Death According To Sparks.

“Granny Green has gone,” said Miss Taylor.
“Ah yes, I noticed a stranger occupying her bed. Now what was Granny Green?”
“Arterio-sclerosis. It affected her heart in the end.”
“Yes, well, it is said we are all as old as our arteries. Did she make a good death?”
“I don’t know.”
“You were asleep at the time,” he said.
“No, I was awake. There was a certain amount of fuss.”
“She didn’t have a peaceful end?”
“No, not peaceful for us.”
“I always like to know,” he said, “whether a death is a good or bad one. Do keep a look out.”
For a moment she utterly hated him. “A good death,” she said, “doesn’t reside in the dignity of bearing but in the disposition of the soul.”
Suddenly he hated her. “Prove it,” he said.
“Disprove it,” she said wearily.
– Muriel Spark, Memento Mori

the delicate human body.

i usually don’t like to write too in depth about my personal life, but i’ve spent a good portion of the past two days visiting my grandfather at the hospital, and it’s been a very surreal experience.

i’ve never spent much time in a hospital, either to visit someone or because i was sick or injured. hospitals, more than any other place i’ve been, are so quiet and nervous and cold. my grandfather was in the icu, and when i walked into his room, he was sleeping; with what seemed like great labor, his chest moved up and down, breathing in and out. he had tubes in his nose; needles stuck into the flesh of his arms, connected by tubes to the audience of machinery that surrounded him, clicking and humming; straps, like the ones that grocery store to test your blood pressure, around his legs that pumped air to squeeze his calves and keep his blood from clotting; a bag half-full of bright yellow urine hanging from a hook on the side of his bed. it was all i could do to keep from crying, seeing his body so frail and aged. he was disoriented from the pain medication, kept falling asleep in mid-conversation and mumbling sentence fragments unconsciously.

never before have i been so aware of how delicate the human form is. when i saw him, i thought “this is the closest i’ve ever been to death.” my grandfather is in good health, active for his age, and yet there he was lying in a hospital bed, completely inert, weak, pricked and monitored like a science project. he took good care of himself, and his body still had to be aided with medicine and machines when it had been pushed a little too far.

it just reminds me of how much we take our bodies for granted: our bodies can do magical things, like push out a small human form into the living breathing world, lift the dead weight of an automobile in the right circumstances and with the right amount of adrenaline, naturally process the food we put into it, endure cuts and kicks and chemical exposure with fierce resilience; and yet, our bodies are not invincible. they are made of matter that can be crushed, sometimes to a pulp. i think of all the damage we inflict upon our bodies, for reasons cosmetic or psychological or unknowing, and how we don’t treat always treat them with the quiet wonder that we should if we truly understood how transient their animation is.

my point is that we need to have consideration toward the body, sensitivity to its limitations and embrace of its magnificence. we only get one body (unless you believe in incarnation), and once it’s gone, it’s gone forever. all we can do is be good to our bodies, so much as we have power to do so, and hope that goodness will reverberate for as long as possible.

r.i.p. j.d. salinger

thank you for writing a book that made me feel like it was okay to feel that adolescence was a breeding ground for madness. i made it through high school a lot better adjusted than i should have as a result of reading catcher in the rye. your understanding of the misfit and your hilarious and poignant dialogues in your writing will be missed.

“the goddamn sands run out on you every time you turn around. i know what i’m talking about. you’re lucky if you get time to sneeze in this goddamn phenomenal world.” 
- j.d. salinger, franny and zooey

my favorite teenage morons: romeo & juliet.

reading romeo and juliet apparently makes some people very defensive. in a class discussion the other day, i piped up for the first time this quarter and said that i didn’t think romeo and juliet were actually in love, because they didn’t exercise any degree of reason in their 3-day love affair and because they were adolescents who had no conception of love beyond what their libidos were telling them. and out came the claws!

it was the general consensus of the class that romeo and juliet’s brand of immediate, uncontrollable, dangerous passionate love was an elevated form of love, that their love was somehow more pure than the long-lasting, mundane love that most people experience. someone even went as far as to quote neil young and say “it’s better to burn out than to fade away.” how poetic.

call me square, but i just fail to see the appeal of this kind of love, if you can even call it that. i feel forced to bear my post-romantic teeth at the thought of such awesome recklessness/immaturity/selfishness falling under the category of love. i just try to imagine what their lives would be like if everything didn’t go tragically awry for them: they would have lots of passionate sex for a while, but then romeo would develop a roving eye, juliet would cuckold him, and there would always be that underlying tension of their families hating each other. there is no way they could maintain that intense level of passion for any longer than they did, so i guess there was no choice but for their story to end tragically; maybe that’s why people like it. in my mind, passion is kind of like caffeine: you can only run on it for so long before you get burned out, and either start looking for something else to get you going or allow what was once a high to become a routine. and everyone knows that teenagers are incapable of knowing what love is because a) they’re self-centered (and self-centered is the opposite of love) and b) because they don’t know themselves. you would think that if romeo really loved juliet, he could have restrained himself from killing her kinsman and getting himself banished and generally mucking up all their plans, but no. hrmph. fortune’s fool, indeed.

conclusion: i just can’t bring myself to romanticize their relationship (or any relationship that resembles theirs, for that matter). they were not great lovers, they were idiot kids who lived in the moment and died as a result of their inability to exercise restraint and plan ahead. and as dr. amorose said, this is the last shakespeare play that should ever be taught in high school english classes… it’s too great of an encouragement for moronic teenage lovers to be more reckless and moronic than they already are.

bye michael.

i have become really terrible at blogging on a regular basis. it doesn’t help that my laptop had to go the computer hospital due to a broken optical drive (which, ironically, coincided with my recent netflix subscription). it’s infinitely difficult to find the motivation to write after an 8-hour (soon to be 10-hour) workday.

since everyone else in the world has blogged about michael jackson in the past few weeks, i have a subconscious urge to say something, at least, about his death. last weekend was mj-filled: there was a zombie crawl going on in fremont in which zombified seattle-ites were attempting to break the guinness world record for how many people could dance the “thriller” dance simultaneously. i didn’t dress up like a zombie, but it was really an amazing thing to see five thousand people all dancing this dance that michael jackson made so famous. and if that weren’t enough, i decided to watch the movie “13 going on 30” (i was having a really bad day and needed to watch something cutesy and light-hearted), in which there is also a “thriller” dance reenactment. and the scene was a party where no one was dancing, and then “thriller” comes on and one person starts doing the dance, and then everyone joins in and is loving life and thinking the party is great. i feel like michael jackson’s music often has that kind of effect on people, and the fact that it has permanently permeated american culture and will continue to be iconic (even more so now) is a testament to his talent, his ingenuity and his ability to entertain. i don’t want to valorize him, because he was just a singer; he didn’t find the cure for cancer and he wasn’t super-human. he was just a human being, who was talented and whose demons were more magnified than most people’s. the thing that makes me the most sad about his death is that, despite his fame, he was a deeply unhappy person who self-medicated just to be able to make it through each day. i’ve read reports that he was administered daily shots of demerol, one of the stronger painkillers; so sad that he felt he had to numb himself with prescription drugs on a daily basis just to be able to function. that’s sad no matter who it happens to, famous or otherwise. and really, the saddest part is that his kids have lost their dad at such young ages. that’s probably one of the worst things that could happen to a kid.

r.i.p. michael.

dying, returning, dying and so on.

so the last two movies i’ve watched have dealt heavily with the idea of reincarnation. i don’t believe in coincidences, so i’m trying to figure out what i think this means. i used to think it was such a weird concept, that someone could return in a different body but maintain their essence… but i guess with getting older, i realize how little the body defines the person. and it seems more true every year that there is nothing new under the sun. reincarnation makes sense to me.

i just realized that yesterday was the one year anniversary of heath ledger’s death. i guess i never really felt sorry for him, because i suspect that he just went to sleep and didn’t wake up, and it was painless, and it was an accident. what i do feel sorry about is that matilda ledger is never going to know her dad. i don’t think there are very many situations that could be more sad than that. when i was researching haircuts, i decided i really liked michelle williams’ hair, so i was looking at a lot of pictures of her to find one i could use as a reference. i came across this picture of her and heath ledger:

it’s so funny and so sad at the same time.

i’m very sad.

one of the few good men left in hollywood died.

he was a brilliant actor dedicated to his craft, and a philanthropist who deeply cared about making the world a better place.

rest in peace, paul newman.

paul newman – plastic jesus.mp3

see ya.

so i had a weird and deeply personal question posed to me (sort of inappropriately) via text message today:

“if you had to kill yourself, what song would you play? the only rules are you cannot pick a beatles or rilo kiley song. and would your hypothetical way of ending yourself have an impact on your song choice?”

i’ve thought a lot about how i would kill myself if i felt so driven to do so, and the only way i can see myself extinguishing my own life is by running my car in my garage until i asphyxiate. all of my other options require more trouble than they’re worth, in my opinion… like buying a gun to shoot myself or climbing on top of a building to jump off of. i don’t want to exert myself in my last moments. i would want it to be familiar and easy. i’d get in my car, like i’ve done a thousand times before, and start the engine and just wait. i’d probably be smoking a cigarette with the windows rolled down.

with this idea in mind for my hypothetical suicide, i’ve assembled a top ten list of songs that i would want to die listening to.

1. ‘alison’ by elvis costello

2. ‘i’ll be yr bird’ by m. ward

3. ‘lover you should have come over’ by jeff buckley

4. ‘the queen is dead, take me back to dear old blighty’ or ‘how soon is now’ by the smiths

5. ‘monument’ by mirah

6. ‘hotel chelsea nights’ by ryan adams

7. ‘vienna’ by billy joel

8. ‘jesus etc.’ by wilco

9. ‘rebel rebel’ by david bowie

10. ‘racing like a pro’ or ‘fake empire’ by the national

11. ‘all the young dudes’ by mott the hoople

obviously, the person who posed this question to me knows me well enough to know that i live the beatles and breathe rilo kiley. if these two weren’t disqualified, here are some more options.

the beatles:
‘happiness is a warm gun’
‘oh darling!’
‘you never give me your money’
‘strawberry fields forever’

and
rilo kiley:
‘we’ll never sleep (god knows we’ll try)’
‘picture of success’
‘with arms outstretched’ [which, in all likelihood, would be the song that ushered me into death]

on a happier note, i’m going to see cansei de ser sexy and tilly & the wall the day after i get back to seattle. score.