joanna newsom is like a mermaid in real life. thursday was the best day.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wx2jaXzAP9s

THIS IS GETTING OLD.

oh my god, every time i think about grad school I feel like vomiting. if you are reading this and you are on the admissions board of any of the programs to which I've applied: I'm being dramatic about throwing up, but it was the only way I knew how to get your attention. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE LET ME INTO YOUR PROGRAM. I'm not yelling, but caps lock was the only way I knew how to get your attention.

Missteps in a Sousa March

I think I may be posting this because it's officially December now, and December always makes me feel a certain way. Miss you, Nana. 




Missteps in a Sousa March

I can see the movement of the heartbeat in her throat, despite the difficult laughter—Mary Kinzie, in a poem to her daughter.

      In 1998’s late August, my mother, sister and I watched television shows about guardian angels on Sunday nights at eight. We cried softly in our beds when we thought everyone was asleep, woke up and ate big breakfasts. We did this, hoping that Marie Gay wasn’t underneath the grass and dirt, entombed in cherry wood. Instead, she was up one busy street, dusting fan blades in her and my grandfather’s one story home. I don’t remember when our days became less routine, how long my sister and I slept together in her room, using memories of our grandmother as bedtime stories. I don’t remember how much time passed before my mother was no longer using toilet paper to dry her eyes in the bathroom, shouting “Mama, Mama” and wailing, sometimes as resonant as a hand bell. 

      When I think of the night she died, after so many years, I see our family, all four of us, lying or sitting on my sister’s double bed. We are holding hands with tears all over us. We are all wet from each other’s tears. My mother tells my sister and me that she doesn’t know the cause of death, but Nana had defects inside of her chest, that her heart was not a normal one. It was the kind of heart that beat too quickly or forgot to beat.

      “Our hearts don’t do that, do they?” I asked her.

      She told me they did not, and cocooned herself in blankets.

      If my grandmother had died this year, rather than during my adolescence, my mother would have told me that what my grandmother died of, heart arrhythmia, sounds more severe when you speak of it scientifically. What I mean is: we suppose our bodies are automatic until someone we know stops inhaling and exhaling. Then we remember, until we forget again, that our bodies are not slabs of skin and hair, but amalgamations.

      This year, on the first of November, I go with my mother to see her brother, Bill, in my hometown of Lumberton, North Carolina. We drive fifteen minutes to his country home, and before we go inside he shows us the solar powered lamps he has in his garden, tells us how nice it is to see his plants light up after the sun goes down. He is wearing plaid pajama pants and a pocketed t-shirt the color of sandstone.

      Inside we sit on leather couches in the living room. On each table, there are lamps that used to belong in my grandmother’s house on Thirty-Sixth Street.

      My uncle says, “Lindsey, do you see the peace lilies on the floor in the kitchen?”

      I tilt my head back and look upside down at the plants underneath the window.

      “I got them from your Nana and Granddaddy’s funerals.”

      “They’re artificial, then?”

      “No, they’re real. I’ve taken care of them all of these years.”

      I tell him the plants look healthy and my mother remarks how impossible it seems that a plant can live ten years. My uncle nods his head.

      I ask him if he was aware his mother had an irregular heartbeat. He is sitting in the corner of a couch, legs crossed at the ankles.

      “Mama didn’t like the idea of a hospital. She knew how bad her health was, but, I guess just thought, ‘I’m going to die of something.”  

      “Yeah,” my mother says, “She’d keep right on going no matter how bad she felt. She used to tell me she hoped Bill and I didn’t inherit her health problems.”

      It is the idea that you will continue grocery shopping and planting flowers and wrapping Christmas presents with no effort of your own to maintain the machinery of your interior self. It is the idea that sometimes the bodies we depend on are as noiseless as a church.

      “To me,” my uncle says, uncrossing his ankles, “everything seemed fine. I talked to her the Saturday she died. We were going to Aunt Jean’s house two and a half hours away in Morehead City. Mama was telling me what a beautiful house Aunt Jean had; I told her that I loved her. At Aunt Jean’s, we went and had a good meal, came back and had a message on the answering machine. Daddy said, ‘Bill, look, something has happened to your mother. Come home. Don’t drive fast.’ I knew there wasn’t anything good about it. And, we got in that ’94 Honda and I put it in the wind on that two lane highway all the way home. I didn’t ever get it under eighty miles per hour. By the time I got to the hospital, she only had forty percent brain activity.”

      My uncle is shifting on leather. It sounds squeaky and plastic like a pool float. In between answering my questions, he is pulling adhesive off of an envelope, then showing my mother pamphlets about a new dietary supplement he ordered last week. After a while, he turns to me and says he never thought his mother’s heart would be the thing that killed her--was sure she’d die of a stroke. I nod, but I’m thinking of something else—visions of myself and my grandmother at her kitchen table. When we ate together, she’d ask me to pace myself, chew my food until I could hear my teeth knocking together, and then swallow, because she had what she referred to as “stomach problems” and it was because she ate too quickly when she was younger. I thought if she ever died, it would be because she wasn’t following her own advice at dinnertime, and when the coroners opened her body, they’d find an entire apple in her stomach. She never mentioned her heartbeat. 

      Every year, during the Christmas season, my mother fills hollowed eggs with a mixture of Miracle Whip and mashed yokes, her mother’s recipe. Sometimes she sheds tears onto the monogrammed ornaments we hang on the branches of the Christmas tree, wiping her face, whispering, “Mama always loved Christmastime.” I notice that in those moments, she stays very still. I wonder how her heart reacts in accordance to her memories.

      Every year on August 4^th—the day my grandmother died, my mother makes a phone call to her brother, Bill, and the two of them buy artificial flowers, go and sit in front of her tombstone. Meanwhile, I am at our family home, wading in bathwater up to my shins. I am calling her back to memory; wanting to remember what her body looked like in motion. Then, I see a fuzzy version of my younger self, like the static of a television, in a baptismal pool in the front of a sanctuary. She is sitting a couple of rows from the front of the church on the red velvet cushion of a pew. She is smiling and nodding. “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit”, and then I arch my back into the sacred water. When I come up for air, she is crying and smiling and nodding and as I trudge to the stairs of the tub, my white robe billowing around me, the congregation begins to sing the Doxology.

      On an August night in 1998, my grandfather drives two streets down to his friend, Herbert Dowless’ house, for a Sunday school book. When he returns home, he expects to begin preparing tomorrow’s lesson for a class of sixty-somethings. Retrieving the book from Herbert takes ten minutes. When he arrives at home, he greets my grandmother from the kitchen door as he steps over the threshold. He will not notice how silent the house is until he speaks to her again and again. He calls her name and when she does not answer, he looks from the kitchen into the living room and sees his wife in the same chair he left her in, only now she is not breathing. Her dinner plate is placed in front of the chair. No food is spilled. Months later, in something like an afterthought, he tells his children their mother did not look distressed when he found her. He imagined she felt something funny in her chest and placed her plate on the ground, so as not to spill it.

      Years after her death, I will play percussion instruments in my Junior High Symphonic Band. After months of additional after school practice, I will discover, because of my lack of innate rhythm, I am not able to play Sousa marches on the snare drum. When asked to perform rudiments, I will be surrounded by boys my age whose hands accelerate in 4/4 time and then move slowly, almost like underwater tentacles, in retrogression. Despite my fervent effort, I will never be able to find my rhythm. It is then that I think of her—her heart as a metronome irreparable before birth

Do you want to come over and kill some time?

  Soon, this will be how my friendships operate. It will be quite the pleasure. 

beyonce' is intuitive.

In a heavy, heavy bag.

All around me people are falling in love. Or, lovers are re-appreciating the feeling of being in love. In a fit of forgetfulness, will love ever feel to us like a passing memory, like an old birthday, and will it feel lost to us? I wonder, then,  how we will tell our closest friends the way we once felt. 

If I ever forgot how to love, I would only think to use representative, physical samples of the feelings I once had in my brain and in my heart. I would put all of these samples in a bag: conversation hearts, old letters and cards, and recordings of myself saying things like "I love you, person, and here are all of the reasons." This bag will be confusing and compelling all the same. It will be a  didactic for the romantics I know and for the romantics I don't. They will thank me. I may even be famous for a week. 

In the bag, I'd include a note that said this: "How To Conduct a Human Relationship" and it will read: "Feel happy, then feel sad, forgive yourself and others because it feels more biblical that way, feel happy and then, feel very, very sad. Please repeat this until you are dead." It will be the only explanation I can create for love by only using my brain. 

The world will say thank you until they realize that if Love had a party, Logic would not be invited. Perhaps this is how all of the lovers will operate while they are alive--in a constant effort to verbalize the way loving a person feels, though these explanations are, and will always be,  as scattered and elusive as prime numbers. 

OPERATION: GET LINDSEY INTO GRADUATE SCHOOL, A STEP BY STEP GUIDE BY THE OLSEN TWINS.

please help me welcome myself back from a very long absence. hello, self. welcome back to your blog. you've left all of your followers out to fend for themselves, hunt for food, and explore the online-reiterations of other people. 

over the past weeks, i have ONLY BEEN DOING THINGS THAT ARE NECESSARY TO MY GROWTH. It's true. Soon, I will develop a database to chart my progress. I will have pie charts (and pie!) & timelines, because as we can all guess, charting progress is a great way to boost self-confidence and it is a terrific way to remember important things and unimportant things. Charting progress is the best and only way to make important and unimportant events carry equal weight. 

More to come, later. Tyler and I have begun Operation: Get Lindsey Into Graduate School. It is as follows:

Step One: BELIEVE, BELIEVE, BELIEVE THAT I COULD WRITE MYSELF OUT OF A PAPER BAG IF THE OPPORTUNITY PRESENTED ITSELF.

Step Two: Resolve all issues that exist within my craft. Along with fulfilling the self-confidence requirement as issued by Step One, I must assure all of my creative shortcomings become invisible in a matter of months. Specifically, I must go through all of my work and circle (in bright ink!) all of the times I may be speaking/thinking in circles. I have to bookmark the word: COHESION. I will wake up and think of COHESION and dream of COHESION at night. From here on out, if I stall in conversation, it is because I am silently asking myself this question: "Is my thinking linear today?" 

Step Three: Personalize my personal statement. This has proven to be harder than I expected. To achieve this, I must revise until I am telling the truth. Because I'm having difficulty, Tyler & I have developed a scenario. We are the Olsen Twins. We are both Mary-Kate and both Ashley and we have chosen to be these twins because these twins are always on a mission. They're dedicated and aren't shy about it. Channeling the Olsen Twins will, without a doubt, give me persistence. 

Step Four: Do real-world things that motivate me. Yes, this involves caffeine and it may include double-digit hour rest, but I also must read books I love and only speak with people who inspire me and trek around the neighborhood. I must talk to Cory and Lia almost every day and of course, my Operation guide, Tyra Sparks. 

Step Five: Put all of my materials in an envelope, pick the prettiest stamp at the post office, and kiss it before I put it in the mailbox. This will look peculiar to onlookers, but it will give me the good luck I need. 

Step Six: Wait and try not to kill myself or my family or my friends. Maybe I will go on a trip or two. BELIEVE BELIEVE BELIEVE THAT I COULD WRITE MYSELF OUT OF A PAPER BAG IF THE OPPORTUNITY PRESENTED ITSELF.

morningtime.

across the street, i am making a new friend. he's roughly seventy-two, has a dog that is too old to have puppies. we will always be friends, because he is the first person who sees me in the morning. 

lately, i have been going into work very very early, which is strangely satisfying without soft drinks and breakfast and other people, besides myself, my old-man neighbor and his old-man dog.  sometimes i wave, but mostly i smile at him and smirk at his dog. i wonder if it affects them in the same way. on the days that i wave, he waves back with one or two fingers. not all. it is much too early for that. it is then that i wonder what his voice sounded like when he was young like i am. if it was raspy, like a late night radio dj or baritone like a pulpit preacher. i wonder if there are words that make him nervous the way that "ointment" and "moist" make me shudder. i wonder if he says "commode" rather than toilet, if he has many geriatric tendencies at all. 

my new friend always wears white. he either has one morning shirt or many morning shirts that all look the same. either way, i am SURE his friends never give him a hard time about it. old people hate change, don't they? his wife maybe turns him away from bed if he's not wearing white, saying, "I don't know you in purple!"

in the mornings, because he's always pulling the same weeds out of the same flower bed, with the same ribcaged-dog, it makes me excited for the day--about all of the things that will go as smoothly as the day before, all of the events that will replay themselves, all of the people i will get to love again. this is the foundation of my day.  i always forget to thank him or speak, even. 

todaytodaytoday.

TODAY I AM SEEING BOB DYLAN.
(though this was not on my 22 year old to-do list, it has been on my list since long before that.)

Bananarama!

Today I crossed something off my "22 year old to-do list"!!! I made the most perfect banana bread. Here I am with my loaf. Oh, and my glass of milk! Don't worry, I didn't eat the whole loaf tonight. Just a pinch. Bye bye, spaghetti dinner. Hello, banana bread breakfast!

Respond.

1. What is your current obsession? The OC, Season One. Guilty & about 3 years too late.

2. What is your weirdest obsession? Frank O' Hara. I spend too much time with him before bed.

3. Recall a fond childhood memory? When I was in elementary school, and when my Nana was still alive, I used to come home to a clean house two-three times a week. When I asked my mom why the house was cleaner than when we left it, she'd tell me, "a little elf came". Then, she'd call nana and thank her, over and over.

4. What’s for dinner? a tv dinner. lovez it.

5. What would you eat for your last meal? Yosake firecracker shrimp and sushi.

6. What’s the last thing you bought? Literally? a diet coke. 

7. What are you listening to right now? Don't laugh. I am listening to Daisy (from Daisy of Love) rationalize love and loss. One of the contestants just said, "Daisy, you're taking me with you, and I feel like I found the cure to cancer."

8. What do you think of the person who tagged you? Tall.

9. If you could have a house totally paid for, fully furnished, anywhere in the world, where would it be? Most likely somewhere busy and beautiful that I haven't even been yet. Can I bring Tuna?

10. If you could go anywhere in the world for the next hour, where would you go? Home. Hey mom, Hey dad.

11. Which language do you want to learn? French.

12. What’s your favourite quote (for now)? "The thong is always wrong."--Daisy

13.What is your favourite colour? brown, yellow.

14. What is your favourite piece of clothing in your own wardrobe? today i am wearing a new outfit. lia, please don't say anything about how i buy too many clothes. but it is very sweet.

15. What is your dream job? pretend i just wrote a best seller. i am travelling all over the world and giving talks and signing books and flying on planes. i am not stressed, but i get to dress up and answer questions.

16.What’s your favourite magazine? Cosmo, maybe. Or the New Yorker.

17. If you had $100 now, what would you spend it on? An IPHONE.

18. Describe your personal style? Slouchy.

19. What are you going to do after this? Check the mail and drive Aly home.

20. What are your favourite films? All the Real Girls, George Washington, Me and You and Everyone We Know, Nine Lives.

21. What’s your favorite fruit? Plums.

22.What inspires you? Conversations with people who are curious enough to ask questions.

23. Your favorite books? Self Help by Lorrie Moore, The Collected Poems of Frank O' Hara, How We Are Hungry by Dave Eggers.

24. Do you collect anything? Polaroids. 

25. Any advice from bitter experience? Golddigging is usually unsuccessful. 

26. What makes you follow a blog? Lia and boredom and anticipated inspiration. 

happy birthday to me:

"If the last unicorn in the world showed up and told me that, "Tyler, you're my only hope. You're the only kind soul left in this world, I believe--you're the only one I can truly trust!" I would say, "there, there little unicorn, all is well." Then I would lead it to where I'd tell it I had delicious food and then I would kill it. Lindsey, I would murder that unicorn with my bare hands (probably strangle it b/c you know how those things can get messy) and I would cut off it's beautiful, shimmering, alabaster horn. And I would give that, Lindsey, to be with you right now. I would kill the last unicorn and give you its horn."---Tyler Sparks.

"All I know is that you're so nice. You're the nicest thing I've seen."--Kate Nash

cash out.

these old bones will soon be 22. this is what i plan to do at 22:

1. wake up earlier.

2. stay up later.

3. eat more salads and less salad dressing.

4. find the perfect popsicle.

5. force a collar on tuna "big neck" johnson. preferably a burberry collar.

6. take my vitamins.

7. fall in love with someone who is intelligent. 

8. use my brain.

9. write a bedtime story.

10. be cuter and sweeter.

11. work on my thankfulness and place less emphasis on presents.

12. grow out my hair.

13. pay attention to detail.

14. learn to cook something other than spaghetti. 

15. learn to shag dance.

16. find Lia.

17. find Cory.

18. find Bobby Otten.

19. find Tyler.

20. find Myself.

21. drink less Diet Coke and more water.

22. learn new adjectives.

23. participate.

24. remember to light a candle every time I sit down to read a book.

25. move to a city that can be described as "hustle-bustle"

26. overcome my unhealthy obsession for John Mayer and Lady Gaga.

27. develop a get-rich quick scheme.

Be Kind.

I am generally intrigued by those of you who know how to do things I don't. I think, often, I am skilled at a couple of things: remembering events, being on time and talking on the telephone. There are many sub-categories within these skills that include: maintaining friendships because I am punctual and scrap-booking because my memory is sharp.  Everything roots back to, for the most part, I'm a consistent friend but have no idea how to fill out a tax form, change a tire, or tie a tie. Perhaps this means I will be a sub-par wife. Women who know how to wash a window without streaking it are the kind of women who get scooped up first, not the ones who know how to harmonize with others at choir practice. 

Completely unrelated, or maybe related, people are leaving me for others cities and states and countries. I have a confession: When life-chapters end and people go away from me for extended periods of time, I begin to grieve. It is a death-like reaction and it settles heavy, heavy in my organs and joints. This is not because I am a sad person or a pessimist. It's because, I believe that internally, we are only able to feel 9 or 10 different ways. And, personally, death and loss feel the same inside of me. It situates like nervousness or drowsiness. That's how it feels. So, I miss you all and hope you are satisfied in your zip codes. I can't wait to resurrect you. 

Please! Go! Read! My! Column! and send me fan/hate mail. Just send it here now: lindsey.marie.johnson@gmail.com. 

Here is the link, go to page 18.  http://artsyncmag.com/wp/?p=7  

It came out today. Today is the beginning of my budding and prolific career. It is the beginning of my life of poverty. This excites me. 

ALERT THE MEDIA: I AM ALL MOVED IN.  WHO IS POPPIN' CHAMPAGNE?

I am listening to Mozart and thinking about teeth.

Last night I was knocking teeth with someone my age. Our teeth were not figuratively colliding. I heard the sounds, like a toothbrush against a porcleain sink. A very literal, mistakable sound. In fact, when I think about sounds, all of them, drums or printers or toaster ovens, I'm more than sixty percent sure that the most beautiful sound in the world is tough, tough, enamel. Knocking teeth, in the most romantic way, sounds most like an echo. It is not a dentist visit or a toothy accident, it is two people with similar intentions, only, I am usually the only one thinking of what sounds we are making and why. I think of myself as a small, young person, loose teeth dangling from my mouth like christmas lights. I think of my father, up in the attic above my head saying, "Either you pull it, or I'm going to." Then, I remember the blood and the napkins and the salt water gurgling. I had a small wooden box, only big enough for one tooth, to put underneath my pillow. It was a box that was replaced with quarters or dollars, and later it was sold in a yard sale. I cried that day, maybe.

Sometimes, I hope when I die, people will say I am the kind of person who laughed with my teeth, and I hope they will not mean that my mouth is over-crowded. I hope they will say, "a very spacious mouth!" Or my friends will say, "If her mouth were a room full of chairs, there would be enough space for everyone to sit."

Is feline earnestness not the kind of love we desire?

On Easter morning, weeks after my mother lost Milo, a tiny, boneless-looking blonde kitten with tired eyes situated itself on our doorstep. He mewed like a newborn and rolled around in the pinestraw when we peaked out at him.
“Tricky, tricky,” my sister cooed.
“Don’t feed him,” my mother advised and poured a heap of dry cat food in a bowl for the indoor cats.
“He’s just a little ball of cotton,” my father purred. He uses this sound for the smallest animals and humans.
My sister screamed, “Cotton!” and folded her hands together as if she already loved the kitten and adored the way it moved around on the pavement.
We are cat people. Our family believes when we die, we will meet all of our old pets again in heaven and they will recognize us and rub their soft bodies on our legs and they may even speak to us. They may say, “Here you are! You look young!” or they may not speak at all. They may just love us silently.

"I'll school, you get schooled" or perhaps this adds to my mystery.

There is a feeling I get when I am driving home to my parents. I often wish I were wearing a red dress and that the light from the windows was tanning the tops of my kneecaps. I'd love for my mom to tell me that the tops of my legs were "miscolored" or "reddened" and blame it on Wilmington, North Carolina. 

On the ride, I think of things, or think up things. I often remember Robyn as a junior in high school--the way she laughed with her teeth when she told me how on Sunday afternoons, with the car windows rolled down, she feels like she is in a gusty music video. And, on some afternoons, when I'm riding alone, I try it too--pretend she is on the side of the highway with a boombox and a camcorder. 

I think of the songs I love because my parents love them-- Rod Stewart's raspy songs about women and Boz Scaggs. I think of cleaning the house for ten dollars on a Saturday. I think of my sister, who is as grown-up as she can be at nineteen years old. I think of her perfect eyesight and her Outer Banks trips. 

I think of animal deaths and italian ice and why I hate the sounds I hate and three years from now and four years from now and what it means to be sincere or apologetic and all of my old haircuts and what lessons I still have yet to learn. I think of summer, also fall, but mostly spring. I do math in my head and attempt to invent a way all boats can travel at night, so no one has to stop enjoying themselves.