Itinerantdaughter's Blog

My friend NZ just attended what sounds like a great wedding at Disney World (who knew?!) and regaled me with a tale of drunken Magic Kingdom antics…

I’ll save my real musings on pleasurable masochism for my dearest pen pal (yes, there IS someone more important than you) but for now, let me just say that there are few things as wrongly right as taking one too many painkillers and reading Autobiography of a Face.

“Afterward I’d lie in bed and concentrate on letting the tremors run their course, allowing them free access to all of me so that, like some bear sniffing me out, they’d gradually grow bored and amble away, leaving me alone and exhausted but still alive. Some pain, like the pain of a needle or the site of an operation, is specific: it announces itself in no uncertain terms. Often I tried to balance the pain out with the rest of my body, a sort of negotiation in which I’d isolate one section. I’d lie there and list to myself the parts that didn’t hurt, trying to feel them, aware that normally I’d have no reason to ‘feel’ my body or know it so intimately.

“I was becoming aware that I was experiencing my body, and the world, differently from other people. For hours I’d lie in bed either at home or in the hospital and run my finger back and forth along the wall or the bedrails beside me, conversing silently with myself in the third person, rationalizing the situation, setting down the basic premises of my secret philosophy, occasionally even telling myself I was lucky, lucky to have this opportunity to know such things. At times I was desperate and could find no solace anywhere. Nothing seemed to work, and the weight of being trapped in my own body made it difficult to lift even a hand off the sheets. Other times a sort of physical awareness would take hold of me. Each breath was an important exchange with the world around me, each sensation on my skin a tender brush from a reality so beautiful and so mysterious that I would sometimes find myself squealing with the delight of being alive.”

As I said before, sometimes we get hilarious book proposals at my office.  (A Book Deal-Worthy blog would chronicle just these and then they could be compiled into a book –– but would you have to pay the weirdos royalties?)  Here’s a section of a proposal entitled The Alien Letters, a book of “a series of letters written to an unmarried human by an intelligent visitor from another planet.”  Fiction.  Just FYI.

Letter Forty

Dear human,

The process of falling in love with a married man was sweet.  You at first (for a very brief honeymoon period) carried this sweetness into all other areas of your life.  This was followed by the entrance of discomfort caused mainly by associating your life outside of work with his absence, making your experience bitter-sweet.  As time has progressed, the bitter portion has increased and the sweet portion diminished.  During all of this, your experience at work has remained largely sweet for the obvious reason that he is there.  However, even that is beginning to change.

Because there is absolutely no sense in which he belongs to you, an increasing amount of hurt and pain is occurring in you each time you see him or spend time with him because each sighting throws in your face both the fact that he does not belong to you and the fact that you wish he did.  This mixture is by definition painful.  The more attached to him you have become, the more painful your sightings of him will be.  Thus, though you long for him, you have begun to avoid him when you can.  Instead of taking the hallway where you are most likely to see him, you now take the long way around.  If you see him in the distance, you change courses in an effort to avoid a short, and therefore awkward conversation.  The occasions when you see him but are not able to speak to him are unspeakably awkward and pierce your heart for hours thereafter.  A three-second sighting, especially one where he seemed almost cold, formal, and even distant, puts you on the verge of tears.  You experience untold relief when he is absent from work because his absence gives you rest from the pain of these sightings and the resultant emotional strain.  You feel like you have been released from a prison because in his absence you are free to walk anywhere in the building without fear of seeing him.
The interplay of your varying emotions is, in your mind, being caused by him.  In other words, if it were not for him, you would not be in the pain you are in.  As such, you have actually become angry at him for causing you such distress.  Pain, especially prolonged pain of the type you are experiencing, almost always among you humans turns into anger, and anger always needs an object to be mad at, usually the cause of the pain if it can be identified.  (If it cannot be identified, you humans tend to take your anger out on whoever is most convenient or on whoever you can take it out on and get away with it such as a loved one that you take for granted.)  Since you can identify the cause of your pain and anger as him, you are finding it increasingly difficult to be civil to him.

Your incivility takes the form of being icy cold to him to a degree so obvious that even other coworkers notice, though they pretend not to notice.  Besides your coldness toward him being ultimately motivated by your anger, you have three other motivations, each of which bring their unique bitter taste to the blend.  One, you hope he will notice your coldness and ask you about it.  You wish this not only because you would crave such attention from him but also because you hope that his noticing of your coldness and stiffness would indicate that he ultimately cares about you the way you care about him.  In other words, you suppose that his noticing would prove that he has feelings for you.  Two, you desire to hurt him as payback for hurting you.  Again, in addition to wanting to hurt him for the sake of hurting him, you are also looking for proof of his interest in you by supposing that if he really is hurt by your iciness then he must indeed have something for you, otherwise he would not be hurt.  And three, you hope that by being mean to him your own emotions for him will subside.

After being mean to him for a while you start to feel guilty which in turn moves you to be particularly warm toward him.  Thus you are running hot and cold with him.  Distancing yourself from him also produces fear in you because you do not want your coldness to be the reason that you ultimately missed out on the possibility of having him.  And even apart from all that, you do not want to be the bad guy and allow him to say that the reason it didn’t work out between you two was because of you.  Your current emotional state has sapped any strength you may have had to bear such a burden.

Your resident alien

A first edition of Bambi, for one, and one of the author’s other books, which sounds like a MUST READ:

The Austrian erotic classic that’ll make any parent think twice about taking their young ones to meet a beloved children’s book author.  Written by Felix Salten (Bambi), [this book] is the story of a young girl and her many amorous encounters, with friends, family, and the local priest, culminating in her establishing a career as a high-priced courtesan.

Every so often I encounter a whole universe of devotion that I had never known before, and I’m (usually) invigorated by the fact that I basically know nothing of the world.  Case in point: I found a CD in my new office entitled “The Art of Funerary Violin: A selection of archive recordings by members of the Guild of Funerary Violinists.”

(www.guildoffuneraryviolinists.org.uk.  They have a website.)

Here’s the bio of the violinist:

Long regarded as England’s foremost authority on the history and practice of Funerary Violin, Rohan Kriwaczek graduated first from the University of Sussex in 1972, and then from the Royal Academy of Music in 1974 with an Advanced Diploma in violin performance.  Following a number of successful tours of Britain and Europe as a violinist, he became involved with the Guild of Funerary Violinists in 1975, and after much active scholarship researching their archives, was elected Acting Secretary in 1982, and then Acting President in 2000.  Over the last 30 years, he has dedicated his academic life entirely to the fervent study and recreation of the lost history of Funerary Violin, presenting lectures and workshops all around Europe, and writing a number of books on the subject, recognized today as the standard works for all students of Funerary Violin.

As a Funerary Violinist himself, he was instrumental in establishing concert series in cemeteries in a number of major European cities and has been given many honours, including the ifetime Achievement Award from the International Federation of Funeral Directors (2004.)

He has, over the years, held many posts at Universities and Colleges, but, since 1999, has dedicated himself exclusively in the promotion, study and performance of Funerary Violin, and his official duties as Acting President of the Guild of Funerary Violinists.

And the bass drummer:
Tobias James was born in 1975 and holds a first class degree from Oxford University in Funerary Musicology.  He joined the Guild of Funerary Violinists in 2001 and is currently serving an apprenticeship under fellow mentioned above.

…

BTW, the President, the picture of him: he’s wearing a bowler hat, standing in cemetery, and in his mouth is a pipe so long that the bowl and chambers lie outside the borders of the picture.

“When his father was imprisoned by the Russian authorities for his political activities, the 8-year-old Vladimir [Nabokov] brought a butterfly to his cell as a gift.”

From an article in today’s New York Times entitled “Nonfiction: Nabokov Theory on Butterfly Evolution is Vindicated.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/01/science/01butterfly.html?src=me&ref=general

My boyfriend’s mother did this thing called Donors Choose for me, which is a charity that allows you to choose who gets the money you donate (hence the name.)  Mrs. Mom-of-Boyfriend gave part of my money to a classroom in Brooklyn that needed new Netbooks and publishing programs.  Yesterday, I got a package of thank you letters from the students.  The following is my favorite:

Dear ID,

You are the best people ever!  You will change me and my classmates life at school.  You’ll never know thankful I am for letting us have two netbooks, ink and large sized newspaper and magazines.  The two extra netbooks will give my classmate more chances to research the ink to print homework and stuff, and the large sized newspapers/magazines, so we can act like real newspaper publishers and editors.

I am lighthearted to have this website.  The items is going to make our life easier and more funner than ever.  If there wasn’t someone like you, we’d never have a better life.  Oh, thank you so much, ID.  You have already change our life.  You’re the best!

Yours Truly,

Naziha

Now my problem is… do I throw these cute little notes away?  There was definitely a Seinfeld about this…

Sometimes people who maintain blogs have delusions of writing/e-fame grandeur.  I don’t really, but I like to imagine that I strive for some sort of substance in my posts.  I’ll let you know in advance that this post has absolutely no redeeming quality, and I am ranting to my audience of none (one?) just to get this off my chest.  As I have been poor as Heidi Fleiss post-Hollywood Madam but pre-Celebrity Rehab these past few months, I’ve spent a great deal of time perusing Craigslist looking for little part time work.  I often saw ads for internships (point of irritation number one, as that’s just fancy college talk for “slave labor”) for an e-newsletter called Scallywag and Vagabond, obviously trying to snarikly fake-it-til-they-make-it into the world of Better Than social NYC.  So that was annoying, just knowing these people existed, and then one day one of their emails mysteriously appeared in my inbox!  How they got to me I have no idea (I’ve never been a Gawker fan) so I followed the instructions at the bottom and dropped them a “note” asking to please be removed from the list.  No dice; shit still showed up in there letting me know of such pressing news items as the “The New Breed of Coke Whore” and “Have u ever lived with a Crystal Meth addict? – Oh the adventures… CRYSTAL METH BOY AND HIS SKANK.”  Finally I just marked it as Spam and yet SOMEHOW today I got the LATEST ISSUE of this piece of rubbish, re-printed to help you along with your burgeoning bulimia below:

from scoop scoop <scoop@scallywagandvagabond.com>
to
date Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 5:27 PM
subject Who are the top 10 hot men in NYC? The return of Anal Sex and more celebrities who misbehave.

hide details 5:27 PM (21 hours ago)

WELCOME TO SCALLYWAG AND VAGABOND- an irreverent dossier on scandal, misbehavior, aesthetics, manners and intellect. Midweek newsletter.
http://scallywagandvagabond.com/
Who are the top ten hot guys of NYC? – let’s find out… TOP TEN MALE HOTTIES OF NYC

Anal Sex. Why are more women trying it and liking it? ANAL SEX- R U DOING IT?

Have you ever had the worse dinner party? We just did…. FAUX PAS DINNER PARTIES

Which Hollywood celebrity blew off back to back family gatherings for Santa’s blow? – CELEBRITY PLEASURES

Isn’t it time you aspiring journalists came and interned with Scallywag?- BECOME A TRASH TABLOID WRITER TOO.

Prince William to do away with servants – ROYAL MANNERS

Cynthia Colston gets arrested for calling 911 after receiving a bad manicure  911

Did you give birth to a baby at an airport bathroom, strangle the baby and then flush them away- STRANGLING BABIES

and our favorite – SAVAGE PREDATOR: scandal, faux pas and gossip
ENJOY THE READ

LOVE

SCALLYWAG

To unsubscribe drop us a note.

And so I wrote back:

from Itinerant Daughter
to scoop scoop <scoop@scallywagandvagabond.com>

date Thu, Dec 30, 2010 at 12:51 PM
subject Re: Who are the top 10 hot men in NYC? The return of Anal Sex and more celebrities who misbehave.
mailed-bygmail.com

hide details 12:51 PM (2 hours ago)

1. I never signed up for this newsletter.
2. I wrote to tell you to take me off your mailing list and got no response and still receive the letters.
3. I marked it as SPAM and somehow you’re getting through my filter.

Please please remove me from your list!

See?  I told you this post would have no redeeming qualities.  I’m too pissed to be poetic.

Well, he’s in Los Angeles, but I mean specifically…

IS: guess where I’m going tomorrow