YOU ARE PEDRO ALMODOVAR!IIII

You are adorable Spanish director Pedro Almodovar. Trust me,

it was either this or Benigni, and you lucked out.

http://www.ostrichink.com/may2003/almo.html

i only got here after redirecting my steps 4 times. first i made it as a corpse on six feet under, flipped burgers in a studio kitchen, directed porn, and was one of those pretentious assholes who just sneer at modern cinema fare. it’s hard getting to the top. take it yourself.

i have [in]formally received the go-ahead from every member of senior company to turn their process into a movie. senior company consists of 6 honors theater majors, 2 directors, 4 actors, who, among themselves, have to pick a play, cast it, and then put on a production by the end of the semester. one of the directors i know relatively little of; one of the actors i have lived with. everyone else falls somewhere along that spectrum of familiarity.

and structure! pre-made structure: the best kind. i’ll sit and take notes at rehearsals, occasionally interviewing the individuals involved. if no story develops, i’ll abandon the idea. if one does — or hopefully several do — i’ll have it all captured and ready to turn into my next project.

for my own amusement, i’ve been trying to cast Senior Co.: The Movie in my head. good, 20-something actors are eerily hard to come by.

one of the more inventive quizzes i’ve seen lately: The Dante’s Inferno Test has sent you to the First Level of Hell – Limbo!
Here is how you matched up against all the levels:

Take the Dante’s Inferno Hell Test

limbo, btw, is described thus: “charon ushers you across the river Acheron, and you find yourself upon the brink of grief’s abysmal valley. You are in Limbo, a place of sorrow without torment. You encounter a seven-walled castle, and within those walls you find rolling fresh meadows illuminated by the light of reason, whereabout many shades dwell. These are the virtuous pagans, the great philosophers and authors, unbaptised children, and others unfit to enter the kingdom of heaven. You share company with Caesar, Homer, Virgil, Socrates, and Aristotle. There is no punishment here, and the atmosphere is peaceful, yet sad.”

i mean, that seems all right. as a jewess i could hardly hope for better. but who does enter the kingdom of heaven, out of curiousity?

my poetry thing went rather smashingly, if i do say so myself. i got lots of laughs. that goes along with my poetry reading philosophy, which is, if your poem isn’t funny, it better be pretty damn good. otherwise (i’ve noticed) people lose interest fast.

i racked up several wonderful compliments from several wonderful folks, including one cute freshman i don’t know. “i liked you the best,” she said, “not that you probably care.” i was like, “are you kidding?” who doesn’t live for the praise of strangers?

small craft warnings, the official lit mag, emerged today in hot pink. i tried my best to match it. people treat you differently when you wear pink. i can only wonder how my life would be if i dyed my hair blonde.

now there’s nothing to do but buckle down and start reading for my history final on the 14th. in honor of my semester of poetry, here’s a link to an ultra-cheerful newsweek article. my consolations are that clearly he didn’t like poetry that much to begin with, and i’d never want to be friends with him.

having little to do is a serious predicament, particularly right now. even when amusements present themselves, a good time isn’t guaranteed. for instance, last night i went to to the a capella jamboree, a swarthmore tradition in which twelve-too-many a capella groups sing sets that are five minutes too long. that’s not the point though. the event can still be enjoyable and occasionally it was.

in the last set, the sight of one individual forced a realization down like a piano on my head: the seniors are leaving. the seniors are leaving. that individual, and another that he reminded me of, a girl i’d always wanted to be friends with, would be leaving; i’d never see either again.

i managed to regain my composure when the group did something funny. but that backfired: i congratulated one of the members of that group in a way that my companions alerted me was stupid. i hate knowing i’ve said something stupid. if i could have, i would have chased that guy down, tackled him and forced him to give me it back. sadly i couldn’t and now i’ll know that he gets to carry my stupid remark around with him forever.

this wouldn’t have mattered so much if i hadn’t been sad. o was i sad. as soon as i escaped my companions i started bawling. i mean on the stairwell. in a way there’s no better place — stairways have cathedral quality acoustics. at least no one happened upon me and my resounding misery in the stairwell.

better today. still aimless. i finished postcards from the edge whose happy ending — and plot, and structure, and focus — differs entirely from the film version. i love carrie fisher’s voice. it reminds me of dorothy parker, jean rhys, and rebecca eisenberg, of everyone in fact who writes well about neurotic witty upper-class women. i think i used to read so much about neurotic witty upper-class women that i wanted to be one. now i’ve read so much of the same that i decidedly do not. that’s growth.

several exciting things befell this weekend, including, most notably, a visit from dearfriend ilana. she trekked down from harvard and thus was subjected to innumberable questions of “do you know ________ ?” she seemed to enjoy herself, maybe a little wistfully at times, and of course i loved having her here. like bingley in pride & prejudice — which production i just watched again from start to finish — she was eager to approve of everyone and everything she saw. sarah kelly in particular.

worthstock, the music festival that’s come to be known as ben’s baby, went off smashingly. a good crowd lingered all day and by golly it didn’t rain a drop.

the next day co|motion met with our girls for the last time before the summer camp in june. they scavenger hunted (assignments included, “sing to two students and get their signatures” “what is the barn?” and “bring back a W”), then we all played elbow tag. just 15 minutes of the latter left me out of breath. if only i cared about being in shape.

my vcr has turned tempermental at the very moment that i have much free time and little to do with it. at least there’s something going on every evening: ross’s funny dance-thing this evening (king lear via liza clark, ballet style); tomorrow evening the collective creation pieces; wednesday MY POETRY CLASS READING at 4:00 PM IN THE SCHEUER ROOM and the small craft warnings / scarlet letters distro party at 7.

i did not realize, let alone celebrate, it, but yesterday was my last day of classes this semester. i loved this semester. being me, of course, i was very apprehensive at the end of last semester. being me, of course, i’m now very apprehensive about the fall.

people shrug me off when i voice these apprehensions. half of the semester will be swollen with screenplay writing. i’ve only written one and the general consensus (i’d link to the triggerstreet reviews but that would be ghastly and depressing) was that it was sub-par. true, it was a first effort. but who’s to say that this attempt will go better?

people say pshaw and i’m offended, the way a 6 year old is offended when not taken seriously. no, really, people, i’m scared to death. the least you can do is squeeze my hand.

i wrote a lot when i was 6. i had a ramona quimby diary and when i confided something too personal, i’d tear out the page, scribble over the words, shred it and bury it in the trash can in my brothers’ bathroom. i wrote stories about life being cruel and unfair, which for me it was not. i wrote about girls named kate and mary and personally knew none. influenced and transfixed by the roald dahl books, in particular boy, my stories nearly always involved violent punishment of children. no one ever hit me, except the time my older brother knocked into my mouth and a baby tooth fell out, as though he’d put a quarter into a vending machine. in reaction he said he deserved half the tooth-fairy money.

when i was 10, the parabola of a tennis ball inspired me to rush home and write my first poem. it begins, “i had a dream the other night/ i flew with silver wings/ surprisingly i wasn’t scared/ to leave all normal things” and ends, “it was a time to start another day/ but when this one will end:/ maybe i’ll fly again tonight/ and this time, with a friend.” actually i’d never dreamt about flying. i still never have.

the flying poem was anthologized by the bastards at the national library of poetry. those vultures feed on the vanity of people like me, pretending to sponsor a contest, updating you every few weeks, “CONGRATULATIONS!! you’re in the TOP 2%!! send us more cash.” eventually they declare you a winner and sell you, for $50, a hardback book with your poem on page 424 after as many horrifically bad poems called “rain” “the day my cat died” and “when you left.” the first in the book — it’s burned into my memory — begins, “salty tears run down my cheek/ as if my eyes had sprung a leak.”

i know we all have to learn lessons in life, but really though that one was way harsh. the funniest part about it, which after about a week i could appreciate, was that they also sold you a tape with your poem read aloud by a sonorously-voiced man. this guy, who probably had an mfa from princeton, had, with utmost solemnity, to recite my 10-year-old stab at lyricism: “… as i flew higher and higher, i/ could see the land no more/ so i spread my wings to try to glide/ what a thrill it was to soar! …”

the moral of this story is, i’m not ready for this semester to end yet. i have 14 fears about next semester (11 logical, 3 il- ), none of which can be scoffed away. please, just squeeze my hand.

last seminar, including dinner prepped for us by our lovely unique prof, over. the night before, instead of doing catch-up reading for seminar, i wandered down to sarah’s room. she and her quad convened. somehow, and for the life of me i can’t say how this happened, elisabeth and i started bonding over poetry. (poetry! isn’t it great!)

from her room we retrieved a browning book and read the pied piper of hamelin aloud; her dorothy parker portable, a different published copy than mine; an ogden nash; a billy collins; a fran lebowitz (i don’t know the woman but elisabeth pressed her book on me, assuring me i’d fall in love); o there were thousands more. we recited and flipped furiously through pages to find the poems we were thinking of.

britta contributed, asking thought-provoking questions like “who’d you rather be locked in a room with all day, william blake or ezra pound?” and “what’s your least favorite poem?” that one took a minute. eventually i settled on “tyger, tyger” because really — no, really — i intensely dislike that and always have. i used to sit opposite a copy of it posted on my seventh grade english classroom wall and mutter curses in its direction.

last night, more pedantically, i watched secretary again. i found it even more beautiful the second time.

this is my favorite kind of day. just a couple of degrees too warm, enough so that breezes are welcome and so that you want to throw yourself dramatically to the ground and not get up. i’ve only gotten a chance to do a little bit of the latter: i had the first of my last classes to get through first. that went well and now it’s over, like, ososoon, so many things will be.

i’m trying to put together the set of ten poems i’m submitting for the english department’s approval. that means both revising new things like mad and going through old things, considering them. personal poems that reflect on an experience or situation that’s no longer applicable i dismiss out of hand. but what about old-favorites like 5’1″? should i keep everything recent so that the tone/style is consistent? is stuff that’s been published automatically preferable to stuff that hasn’t?

i don’t envy people who have serious work to do at this time of year. that’s a strong argument against the honors program, in case you’re looking for one, or for being rich and indolent. i bonded with my friend adam this morning over our shared opinion that we could have done well having been born in the late 1800s. if you’re rich, of course, you can do well virtually any place or time, unless you’re hit by unavoidable grandscale miseries like plagues or reality television. but to be well-to-do and of-age in the ‘tens and ‘twenties, to be able to flit between berlin, paris, and new york, to trailblaze by drinking highballs, wearing short skirts, and writing verse that occasionally rhymed and occasionally did not … ah, that’s the life.

then, to die, dressed to the nines, cocktail in hand, in a car crash in the spring of 1929.

“The base is with Santorum, the White House is with Santorum, and this is gender, not race,” said a GOP aide. “The reason Lott lost is because those three factors were moving the other way, against him”

from white house defends santorum. not that you’d expect any better from bush, but still. besides, “gender, not race”? homosexuality = gender? since when?

sad:

Francis said that was good politics, adding: “Swing voters want a very moderate approach to the whole issue of gay assimilation into mainstream America.”

i’m underutilized. everyone else is overstressed. not an ultimate combination. i’ll all right though. with movies, with pleasure reading, with catch-up history reading (see, it’s not all fun and games), i’ll get through it.