A Streetcar Named Desire

This is a post I put up on my family's blog...I don't really think that anyone looks at that blog, though, so I'm reposting it here because I'm vain and I want attention or something (heeheehee):

For the past month or so my every thought and action has been tainted by a certain fictional, manipulative, and very messed up someone known to the world as Blanche DuBois. She's an alcoholic and a smoker, she makes bad decision after bad decision and her need for constant and hearty approval means that every bad decision impacts the people she loves most as well. Of course, like everyone out there, she does have her redeeming qualities. She loves deeply, sees the poetry in the world where others see blandness or mire, and understands people in a way that many do not. Blanche DuBois is a character that I first fell in love with, then found myself hating but, finally found a kind of kindred spirit in her.

In the conversations I realized the play was a lot more relevant than I initially believed. I had trouble wanting to invite people to this play because, although it is a classic, it is not a pretty story. By the end Blanche has been driven insane and her sister's life in New Orleans, once imperfect but happy, is left in shambles. Of course my character's habits of drinking, smoking, cussing, and indulgence in casual sexual encounters, coupled with the rape at the end of the play also made it hard to invite family members. It is not exactly a "bring the kids" kind of production. However, once I was able to get over my discomfort with my family's ability to separate Blanche's behavior from mine, I started to find valuable tidbits of gold that were surprisingly applicable to my life that I would like to share with you, if you have the patience to indulge me:

There are two bits of monologues in particular that I would like to offer to all of you because of the incredible meaning I found in them. The first was actually cut from our production because it evidently did not have the same profundity for my director as it did for me, but I think it one of the most beautiful pieces of writing in the play. I have now realized that it is so meaningful to me because I missed this part of my father's death. The guilt that Blanche is here reproaching her sister with is a guilt that I have felt. Although everyone in my family says my Dad passed away quietly I have always gotten the very subtle impression that this part of his journey is one that I should not have missed.

"Funerals are quiet, but deaths- not always. Sometimes their breathing is hoarse, and sometimes it rattles, and sometimes they even cry out to you, "Don't let me go!" Even the old, sometimes, say, "Don't let me go." As if you were able to stop them! But funerals are quiet, with pretty flowers. And, oh, what gorgeous boxes they pack them away in! Unless you were there at the bed when they cried out, "Hold me!" you'd never suspect there was a struggle for breath and bleeding. You didn't dream, but I saw!"

The other monologue that is so meaningful to me is nearly at the end of the play where I have been cornered by my love interest. He has realized that I am not the moral pillar of "old-fashioned ideals" that I have painted myself as and is confronting me about it. Finally I cave and I tell him the truth. It is the second sentence in the following quote that I find the most powerful because it encompasses how I felt and acted after my Dad died. I didn't run around having sex with strangers like Blanche did, but I did find myself repeatedly ripping myself out of places before they could become meaningful. I found my protection in isolation by way of constant movement. I found the goodness in people by refusing to get to know them on a more than superficial level. It seems to me that it was the same for Blanche. Blanche found the goodness in people by only having physical relations with them. She had been hurt so badly by the loss the person who was most important to her in life that she couldn't sustain another relationship for years. She could only ping-pong her way through life, looking for happiness everywhere it wasn't and hoping that eventually she would find someone that could understand and fix her.

"Yes. I had many intimacies with strangers. After the death of Allan intimacies with strangers seemed all I was able to fill my empty heart with. I think it was panic, just panic, that drove me from one to the next, looking for protection in the most unlikely of places."

It's a good play. All y'all missed out if you didn't get to see it. We've been hearing really good things from everyone who has come so far, which is a lot of fun. Especially considering how much time we've put into the play. It's only been a month, but Blanche is a verbose little lady, and I have spent a LOT of time sticking her words into my head. :)

No Fucking Pandas, No Fucking Pandas

I just had the first legitimate nightmare that I can remember having since I was five and dreamed that an innocent, happy Ken doll turned into a giant black snake and swallowed the Barbie doll to whom he'd been speaking. I'm not used to having nightmares. My dreams are normally action-packed, violent and exciting. There are explosions, leaps from tall buildings, swordfights, gunfights, knifefights, fistfights, but there is never an accompanying sense of fear. Tonight is different for some reason. FYI: After finishing writing the story of my dream there still seem to be small bits and pieces missing. I apologize for that, but it is still a cohesive(ish) story, so I'm publishing it here on m'blog anyways.

Dream:

I came home, entering through the door in the entry way that leads out to the garage. It was early afternoon and sun was gently streaming through our small octagonal window. Small motes of dust spun lazily in the bar of sunshine, the only movement in all the house. No one else was supposed to be home.

I walked down the stairs and noticed that the tub (that we don't actually have against the wall by the computer in the family room) was full of water. Inside was also what I would later discover through dream ESP was my grandmother. Her face was missing. I drained the tub, getting the impression that, although she didn't have a face anymore, she was still alive. I went to my room to get something to help her. Returning moments later, empty handed but prepared to help, I found that the tub was full of dark, gray colored water again. This time I knew she was dead. With a very slight pang of fear (the kind of "fear" I feel in most dreams like these: that insignificant excitement that is nothing more than a slight adrenaline rush) I realized that the killer was still in the house and that I might have the opportunity to catch it.

In my room again, I heard a noise and saw a flash of color, like a red cloth being shaken out, in the hallway outside my door. Curious, I quietly walked out into the hall. There she was, mere feet away from me, a tall blond stranger with a large hooked nose and smallish chin. Her face was narrow and worn slightly with age; she was probably in her early 40s. She was folding a green towel. Showing no fear of embarrassment at being caught in a house where a murder had just been committed, she looked at me evenly. I stared back and asked why she had done what she had done. (Magic dream transition)

We were upstairs, where Mum, Matt and Evie were handcuffed, sitting on or standing near the couch. The killer told me she thought it had been for love. She said that sometimes a person loves someone more than they would have ever thought possible, but they are denied that love and it eats away at them. The only way they can confront that denied emotion is to let it out in some way. I nodded and cited Ted Bundy and other random serial killer names to agree with her. Other than feeling slightly uncomfortable that my entire family was handcuffed while I roamed free with our serial killer, I enjoyed talking to her and didn't want her to leave. Everything she said was intriguing and much of what she said resonated with me in some way, even if I would never consider killing people to let an unrequited love breathe.

I worried that my family would look at me badly after this encounter because of my desperate questions and the relative cool with which I addressed what we now knew was a serial killer. Matt cleared his throat and held out his hands. The woman nodded and uncuffed him, my sister and my Mother and then started for the door. We all crowded around the top of the stairs, as we tend to do when a person is leaving our home, and waved goodbye to her. Now it was my family's turn to reek of normalcy and I took on the burden of fear.

I broke down. I collapsed to the floor, dry sobbing as soon as the woman left. I almost wondered if I was faking the emotion at first, in an attempt to convince my family that the coldness they'd seen before wasn't indicative of what I felt on the inside. The door re-opened and there she was again, mask removed and the red muscle of her face accented by the new, deranged clown makeup she had started to apply to her face. There were two white diamonds painted around her eyes and her lips were painted a bronze that was eerily close in color to the red of the underside of her face. Smiling hugely, she picked up a small item she had left in the entry way and exited again. She was disgusting. I had tried to re-gather myself in her presence so she wouldn't think I was fazed, but without success. Already my eyes were pink and my hair askew from my pulling fretfully at it. She knew she had gotten to me, which made her trip to our house all the more succesful.

I made my way downstairs and curled up on my bed, but I couldn't sleep. Terrible images kept flashing through my mind, but not of the gore. The gore wasn't so scary as the fact that I had conversed with her like a normal human being. Her evil wasn' so bad as my receptiveness to it. I stood, mind alternatively sputtering and reeling, and began to walk up the stairs. Halfway up the first flight I stopped myself, grasping the handrail for support, and turned down again. I couldn't face my family.

Down in my room again, curled in a ball in the corner, I recalled a dream I'd had quite some time ago (but I recalled it as a reality because I was in my dream world) and I realized that she had been to our home before, and had committed atrocities then as well. I staggered out my door again, leaning on furniture for support, I made my way back upstairs and tried to convince my family that we had to change our locks, that we had to prevent her coming into our home again. They also remembered my dream-memory, but wrote off the need for locks and better security with the decidedly illogical logic that:

"She probably has a key anyway."

There was no point in trying to get around it. We would just have to be very aware all the time. I felt like Job. I tore at my hair and my clothes and invisible tears flew down my face as my stomach twisted itself into terrible knots and my mind ran in useless circles. I was afraid in a way that I have never been in a dream and will hopefully never be in real life. I was convinced that she was coming back and would kill me in the same terrible way she'd done my grandmother and, moreso, I was still petrified of my initial friendliness with this lady. I was afraid of the implications that spawned and I was afraid that I wouldn't just die if she came and tore my face off. I would become like her, her unwilling (or perhaps enthusiastic) apprentice. God knows there's enough unrequited love in my life to start my killing spree if that's all it takes.

The doorbell rang. I looked out the window and there were pandas flouncing in the snow. Suddenly more terrified than ever I ran back upstairs, this time managing to find my feet and run with relative coordination. The door was open and I could see two of them standing there behind the glass door. Making it into my Mum's office upstairs I looked out the window, where I could see the pandas more clearly. Two or three were playing in the snow, wrestling and laughing airy, panda laughs. Two were standing at the door and they had a huge golden box at their side. Convinced that they were also murderers of some kind, probably bombers, based on the box they carried with them, I refused to admit them.

I started screaming shrilly at everyone in the house not to get the door by way of "No fucking pandas, no fucking pandas" and I ran up and down the stairs, quite properly wigging out. One of the pandas, this one actually a human person in a costume saw me and reached out to open the door. I slammed it back on them, now convinced they were indeed dangerous criminals because one had taken the initiative to open the door, probably thinking it should assist what seemed to be a DERANGED PSYCHOPATH (me).

Still only screaming "no fucking pandas" I continued to run about my house, pulling at my hair and looking the very image of a crazy person as the rest of my family sat passively by. The only reaction I got from any of them was a general sense of disproval from my mother at my use of the f-bomb.

Are they making tic tacs differently these days? I just bought a box and they taste like minty cardboard with a hint of whipped cream.

Poetry

I'm doing a daily poetry thing this year. I'll post them for all y'all every now and then. I was going to post one that I wrote about a little experience I had tonight, but I don't think I should. Instead I'll post my calm, serene one from yesterday.

Satisfied
Always on his lips:
After clearing a plate,
On a comfortable day,
Or as a conscious commentary
Regarding his untimely departure.
Now it reverberates within me.
My aching muscles, bruises, scrapes
Harmonize with a greater inner peace
And reconcile his word with
The feeling it encompassed then,
Encompasses now.
I am not he.
His feeling was undoubtedly different,
But I feel that much closer to him
Now that satisfaction laps at my skin
Like a tide slowly coming in.

Life Sentences for Children

I am supposed to be working on my biology outline right now. I, an omnivore who would choose a steak over a salad nine times out of ten, am arguing that vegetarianism is the most eco-friendly-minded dietary choice a person can make. This is true, but I don't want to be arguing it. I wanted to explore eco-friendly food choices in a local produce kind of way, but I was told to change my topic because it was "too broad". Somehow I got narrowed to vegetarianism. I am not enjoying my research at all, either, because: A) it means that I am constantly accidentally stumbling across PETA material, which is mostly oversexualized, violent, star-studded, reactionary junk. And B) it is a poster project, meaning that most of my material needs to be visual, and there is a surprising lack of charts and graphs to prove what I want to prove. I just found a site site that had four visual aids, all of which I plan on using, but before that all I could find was cartoons making jokes about eating vegetarians and photos of PETA protests, wherein women wearing bikinis and ballgowns made of leaves were walking the streets of various cities. ...seriously? That is how you plan on getting people to go veggie?

Anywho, I went to NPR.com when I got tired of reading veggie this and veggie that, and I read an article on their home page about whether it can be deemed cruel and unusual punishment to sentence a child to life in prison. The example they gave was that of Joe Sullivan, a man who is now 33 years old but who, at 13, raped a woman in her 70s and robbed her (Clockwork Orange, anybody?). He is still in prison 20 years later, and will be for the rest of his life. The question is posed - is it fair or morally acceptable for the justice system to put a child in a prison and then leave him there until he dies however many years later? Can we expect a child to have known enough to not do whatever it was he did that got him in trouble in the first place? Can we expect rehabilitation to work on someone who does something so atrocious at so young an age? (Not that we really do rehabilitation in the States anyways...)

Personally, I have always been of the mindset that a judicial system should aim to rehabilitate, not punish the people who commit crimes. The possibility of rehabilitation increases significantly when the criminal is young, but throwing children in prison for the rest of their lives is not going to do anyone any good. Not knowing anything about Joe Sullivan, I can almost guarantee that he is now about as criminal as they come, even if he was simply a little misguided as a child, because he has spent 20 years of his life surrounded almost solely by criminals. If, however, we had given him a chance to reform his ways in the beginning, things could have ended differently. As such, I would not suggest reversing his sentence now, but I would make it impossible (or at least difficult) for such a ruling to occur again.

Silence pervaded the tiny room, blocking conversation and laughter with a heavy ferocity. Untrusting, red eyes met briefly, only to dart back to the tiny boxes.

Theirs, Not Mine

They have destroyed the chances of it actually happening.
Every touch, promise,
Blandishment
(Because that's what it all really is, isn't it?)
Finds its provisional place within me
Where it giggles and squirms with all the
Energy of an excitable child.
Then, too soon,
It dies,
Slowly and with paroxysms of self-righteous anger.
It tries to prove its validity
But without its creator to confirm its case it has
No credibility. It was empty from the start.
Pity, boredom, curiosity, drunkenness,
Whatever created it, they only last so long
And when they disappear, it does too.
And I am left outside
Underneath a clouding sky
To wonder in the rain.