Little Boobies = Self-Deprecating = Unhealthy

(Discipline and transition)



I suppose it's a catch 22. I'm closed, uninviting, cold, hard at making eye-contact, timid, coy. I'm secure, or more secure, or secure e-fucking-nough.

Why should I open up? Why should I talk at all? I observe. I observe and absorb. I'm not unintelligent. A connection is lacking. I want to open up-- I want to be invited to open up, sincerely.

Ah, abandonment. What comes with opening up is the possibility for abandonment. Abandonment in the long term. Judgement in the foreground. I can almost handle judgement in the foreground as long as it doesn't lead to abandonment in the long haul. It's a risk, you know, opening up-- being susceptible to someone's ideas of you. Being boxed, catorgorized-- not much unlike how I was suprised when you said you liked sweets. I boxed you up with men not liking sweets and that's unfair.

Greater scale: What do I do? What have I been doing? Feeling it out-- testing the waters. Looking cute, being thin, young-- I quit smoking and I don't drink as much. Discipline. I'm constantly working on discipline. Discipline to be sitting here and not sitting outside or going out tonight. Not spending time in the mirror-- I hate mirrors and I love mirrors just the same. I am indifferent to mirrors, maybe as we all should be. I ignore them because I feel like people are watching me when I watch myself in a mirror, or any reflection really, whether it be a window on the street or whatever. Vanity. God forbid I ever be accused of how vain I actually am.

Working, writing, cocktails. Let me tell you what the word 'cocktail' means to me. Sipping, classic, awfully contrived scheme that has bombarded my life in New York for the last some odd five years. When I first stepped into M&H. When I first laid eyes on that hairy bartender and his beautiful mother-fucking hands. He sat me and my at-the-time boyfriend in a table in the back, after hours, with a bottle of Johnnie (ew) Walker Green. And the drink made sense. The drink, and the destination there after-- made sense. It was sexy, classy, sexy, classy, (contrived, fake-- but I was blind).

I respect the cocktail, the cocktail creator, the maker, the hands... as I would a chef or even a painter. I respect the hands-- I love hands. Long, slender, masculine fingers. Ah, jesus I get wet watching those sorts of hands work, I kid you not.

Hands do it for me constantly and consistently, always and forever. Fingers, being fingered, having fingers inside of me, wanting fingers inside of me. I absolutely love hands.

Conforming, activism, all that hearsay, jargon, shenanigans, this mother-fucking election that although I have not been following it as closely as I should, follows me tightly-- pollutes my brain, my inbox, and the tables I sit around with my friends. Funny dialog sticks out to me like, "I might have to break up with my boyfriend because of the economy.".

Movies I have not seen. Credentials I have yet to acquire. Credentials that have yet to matter. What I have: Life experience chapter-- check, check, and check. As far as gritty New York goes, I don't want to see anymore of it. Drunken dramatics, check. Scrounging pennies, check. Laundromats, check. Finding love within it all, check. Losing love within it all, check, check and check. Being spit on while riding on the back of a Vespa, check. Popping off said Vespa, check. Friends, people leaving, physically and to their partners and their domesticity. Being told "people leave". Being told "people always leave you, don't they, Bird?". Sad-song Bird. People I care about leaving, people I thought I cared about coming back. People I want to learn to care about, coming back. Them leaving again. Them calling again. There being silence, a table between us. Humming, probably too much humming when we're walking on the sunny side of the street on a Sunday, your flight later that evening. I haven't seen you in eight months, shouldn't we have more to talk about? I want to say a million things and nothing at all. Can you see that in my face? What do you think of my face? Why can't I talk to you? Oh, because I'm nearly certain you'll always leave me to my fermenting insecurities.

Remembering when you told me I was insecure on the subway that one time on fucking Christmas Eve. La de fucking dah.

Doing things-- I like doing things with you. Going places, seeing shows, watching movies-- all those things between work and school and work and work. I like doing all of those things with you. I also like rolling over to you, hard in the middle of the night. And before I knew it, I awoke on top of you and you were inside of me and I am so more than okay with that because the attraction comes easy and I want you and I like the way you smell and how hard you get for me and that sort of animalistic thing you do with your bottom jaw when we're making out.

I just typed that while twirling my fucking hair. Making out. Haaaahaaa.

I want to be able to communicate and talk and reflect and release. Ah, release. I can specifically remember when I clammed up to men. My first love, my first physical love. I had dated my piano teacher's son when I was 13,14,15. We were best of friends. We wrote notes to each other while we rode our respected busses to school and exchanged them when we met at my locker. He had the combination to my locker. He used to suprise me with all sorts of things-- carnations, polar bear stuffed animals, love letters, school dances. We were great friends that held hands and kissed each other hello and goodbye. We made out once or twice in six months on a ski lift, in his bedroom overlooking the grand piano in his beautiful converted church house. His mother vacuumed her way into the room and that was the first time I ever felt a hard dick, through our clothes. I had no reaction.

Nathan kept a shoe box of all the letters I had written him in his closet. I eventually broke up with him for the English exchange student that was nick-named "uncut". Classmates of mine would give me scissoring signs as I passed them in the hall. It didn't make any sense at the time.

Anyway, I remember when I clammed up. Up until then I was pretty open, innocent, pure, talkative, listened rather well-- I would say. We got everything in out in our letters. Those letters helped me to find my love of writing, of course. The British exchange student whom was older than me left me when I didn't "put out". I joined the sardine-packed women's choir freshman year of high school and by my sophomore year I had auditioned for the select chamber choir that had boys in it. Cute, artistic boys that the football players thought were gay. The boys that were in "Bye, Bye Birdie" and "My Fair Lady" and could sing and dance and go to a place they themselves were unsure of but honed it well for their age. More classics. I love the classics and I am not from this time, although my computer would say otherwise.

Newsie hats, tight jeans, H&M had just shown up. I fell for the bi-curious boy in the choir, gave him three solid years of my heart, my virginity, and in his constant defense, my dignity.

It was all about playing games. I called him probably too much. I told him how I felt probably too much. I was open and vulnerable and giving and forthcoming. He taught me music, he taught me kissing in the back of his old Pontiac, he taught me nature, running, fantasy fiction books, smoking marijuana, getting lost in the woods, laying on the beach down at the lake at night. He told me that I wore too much pink. I don't wear it anymore, not ever really. I've dressed tortured ever since.

I clammed up after that. I "learned" how to act with men after him or so I had thought up until early my twenty second year. I thought although I do have an opinion on most things, common things like the election, like music (hell, I was classically and jazz-trained on piano for twelve plus years), like literature, like the news-fucking-paper-- I thought up until just under a year ago that it be best to stay quiet, observe, absorb, and reflect privately.

I am a very private person but I am naked, in my writing. I am sitting here now, hunched over in a ball frantically typing stark naked, nursing on ODWALLA SUPERFOOD and ignoring multiple phone calls from my angry boss (I work in a secret cocktail lounge in the East Village-- that's how I pay my rent) and my friends (my close friend is moving to France for two years in three days and there is a bash for her tonight). I spent quite sometime in a hospital in Harlem on 100th and Madison-- Mt. Sinai, this weekend waiting for my uncle to die. Still, he lives. I flaked out on work on Saturday night, went to a gay club in the company of a musician I am a huge fan of-- whose career I have followed since I dated said bi-curious boy at the age of 15. I spent the night next to an old beau, an old friend, an old love who recently reentered the picture that is my life. I don't actually know him and he doesn't actually know me, a whole lot of opening moves, if you will. Not sure if gambit is the right word to describe our relationship or the absence of one. That is my life, here in New York. Working nights, avoiding cigarettes, cocaine, the cocktails I know nearly everything about, marijuana-- I even gave up poor, ol' marijuana. School by day, or evening rather. Studying towards what? Writing what? What?

"So, you aspire to one day work writing in the entertainment industry?", asks Joe, a table between us, at some chocolate-themed restaurant in the East Village, unknowingly caught in the Sunday brunch rush. Just prior to asking me that he mentioned that he had read Tarantino's latest screenplay followed by, "That man can write!". I look haggard and I want to scratch my eyes out of my head. We fell asleep in our clothes the night before; I spent the entire night sleeping soundly on his arm. I right then looked over at his arm and wondered if it hurts as much as my neck does and avoid the question by bringing up my parents.

God, fuck if I know. I don't fucking know what I want. I want to write a fucking feature film and cure cancer simultaneously, doesn't everyone? I want to write it, I want to direct it, I want to be Woody fucking Allen or some thing equally ridiculous like that. What do you expect me to say, really? Who did you sleep next to last night? I will not settle for anything less than great, but I have no idea what I am doing or where I am going. I feel like I have a lot to offer-- someone, somewhere, something. I am feeling everything out.

So, when the musician I mentioned before, whom which I highly respect and have followed for many years (many in terms of my twenty two years here, thus far) is introduced to me and I later catch myself in the back of a cab on my way to a gay club in Chelsea-- fucking Chelsea-- and he asks me, "So, what do you do, Amanda?".

"I'm studying media production at the New School.".

WHAT DO I DO?!?! Rather what am I willing not to do, in order to reach the end, make my mark, my dent in society, my quiver in the general-scheme-of-things. I want to work, I want to bleed innovation. I want to cure the proverbial cancer (preeeeetentious). I don't want to be in this twenty-two year old state, nearly twenty-three (fuck, the early twenties are the early twenties)... PURGATORY, that is me-- that is the rat race of this city-- trying to be successful while "working" and paying rent. I want "working" to be "writing" and I want "writing" to be whatever artistic outlet it lands on and happens to be... in the future-- in the end, the beginning of the end, the success of my career.

The truth is I have no idea what I'm doing and while I have some direction (a little bit more and more as time washes on by me) I have no idea where I'm going. And this should be obvious to everyone around me, because I'm terrible at reading maps; my sense of direction is skewed unless it's a grid formation with a sequential number system to back it up. My future was not laid out for me at birth-- not one bit, not at all. Never was, never had been. Opportunity was. I can do whatever the hell I want, and do whatever the hell it takes to do so.

There is no emotional pretense. There is no more burning brain cells (or minimal, minimal burning, as I cross my fingers). There is growing and finding and excising the ingenues (goodbye Zoe, I'm sorry) and opening up to the real people to be done. Once, that is, I determine that they are in fact real, in my observations.


Your patience is appreciated.