The Pope in Hell

Reading: Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris

This book is especially relevant because as he recounts moments of terror and error in his French class, I can wipe away tears and nod my head, saying "yeah...sniff...I know what he means" because being in an 8-week, 15-unit intensive Spanish class, I do. Highlights in the book include his list of examples of the creative ways one pieces words and phrases together in order to communicate with a small, infantile vocabulary, in a foreign, unmastered language. I feel as though after every attempt at speaking an entire sentence in Spanish, I should, in English, apologize and say "really, I'm quite eloquent in English, I promise."

I feel as though I should be doing better seeing as I have a wonderful teacher who has us talk about paintings and poetry and abstract social problems. While examining two paintings of Pope Innocent, one by Bacon and one by Velasquez, I decided to lend my two cents to the conversation and proceeded to speak blasphemous, horrible words. The thing is, while I have a tendency towards irreverence, I wasn't trying to be mean or rude, I was just happy that I, for once, had the vocabulary to say what I thought. So, referring to the Bacon Piece, I said "Me think this be a picture of Pope Innocent in the Hell because, you know, he did many things bad and evil and the Inquisition was a thing in the past that was not good, you know,... the Pope in Hell."

The entire room gasped and my teacher looked at me with wide eyes and corrected my verb tenses. Apparently, my class is full of Catholics or people who think Hell is a silly place to put a Pope. Either way, I offended everyone and spent the next few minutes being very solemn and pious-looking.

I often complain to Phil that I have trouble making friends in college because I don't want to go to keggers and well, I'm just not a super outgoing person. But now, I can no longer complain. I mean, how does one make friends if one is condemning the Pope?

Me think this not a place to start good.

All my dreams can commence coming true

Tori Amos is touring with Imogen Heap and The Ditty Bops.

I am married to this man

I am married to this man
Originally uploaded by tawnillia.

He loooooves making ice.

The Anatomy of Mercy

My grandma is very stylish. Every time I see her, her earrings match her blouse, which matches her socks and purse. Besides her impeccable taste in fashion, she has mercy, among many, many other things. This is one of my favorite words…Mercy…and despite the fact that religious folk seem to have a monopoly on its use, I try to sneak it in whenever possible. I realized the extent and anatomy of her mercy last weekend.

She has taken care of a relative of ours for years and it has driven her bonkers. This particular relative is a fixture in my childhood memories and is usually the one in the background saying “Be careful of black people, you know, just be careful” or “How dare James Taylor wear jeans on stage…he’s rich and just doesn’t want to show it”. You can imagine how well we got along, whatwithall the respect I happen to have for black people and James Taylor. This relative has made my grandma’s life a struggle and her presence is a burden. Secretly, I hated her for the duration of my childhood. So did my mother seeing as she too has memories containing the phrase “my dog is smarter than you are”.

No one understood why my grandma put up with her nagging and laziness and bitterness for literally 60+ years. On Sunday, I found out.

Apparently, this relative lost her father at 13 and her stepfather proceeded to molest and abuse her until she left home. She pleaded with her mother to intervene, but she refused to. When her mother was dying she asked that my grandma take care of her daughter. My grandma kept this promise in a real and palpable way. Suddenly the visions I had of my annoying relative locked up in her room with her books and her dog seemed pale and sad instead of lazy and maniacal. The mercy required of my grandma to build her life around a person who seemed to have no heart is haunting and deep.

What’s more—she never told any of us why. She let us think she was silly and strange for putting up with this relative when in fact, she was keeping a promise she made to a dead, cruel women. She was emptying herself of the things of the self and this equals mercy.

she does pilates

elliot's evening job
Originally uploaded by tawnillia.

If I had the money, Id hire her to be my full-time living dress-form and muse.

The Beautiful Lila

lila-downs-sc 033
Originally uploaded by tawnillia.

I should be studying for my Spanish final, but I can't get last night's show out of my head. We saw Lila Downs at the Rio Theatre. I was not prepared to experience her presence. She was so proud and fluid and elegantly sustained. I've never seen a show where the performer beatboxed to a traditional Mexican folksong, sang in the indigenous Mayan language, danced like her life was beginning and ending all at once, and made me cry cry cry even though I didn't understand half of what she was saying.

Click on the beauty for more pics.

The Corporation

Go rent it. It's very well done in that it has interviews with both the critics of modern capitalism and the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. (one reviewer said "Better manners and longer fuse than Fahrenheit 9/11") Doubles as an economics lesson. Point of greatest impact and interest to me: The functions and attributes of a corporation have been judicially constructed (meaning they have not always been this way, they may not alwayss be this way, they could have been otherwise, etc.) and yet they have been naturalized as being always, already present in our understanding of economics. Thesis of the documentary: Seeing as a corporation has legal protections and responsibilities under the law as though the corporation is a person (this phenomenon could be called "14th amendment abuse"), if we were to diagnose the psychological well-being of any corporation as a person we would find that most would be diagnosed as being psychotic.

Listening to...

...M.I.A.

so so good

She is my latest Sri Lankan crush. Yes, I've had more than one.

When I Talk to God She Seems Distracted

BRIGHT EYES LYRICS

"When The President Talks To God"

When the president talks to God
Are the conversations brief or long?
Does he ask to rape our women’s' rights
And send poor farm kids off to die?
Does God suggest an oil hike
When the president talks to God?

When the president talks to God
Are the consonants all hard or soft?
Is he resolute all down the line?
Is every issue black or white?
Does what God say ever change his mind
When the president talks to God?

When the president talks to God
Does he fake that drawl or merely nod?
Agree which convicts should be killed?
Where prisons should be built and filled?
Which voter fraud must be concealed
When the president talks to God?

When the president talks to God
I wonder which one plays the better cop
We should find some jobs. the ghetto's broke
No, they're lazy, George, I say we don't
Just give 'em more liquor stores and dirty coke
That's what God recommends

When the president talks to God
Do they drink near beer and go play golf
While they pick which countries to invade
Which Muslim souls still can be saved?
I guess god just calls a spade a spade
When the president talks to God

When the president talks to God
Does he ever think that maybe he's not?
That that voice is just inside his head
When he kneels next to the presidential bed
Does he ever smell his own bullshit
When the president talks to God?

Home for the Holidays

Our Holidays (that means "holy-days" for all you heathens) in Santa Cruz have been other-worldly. Santa Cruz is, in many ways, somewhat extraterrestrial at times and the Holidays in SC are no exception.

New Years

On January 1, I drank so much (homemade wine, smirnoff raspberry drinkything, and heffeveisen) that I threw up twice. The first time, Phil (this is how I know he loves me) cleaned it up. It was PURPLE and CHUNKY and the man CLEANED IT UP. And while it can't be compared to this story, I was and am very impressed. The second time, I was outside a restaurant trying to procure breakfast with a group of people I didn't know very well. Oh the memories.

The night before (that's New Years Eve for all you prudes) we drug a Christmas (that's CHRIST mass) tree through the streets and onto the beach, over a river, and through the woods, until we reached the tree's final resting place. We lit that motherfucker on fire and watched it burn. To this day (yes, 6 WHOLE MONTHS LATER) Phil claims that he will never be in the same room as a Christmas tree, ever again. It was charred and smoldering after a few short minutes of burning which entailed flames shooting 15 feet into the air and a roaring sound that seemed to be coming from the vast, angry ocean or my alcohol drenched belly--a toss-up. As it glowed we sang patriotic songs and got weepy. Don't let anyone tell you I'm unAmerican.

Independence Day

Apparently, in SC, there is a city ordinance which requires every human and humanoid to leave their home, get drunk in the streets, and stumble to the beach to watch THE MOST FUCKING INSANE DISPLAY OF DISPOSABLE INCOME EVER. We literally saw tens of thousands of dollars in illegal fireworks go off for over two hours, directly above our heads. It was unreal. These were like, movie-quality fireworks; twinkly, erratic, glowing, effervescence, luminescent bursts of sound and spark. The entire beach and all of the beaches as far as we could see (which wasn't far because of the smoke) were filled with Americans in desperate need of an excuse to party.

We all looked up and across the water, past the boats hovering on the shore and the falling embers, towards the other beaches where people just like us did the same thing. We were all so entertained by the sounds of war. Don't let anyone tell you I'm unAmerican.