He walked into the gym, and she punched her time card, grabbed her bag, and headed home to get ready.
When he was sure she had left, he stood in the corner of the gym, opened his cell phone, and called his mother. “How does one cook fish?” he asked. A bead of sweat had appeared, as if from nowhere, on his forehead.
|
|
|
| |
| Part seven or whatever. By the way... I'm a college graduate now... if only i can put that piece of |
| 06.07.04 (10:37 am) [edit] |
On occasion, it’s important for an author to step out from behind the veil and remind you, the reader, that your reading isn’t in vein, and that somewhere, somehow, there’s something beautiful and maybe even worth keeping in what you’ve read.
And I hope there really is something in these words. But I can’t promise you beauty or anything more. Because I am, after all, just an author, and not somebody responsible for the world my characters create or the games they play. I don’t pretend to be God… or even if do… I still wouldn’t know whether or not there is something beautiful or fulfilling to hold onto here. This is Greg and Tatiana’s story; they’ve got the power, they’re acting it out. I’m just writing it down.
So what?
On a most basic level this means that I’m asking you, my friend, to lower your literary expectations for this one. I got ahead of myself or even lied to you when I said earlier that Greg and Tatiana would finally enjoy a bottle of wine and start their real story. They may not. They may have already ended their story together (the story of Greg and Tatiana) at that picnic table. And if they did in fact end it there, if their story never began, they’d be forced to resolve their own existential problems elsewhere, without each other, and without us watching. And that’s entirely plausible.
If there’s nothing here, or if there’s something here but no resolution, I don’t want you to feel too bad or let down. Because mostly, this is how our stories go. Either they don’t happen at all, or they happen all wrong.
So relax. Take a deep breathe, settle into your chair, and let things unfold or not. The most interesting part of this adventure, I think, is knowing that you may come up empty, but reading on despite that knowledge. Because who knows what you’ll find. And if you do find something, and you don’t expect it, think how much happier you’ll be than if you’d expected it all along.
|
|
|
| |
| Part 5? here goes... we get to find out more about tatiana!!! |
| 06.04.04 (8:45 am) [edit] |
And (maybe not so) coincidently, ever since Tatiana was a little girl, she wanted love, perfect love. Even her mother admits, “When Tati was younger she knew exactly how things would be. She would be a doctor and travel around the world and dance and search for all things passionate in life. And her boy, the one she fell in love with, would inexorably be one of those things passionate. His aspirations and interests didn’t have to fully match hers—that’d be too boring— but they did need to complement her quite well. And she would need space from him. She has always been her own woman, yes woman, and he’d need to respect that. Because she requires social, intellectual, emotional, and physical intimacy with many people, and he would need to understand that her proclivities have nothing to do with him, or her love for him, rather, they are the part of what makes her special and unique. And he’ll love her for that. She knows it. ”
Tatiana understood, even at a young age, that by flaunting her beauty or even revealing it at all, she obtained extraordinary power over most boys and some girls. She knew, for instance, that by touching Greg lightly on the shoulder, or batting her eyelashes at him, that he would imagine fucking her later that night, and that even in that moment, he would do anything for her, or at least anything for what she represented: the possibility of beauty conquered.
And because she knew that most boys and some girls would sacrifice lots, maybe too much, to ‘have’ her beauty, or even imagine ‘having’ it, she learned never to compromise her own desires with others. She didn’t need to. If she wanted something, she asked for it, and more often than not, much more often, she’d get it, if for nothing more than for beauty’s sake.
Her boyfriend, whom she had dated through most of college, the one with the eye-catching cleft chin and broad shoulders, was one of the most desired boys on campus. He was strong, athletic, artistic, musical, and, according to his pastor, “a very good guy.” Yet, none of these qualities “really did it” for her. “He lets me go elsewhere to fill the rest of my needs,” she once admitted to another boy while holding him closely at night.
A cheater? Another fucked up love story? Not quite. Don’t rush to judgment.
Even then, she admitted that she was socially, intellectually, emotionally, and physically promiscuous. And she will tell you, as she told Greg while innocently crossing her legs on that park bench, that “there are two types of promiscuous girls. There are those that have a set ideal of perfect beauty (love) and search for it in everything they do, in every person they’re with. And there are those that imagine there is the possibility for perfect beauty (love) in everything they do, in every person they are with. I am, of course, one of the latter.”
Wait. You, my friend, have no right to make arbitrary judgments. You don’t yet know what promiscuity means… for her. And you know, as well as I do, that it’s impossible to judge a girl by what she says if you don’t know what she means. So let’s find out.
Promiscuity, for her, back then, had no more sexual connotations than anything else universal. “It’s the act of being indiscriminate with people and things in life,” she might have said. “And it has nothing to do with faithfulness.” Because she would have argued, back then, that “despite my sleeping with boys, I was no less than completely faithful.”
She doesn’t fuck them,” her mother once said to her stepfather. “She sleeps with them, sure, but only because she needs somebody different to hold sometimes. She’s a very tactile girl. But she would never cheat. She just needs to feel touched, loved. And there’s nothing wrong with that. We all need that feeling sometimes. ”
|
|
|
| |
| next part-- this one is more about Greg... it will, of course, even out |
| 06.02.04 (4:51 am) [edit] |
“Talking with Tatiana was the best thing that ever happened to me,” Greg wrote months after their conversation on the park bench. “She gave me the confidence I needed to talk to other girls, and to eventually to be with them. Now I think I’ve got it down. I know how to do it.”
His confidence, those days, endured frequent and fleeting stays on both extremes. When he wrote that diary entry, that confidence must have been spiraling out of control. No boy can purport to know how to [i]be [/i]with all girls. It’s an intangible, inexpressible, and practically impossible feat. Or is it?
In the same diary entry he wrote: “A girl, any girl, wants a boy that can listen well enough to know her. Well, she doesn’t want him to completely know her; she just wants him to listen and try to figure her out. For instance, if she likes to laugh, she wants him to know to be funny for her; if she likes to be romanced, she wants him to know to romance her; and if she likes to talk or be protected, she wants him to want to listen or protect her. Oh, and if she likes to have sex, she wants him to be coordinated, somewhat flexible, and last for more than a few minutes. It’s that simple really. I think.”
Is he right? Is it that simple?
In the thirty months and seventeen days between their picnic table conversation and that first shared bottle of wine (we’ll get to the latter soon), he set about ‘figuring out’ girls in the same way he figured out so many of his favorite philosophical proofs. He listened. He learned. And he became the boy that he imagined each of his girls needed. “It’s coercion. I’m coercing them to fall in love with me,” he wrote.
And (he would like us to think that) his system worked. During those in-between years, nine pretty girls fell hopelessly (or hopefully) in love with him. They imagined that he was the boy they had always imagined, and that their feelings for him, the ones that seemed so real and touchable, would last forever.
And despite his attempts to philosophically distance himself from his own feelings, he felt the same intense love that they did. Yet it didn’t seem to matter. Those relationships never lasted long.
“What is it about me?” he often wondered. “All I want is love. Perfect love.”
|
|
|
| |
|
|
