Feeling Small

 

Sam: Every time I go to the MoMa I spend more time checking out what people are wearing than the actual artwork on display.  People are just so artsy here.  I can’t think of any other way to describe it.  Eccentric?  Capricious? Whimsical?  My SAT vocabulary cards probably have a better idea.  Whatever they are, I want to be just like them.  One of those artsy city slickers, sipping black coffee at some tiny hidden café, wearing odd hats found in trendy boutiques, listening to vinyl records in my messy apartment.  That’s basically what I dream about every time I come here. My awesome future. 

 

The actual reason I come here, though, is entirely for the sake of taking notes in my sketchbook, a doodle here, a sketch there.  I have to carry that damn thing around with me everywhere now, since the AP Art final exam portfolio thing has to be completely done by the end of this year.  Thirty-six college-worthy pieces need to be all packed up and ready to go by mid-May.  Thirty-six.  I don’t think my entire life’s compilation of works even adds up to thirty-six.  My age doubled doesn’t even add up to thirty-six. And yet as ridiculous as the number is, I’m a slave to it.  My room is trashed with magazine cutouts, oil paints, crusty brushes, crumpled up pieces of paper.  Twenty-six down, ten to go, I tell myself.  Twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine.  The things I do to get into college.

 

My little sister Rory flicks my shoulder when I daze off like I just did.  I forgot to mention her.  Mom makes me bring her along on my MoMa expeditions because it’s easier than hunting around for some brace-faced babysitter.  You’d think I’d mind this, considering this is my future I’m dealing with, but she’s decent company.  She flicks me on the shoulder sometimes, like she did just now, but it’s only when she wants to move on to the next painting in an exhibit and I’m blindly staring off at the passing people. 

 

“Sam,” she says, and her eyebrows rise into the middle of her forehead, her mouth gaping, “Look over here.  I think I’ve seen this one before.”

 

She grabs the sleeve of my jacket and pulls me to the piece, one that is shrouded with several chin-stroking observers.  We fish through the crowd, peer over some heads, and I recognize the piece about as quickly as I’d recognize Madonna. 

 

 

“I know I’ve seen this before,” she says, biting her bottom lip, eyebrows furrowing.  I stare at her like she is the biggest moron on the planet.

 

“Van Gogh’s Starry Night, Rory.  Do you live in a cave?”

 

She shrugs.  “If I do then you do.”

 

That's the one thing that annoys me.  When my nine-year old troll sister outwits me.  I just want to be like, “No, no, Rory, now you’re supposed to whine and complain and be embarrassingly immature because I’m just flat out more intelligent than you,” but I know perfectly well that it’s simply not part of her nature to act like that.  She’s peculiar, I think.  Peculiar is the perfect word for her, as Starry Night soaks in and reflects out of her deep brown eyes.  Only if she were me, she would know that Starry Night isn’t even that great of a painting.  I never understood what made it so freaking special, so unmistakably famous, an icon of the art world.  I mean, look at it, I think, it’s just a bunch of lines.  I bet I could do an exact replica of Starry Night about as easily as I could make my bed, paint my toenails, finish my homework.  Even Rory could pull off a Starry Night if she wanted to, and I tell her so.  But she only continues to gape at it in undisputed wonderment, like she does with the millions of other things that positively fascinate her. 

           

Rory’s young.  When you’re young and naïve like that, you simply can’t understand art. Art is a skill. An acquired skill.   

 

I flip open my worn-out sketchbook and slowly thumb through my own drawings, slightly tilting them towards the unblinking eyes of my hypnotized sister.  As if saying, hey, look, look at what I did. These, Rory, are hardcore pieces of art. My drawings of real people, realistic drawings of existing things.  It takes skill to draw reality, years of art classes and sketchbooks and practice. She looks at Starry Night and probably sees a recent episode of Spongebob Squarepants, The Rugrats.  A scene from Finding Nemo. I look at Starry Night and I see lots and lots of lines, movement.  That’s what Van Gogh was trying to convey, anyway.  Movement.  And he did a great job and all, but seriously.  Starry Night?  Come on, anyone could do it. 

 

Rory:  I know Sam doesn’t want me to be with her right now, but I really like this place.  I felt like a grownup when we took the train into the big city and I could stand a foot away from a skyscraper, try to look up at its top, and feel like a tiny ant because the skyscraper appears to never end.  And as much as I love the city, Sam loves it even more.  I can see it when she’s busy seeing everyone else.  She is interested in people even more than the paintings in the museum.  She looks at them with wide eyes and an open mouth, and I have to wake her up every few minutes to show her a pretty picture I found.

 

I flick her extra hard when I come across a bluish painting with all these people around it.  I saw it and it instantly set off a spark, like a familiar song or smell, and I knew right away that I had seen it somewhere before in my life.  When we get a better view of it, she gives me that older sister look she gives and tells me the painting is called Starry Night by Van Gogh.  Then she keeps acting like she’s older and better and smarter, and I don’t even care because Starry Night is so beautiful and so close that I almost feel like I am a part of it.  Sam doesn’t feel the same way, though, because she is looking at her own drawings.

 

When I look at this painting, it isn’t just a painting.  It’s a surrounding feeling as well.  The sky is gigantic.  It has gusts and paths of stars swirling and twinkling, a shimmering wind in the night.  The sky is gigantic, enormous, so much bigger and more powerful than that tiny, dark little city crouching below it.  This painting, although it is so much smaller than me, it makes me feel smaller than the smallest ant.  Here I am in this huge city, this busy place with so many people and places, feeling small. Here I am in this huge city with never-ending buildings, those towers, those skyscrapers.  And they don’t even touch the shimmering and swirling blanket of starry night.

 

I really do want Sam to see what I see, but she is still too in love with the big city, looking at her own drawings as she stands in front of the Starry Night.  Sam is an artist and she tries to act like one, but all of her drawings are of models from magazines and photographs.  She tries to teach me what art is by showing me what she does.  Most of her art is of what she sees in real life.  She says this is art because it is hard to copy real life onto paper, but I always thought we had cameras for that.

 

As I watch Sam watching her art, I hope that one day she will paint something like Starry Night.  I don’t mean she should copy Starry Night, either, because anyone with a paint-by-numbers kit can do that.  I hope one day she will be painting a picture of one of her beautiful models, and she will realize that painting reality, copying the real world – those paintings can’t go any farther than the reality that they live in.  I hope that one day she will feel small like me and she will toss reality out of her apartment window. And I hope that on that same day she, with a little help from the endless swirling sky, learns how to paint with what she feels.

When I was in fifth grade I based all of my assumptions of high school off of the movie Drive Me Crazy.  This was a movie starring Melissa Joan Hart, involving some sort of scheming love story and an over-exaggerated prom experience, motel rooms and all.  Cheerleaders were worshipped, popular, if you will.  The football players were dumb shits but people would do the whole part the sea thing for them in the hallway whenever they walked by.  Geeks sat at one table, art freaks at another.  Big buff fat guys shoved little wimpy freshmen into the lockers.  People dry humped outside of class.  And people generally looked older.  I figured I’d have some intense boyfriend by high school, too, and I’d probably have really gigantic boobs as well.  Then I turned fifteen and all those ridiculously optimistic dreams fell to crap.

 

High school ain’t nothing like that. You come with will all these delicious misconceptions, then two years in all you want is to listen to really bad rock music and run around screaming in empty rooms to release your underlying rage.  Here, my dear friends, are the most common misconceptions about these four years of my life.  I constantly have to remind myself that, too.  That it’s only four years.

 

Aw, Man, Another Entry About High School.

 

1.    These aren’t the best years of your life.  I don’t know why people say they are supposed to be because all I feel like right now is this giant morphing machine that is constantly growing and changing in every possible way.  No one wants to be a giant morphing machine.  When I think of giant morphing machines I think of those alien spawns in that movie.  I have no idea what I’m talking about.  But not only are people changing right now, but I feel like we’re all so busy analyzing the way we’re changing that we aren’t able to control which way we are headed.  You know? No?  Me either.  The point is that high school is really just a trip that leads onto bigger things.  Your way to the top.  If you look back on high school as, by far, The Best Years of Your Life, clearly the mountain you were climbing was a small one.

 

2.    The Hallways.  I came into high school expecting the hallways to be these deserted runways that you could basically strut your stuff on in slow motion so that you’d look excellent in memories and you’d fit with the rhythm of the background music that would be playing in someone’s head.  But hallways are nothing like that.  I don’t even have the glory of stepping on other people because I’m one of the slow walkers that people yell at.  I’m the kid with the flapping soles on my shoes because so many kids have brutally stepped on the backs of them. People get hallway rage here.  There’s road rage and in high school there is hallway rage.  Hallway rage is actually much worse than road rage because the person doing the raging is much more capable of physically beating the crap out of you or emotionally screwing you over.  If I had a physical wound for every time I’ve been emotionally bashed in the hallway, both of my legs would have been amputated and fed to famished wolves by now.  Just last Tuesday some bored senior decided to take all of his boredness out on me, telling me to STAND STILL IN THE HALLWAY WHILE THE PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE IS GOING ON, BITCH.  And I really, really, wanted to go up to him and say something like “Hello, cheerio, can you buy me a crumpet?” so that he’d think I was British and feel like a total idiot, but I decided against it since every time I attempt a British accent I sound like a trannsexual version of Austin Powers.  Anyway.

 

3.    The Cheerleaders.  I’m just going to say it straight out.  Our cheerleaders are not hot.  They are not hot at all.  When I see our cheerleaders cheer against the Livingston cheerleaders, I want to cry in a corner and read ‘Don’t Kill Yourself’ books for them.  Okay, not really.  They look like they’re enjoying themselves out there.  But, I mean, those movies.  The cheerleaders were hot in those movies.  They owned those movies.  Bring it On.  I memorized the entire cheer in the beginning of that movie.  For nothing.  I kind of like how our cheerleaders don’t own the school though.  Actually, no one really owns our school.  We’re practically communists here.  Except for the occasional rising asshole.  But that guy is an asshole, so the only people that generally care about him are his asshole friends.

 

4.    The Front Lawn.  Take a look at the beginning of every teen movie.  It will always start with some loud punk rock song, giving a sampling view of a high school front lawn before the bell rings.  These front lawns are infested with students, smoking cigarettes, playing guitar, doing cheers, talking.  I couldn’t wait for high school solely for that reason.  I just wanted to dwell in front of the school with all the cool kids.   I don’t know why we don’t actually do that.  The weather might mess up our hair?  The grass is wet?  I don’t know.  People generally resort to that dreaded hallway, walking aimlessly back and forth and grumbling about running into one another. 

 

5.    Dress Code.  In Drive Me Crazy Melissa Joan Hart came to school wearing a bikini.  So when I was nine I’d always draw pictures of my high school self wearing bathing suits in math class.  I’m glad my assumption was incorrect.

 

6.    Senior Prank.  I blame this one on the college process.  Yeah, yeah, whatever, you have senioritis.  But you’re in college now.  Everyone wants to be in college now.  College dictates everyone’s lives around here.  We are the American Hermione Grangers of the new millennium.  “So, you’re saying I might die.  Or worse, get REJECTED??!?” is the typical mindset of the average Millburn student.  So, unfortunately, filling Mrs. Pitt’s office with five tons of chocolate pudding is entirely out of the question.  No, no, instead our class will donate a new scoreboard, a new vending machine.  Great, thanks, thanks for that, really guys.  Now piss someone off, for god’s sake.

 

7.    School Dances.  I figured we would have a school dance at least once a month in the gym.  And it would always be this huge production, with sparkly balloons and tiny sandwiches and punch in those circular bowls.  And there would be a slow song and everyone would get really nervous and gradually people would pair off.  I always pictured myself being the kid that sat in one of the side chairs watching everyone dance as I sipped my punch that didn’t even taste that good, and then my great grandpa would come out of nowhere and offer to dance and then I’d dance with him and everyone would laugh at me.  That never happened in any teen movie I’ve ever seen, but that’s how it always plays out in my twisted mind.  Instead of dances we have those parties.  It’s basically the same deal minus the punch and the slow songs and my great grandpa.  However, couches sure beat those cold, hard side wall chairs.

 

8.    Lunch. More specifically, food fights.  Food fights just seem like they’re supposed to happen in high school cafeterias.  Some bitch calls a bitch a bitch, and then flying edible slime all over the place.  This place is too polite for food fights.  We hardly even have lunch aides anymore, either.  In the middle school we practically had a lunch aide for every table, with printed out constitutions of the Laws of the Lunchroom that they followed religiously.  Exit the facility in a straight line, show up on time, sit down.  We have so much freedom during lunch now, and never once have we taken advantage of it. Someone needs to take action.  Not on me, though.  And I can’t start it, either.  The vice principal already knows my name, my age, and my social security number.

 

9.    The Girls’ Locker Room.  Supposedly this is where all the secrets come from.  In the movies, people travel far and wide to trudge through the air vents and catch an earful of what goes down in the girls’ locker room.  I would feel very sorry for you if you did, because the most significant thing you’d probably hear there would be something along the lines of “Aw shucks, someone left their tampon right by the soap!”  Unfortunately enough, we have technology now.  Any dark secret we might have has probably been strategically transferred through a text message. 

 

10. Take a brief glance at the time in which this entry was posted.  Yeah, holy hell, Daryl has positively no life.  I still have more to say, but I want to experience tomorrow rather than sleep through it like I usually do.  I don’t always need to fill up to ten anyway.  3, 5, 10, it always has to be one of those for some reason. 

 

One thing I did get right about high school is that you get a better sense of who you are there.  I am more myself now than I have ever been in my entire life.  Everyone seems to be themselves times ten in high school.  The angry kids dress angry; the happy ones wear really bright polo shirts.  Then you get older and know how to control your emotions.  You mellow out.  But being extreme is fun every once in awhile.  It gives me more to write about.  It gives me more reasons to keep observing and living in general.

 

Also, Happy Passover.

 

Daryl.