October 21, 2007

• By now I've probably lost all my readers, but I'll talk anyway.  I'm mailing my college applications next week, and I wrote two essays, so here they are, in order of clarity.

  1.  (beware, this is one sentence prose poem)

                                                            Time Flies

  I don’t know which door, and I don’t know why all the other girls haul flat fussy totes instead of backpacks to their classes and when I dive for some seat stranded in the bell’s wake even the whiteboard watches me stutter that I am Daryl ******** a freshman without a pass, and the guy in front of me has mossy armpits and loathsome legs as my lips trip over my braces and my backpack’s zipper interrupts the teacher and for some reason, this place calls the bathroom the lavatory, like laboratory, as if latex gloves and goggles are requisites to piss, and I scrawl poetry on the stall door among crossed-out curses (erasing it after superior pens mark the grammatical flaws) and at the mirror by the sink I meet the eyes of some senior’s reflection, her lashes like spiders stuck in tar and I say sorry for looking, and sophomore year I marshal beauty in the margins of my math notes, find Y equals time wasted, why equals space and life waits art waits and I hate this place, those orange lockers, how they blaze after five failed tests and never punch back, never write back to my fractured, caps-lock poems about them, and I stumble into biology in the high heels I wear for every inch I should have grown, if only I ate things other than cheez-its, and whenever this kid taps his feet, I smack his desk, my alarm on dusky mornings, while I fill bubbles on tests in colored pencil and personify plutonium and read On the Road in drivers' ed, a wayward atlas in my hands as the blackboard maps car crashes and back home I burn cheap incense and savor its persistent smell, but mom just throws it out because the meatloaf tastes like chamomile and I tremble at the threshold of eleventh grade, watching ancient juniors squint in daylight, bleed Starbucks, wrestle stunted scores and now it is my turn, autumn, and I walk home past my licensed speeding peers, I favor slow scenery, I like my shoes muddy when they march up the stairs to my room where loose-leaf and paint-sets are strewn about the floor, and I'm the Thinker in a swivel chair bathed in laptop blue, musing by a tenement of pixel windows where the residents watch the watchers, writing for a teacher who puts my papers in piles by themselves, copied for the class and how satisfying silence can be after years of stormy thoughts, rows of heads bent over my words, necks craned toward my art on gallery walls and I search out beauty in renewed library books, in the rippled shine of a rushing train, as I linger on museum floors, span the painted battlefields of Jackson Pollack and come home, a senior, to hear mother turn the knob of the right door and whoa, wait, today is the deadline to order my cap and gown?

   

  2. 

  A Breakthrough

   

  A deer ran through a school window, according to The New York Times: it reminded me of being an artist.  The bewildered deer, explains a wildlife professor, mistook its reflection for the enemy and charged through, only to find beyond the shower of bloodied shards a vacant hallway.  Like a misunderstood teenager, the hormonal Bambi tried to find himself as he aimlessly hobbled past classrooms, teachers, janitors, children, all panicked by the sight of the desultory, yet determined, intruder.  After about half an hour, a few brave adults cornered the by then hysterical buck, and amid a clamor of relieved cheers, led it out the back door.

  I don’t have this problem in school. This is because I use the front door and I am not a deer. Still, there are many windows to break. Mine are blank pages, white canvases, and smashing them, whether with pencil or paint, is a silent, accepted process. Standing before this emptiness, I face an imagination paralyzed at the sight of its infinite likeness, and only after I charge at the looming white can I continue my search. So what am I searching for? That question is the white paper; its answer is vague.  I search for searches.  I read the Times not just for the news, but for kindling, and after many fires I have found that the local stories are the dynamic ones.  The words “Troops Surge into Iraq” lose their vitality in the race to inform; but “A Normal Lesson in Vocabulary, Until a Deer Bursts through a School Window” is motion arrested. Call me a pyromaniac of metaphor.

  In the past I have been labeled with other neuroses, namely attention deficit disorder and cynicism.  My penchant for surreal news supports these, as does not having a driver’s license or an “acceptable” math percentile.  But how does one measure attention? Does it appear flawed when it darts from object to object as my peers, set in alphabetical rows, solve problem after problem in mind-numbing sequential order? Yes, in a classroom where everything is right, wrong, or undeclared.  To the searching deer, this is a petty concern.

  Every morning in pre-calculus, I remind myself that there are no geometrical lines in the natural world; things are what they are, and any explanation, any outline, is a futile cry for order.  If I daydream, if I search, it is because I have unlucky genes and a scant sense for relative values, and I am glad of this.  The great poet Richard Hugo once said that the “imagination is a cynic.”  It assumes all things have equal value, which is the same as saying nothing has value, which is cynicism. Without this, I would read that article on Iraq, because it is more important.  I would forget to celebrate the deer. Without this cynicism, I would be a great math student, a driver undaunted by the straight highway, and a terrible painter. 

  A friend once asked me which I could live without, writing or art.  Neither. They depend on each other.  Painting supplies my mind with images, while writing cleans my room, packing everything into quasi neat new carrying cases so more thoughts can filter through. Weaving through limitless color and music, I defy the straight line, that highway, that deathbed for so many deer.  I have colors and words to translate my thoughts to others and myself, to show why I’ll never wait behind a pane of glass, my life on the other side.

   

  Both these essays are amalgams of almost every xanga entry I've ever written.  There is no point in asking which is better, because each belongs to a separate genre. I want to know which one you think will get me into college. 

  • 10:22 am
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