Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand
God or Godless, the whole point of existence is Respect. Some people need a God to put Respect into perspective, and some others need a God as an excuse for not having any. God is in your Respect of others no matter how you slice it, and a kind and loving atheist is worth more than twenty piously judgmental Catholics.
So, i think i’m encountering some extremely disturbing male relative of a “maternal instinct” lately. Tonight i spent Christmas Eve with my father’s side of the family, which is populated with five separate children aged 3-5 (by contrast, i was the only child of the family for over a decade before the next oldest cousin came along). While all of my cousins are usually fun to run and throw around, tonight i was a bit partial to my cousin Audrey. I’m not sure if it’s the fact that she’s the only blonde in our family, or because she’s the least baby-shaped of all the young kids, or because she has a personality (rather than the black & white shy/happy most children have), or anything else, but i find myself absolutely delighted whenever she decides that i’m worthy of her attention. After ignoring me for about three hours tonight, she decided that she absolutely needed to sit next to me and watch Winnie-the-Pooh for an hour, during the course of which i wasn’t allowed to get up or even move to the other side of the chair. Afterwards i was allowed to fetch myself some dessert if and only if i’d share it with her.
Now, obviously my rampant & irrational fear of herpes doesn’t come into play when sharing my fork with a four year old, but i still very rarely share anything with my cousins because i don’t want to get sick. I’m very healthy on my own, but generally my immune system falls like a house of cards in the wind whenever i introduce it to germs from some other person. Despite all of that, i sat on the couch with Audrey with the two of us alternately feeding ourselves and each other until my pile of dessert had disappeared. At some point my father captured the moment on 35mm film to be frozen forever, but i hardly noticed him doing it because i was more concerned with spooning up some strawberry sauce for Audrey.
My whole family thought that the whole affair was simply adorable (and very considerate of me), but really i didn’t have the urge to do anything else but sit there the whole time. Perhaps i was just sick of chasing everyone around the room and giving them piggy back rides, but i think it went beyond that. Audrey wanted to sit there with me, and only me, and she rested her head on my shoulder and idly toyed with the curly wisps of my hair, and it made me feel more special than any performance or audition or hits on my page ever will.
She stared with these awful cow eyes, huge and nearly rimmed with tears welling up out of the dread obese depths of her neck. She didn’t seem to be able to breathe – not at all.
She kept looking up and fidgeting with that tiny air-vent as if it actually blows anything more than the most nothing little ebb down at you which just fades away four inches from the vent which is surely above your head (cow-like or otherwise).
All through the flight she alternately fidgeted and rested her huge cow-like face against the window. I could see the Philly skyscrapers peeking through the wisps of her bovine hair for a second before she reached up (yes, again) to fiddle with her air vent.
It was aimed at me the whole time, but i didn’t have the heart to tell her. Smoothest flight ever. We landed to PJ Harvey screaming “Kamikaze!” at the shrillest top of her lungs.
The sky is a sort of pinkish blue. It’s funny how the fade from one to the other occurs; once i was trying to paint a tiny inch or two of horizon onto an acrylic piece i was working on for art class and it just wound up as this sloppy red-white-and-blue mess. But the sky right now … defies the color spectrum to define it. It isn’t so much violet in the middle as much as the last strands of pink are reaching upwards to entangle themselves with the trailing fingers of the blue.
Obscuring my open sky view is the chunky concrete side of a row home. I can see the evening sky through a break in the the row of houses where one house had been years ago. The empty space is defined by the utterly flat wall of the neighboring home on which you can see the faint outlines of rooms and stairs. Construction amazes me; sure, its not especially hard to build up a single house from the ground up, but to then go back into its empty frame to install electricity and water and heat and everything of the sort amazes me. They built a new dormitory on 32nd street over the summer, and i watched it grow from the ground up until my friends moved into it the day before classes began. Even after having watching it wind its way up i still don’t really understand how it was possible… there’s a building there where once there wasn’t one.
Scale really amazes me. The same way the building of a dormitory seems staggering in comparison to a single row-home that no long exists, distance awes me. I can walk the width of the entire city in a day, and in a car i could drive nearly across the entire state of Pennsylvania. There’s a girl who came to Drexel this fall from Los Angeles, and the space between here and her home is hard for me to grasp. Sure, it’s all tucked safely within the boundaries of the United States, but coming from L.A to Philadelphia to go to school is nearly the same as coming from England. That space … i can’t measure it realistically in footsteps or city blocks or even miles. The idea of a mile loses its coherence when presented in such quantity. Is it just 2000 times farther away than the coffee shop is from me? Maybe, but does that help me to understand it any better? Distance is measured more easily in what comes inbetween: Pennsylvania Dutchland, and Chicago, and endless fields of grain, and mountainous states with less population than Philadelphia, and the San Andreas Fault. Or, maybe i’ve got my geography mixed up.
In about 24 hours i’m boarding a plane to Florida. The distance isn’t as great, but it’s still a bit stunning … i’ll be passing over friends in at least three different states that i’ve never even been to on my way there. It’s a three hour flight, yet it takes six hours to drive from my destination to DisneyWorld in Orlando. I used to have to use mnemonic device to remember if it was Disney Land and World. It’s funny what will stick out in your memory after years of relative obscurity.
I haven’t been in the air since i was in 8th grade. Since then… well, i’m obviously pretty different. I don’t know how airplanes make me feel anymore; before they were a joy and the turbulence was better than any rollercoaster i’d find in Florida. Now rollercoasters make me a little bit nervous, and i’ve known the detached fascination and horror of watching the news report the crash of a plane – knowing all along that i just lost the possibility of having hundreds of conversations i had been planning on having after the summer was over.
All of that is just the distance between me then and me now. It’s hard to really comprehend the difference six years can make in a person, whether it be in days or weeks or seconds. But, you can measure it by the landmarks left on my life. At least that way it isn’t such a daunting task. To be sure, it’s been a long while since i last took to the sky, but i’m still the same person – and i’ll be boarding a plane that’ll tear into that not-so-violet evening sky in 24 hours.
