Stars

     I had heard that before the time of compasses, conventional navigation, and GPS, sailors used to navigate by the stars.  But when I finally saw the stars for the first time in my life, and I mean really saw them, without any rude interruptions from floodlights, or flashlights, or firelight, and not just a glance, a vague impression of pinpricks or dots, but a good long look, I felt all the emotions our bodies are made to trap, contain, and struggle with, drain away.  My emotions, the things I had spent my life gathering and hoarding together, trying to identify, categorize, and describe, had left me, leaving nothing in their wake, leaving me staring, spellbound, up into the sky.  I had seen stars before, from the street at home, I would shield my eyes from the streetlamp and I could pick out Orion and his belt, Cassiopeia, the Big Dipper, the little one, Saturn, Venus, and sometimes Mars.  But never before had I seen stars like this, the stars, as I stood there thirty miles from Canada, on the shore of a crystal clear lake. 

The act of seeing cannot describe what happened to me that night.  I tipped my head back, and let every feeling I had ever had in my entire life be sucked out of me, into the stars.  I did not feel their loss, I could feel nothing; the stars were flooding my every sense, flooding like a great tidal wave into me, and I was drowning.  I lost track of what was up or down, right or left.  I drank in the stars through my eyes, tasting their unique, crisp sweetness.  There are not just millions and billions of stars, what a cold way to describe them.  There are forests of stars, boatloads, armies. There are as many stars as there are raindrops, or grains of dirt.  There are just enough stars to fill a pair of cupped hands and more than would fit in the deepest ocean.  There are as many stars as there are cells in my body, and I could feel the stars floating through my veins, too, like an addictive substance.  I could hear the stars, like a great symphony, an intricate yet simple melody that never ends and has always been playing.  I could feel this music wash over me, a baptism, a caress. 

I had seen the great paintings of Van Gogh, Monet, El Greco, things considered to be some of the most beautiful works of man, and now, gazing at the stars, I saw what they had been trying to achieve.  No work of man, however great, complicated, advanced, praised, or insightful, could ever accomplish something like the stars.  Not even God, a figment of man’s imagination, because man always has to have the last word, could have designed this. Only the random beauty of nature, which suffers all sorts of insults and plagiarisms by man, could possess the power for this kind of display that reaches inside a person and grabs ahold of their soul.

And I could only stand there, on a dock, feeling, tasting, breathing in, and listening to something that could never be captured through a lens, could never be drawn, painted in its entirety, given justice by description. I thought, when I could think again, how entirely daring humankind had been, to try and name individual stars, to send satellites to blunder heedlessly around up there, and how in the world could anyone navigate by these?

Slowly, little by little, I felt the stars give me back my body, I felt them relinquish my emotions after sampling each and every one of them.  And even more slowly, I felt my soul drift unwillingly back to me, though something was wrong.  The stars stole a piece of my soul while I was distracted, while I was drowning in them.  It doesn’t matter how big a piece it was, first they had stolen my emotions, to examine, tear apart, and scatter, then they had made a souvenir out of my soul.

After several years of thought, I am still pondering this strange occurrence. When I look up at the stars these days, I start to feel myself getting lifted up, becoming weightless, I feel my surroundings slip away.  I feel my carefully compartmentalized emotions tremble in their seats.  And then I trip on a crack in the sidewalk, I feel a bug bite me, someone calls my name. Or worst of all, a light turns on, and then it’s the stars who turn away first.  They could still have that piece of my soul, if so I must go up there and find it someday.  But what if, as the Earth was idly spinning, self-absorbed on its axis, they decided to spitefully hurl it down and see where it landed?  I suppose this means, before I leave, I must search the world and see if it’s hidden somewhere.

Illusion of Choice

The New Headmaster Decides to Teach Our AP English Class

 February 13, 2011 (Junior Year)

Our AP English teacher, Ms. Regan, had to have emergency surgery and was out for around 6 weeks during which, Mr. Watson, our new headmaster, took it upon himself (about half the time) to teach the class.

 

This is a snippet of an email I sent to Ms. Regan, wishing her well and a speedy recovery, and letting her know how much we all missed her.

As you know, Mr. Watson is now teaching our class, which is making for some interesting interactions between principle and students.  I'm sure you remember the way he spoke over the loudspeaker. Now if you can imagine that in a relatively small space, with four walls, without the PA crackle serving as a buffer between us and the especially earsplitting bits, it's a rather sharp contrast to your quiet, authoritative voice.  Whereas with yours, we were afraid to tune out or start a conversation with our neighbor, lest we miss something detrimental, with his, I think tuning out is some sort of instinctual reaction to save ourselves from the sheer volume.  Maybe he used this tactic to command the attentions of small, fidgety children, but with us I get the impression of an overall feeling of desperation.

It's clear that Mr. Watson doesn't want us to feel that our loving mother has been replaced by this loud step-father, he obviously doesn't want to usurp your teaching thus far, but neither can he replicate the environment you created for us perfectly, and he doesn't want us to get our hopes up that he is going to attempt to fill any one's shoes.  This is all quite understandable, reasonable, and yet I feel that a majority of the class did not realize that this is what he was saying, that it was going to be different, until perhaps our third class with him. 

Mr. Watson offers rather loose, not as analytical interpretations of things compared to your explanations.  This rests the weight of thinking, cutting through mush to the bare essence, the meaning of what we are studying, on us, which I think has thrown some people off-kilter and gives the impression that their responses don't have to be as thought out as maybe they would have been when responding to you.  Personally, I am finding these interactions hilarious and they are even more observable because we now sit in a circle everyday.

One day we were discussing maxims, particularly, "PEOPLE WHO DON'T WORK WITH THEIR HANDS ARE PARASITES." 

Analise, who happened to be sitting directly across from me, jumped right in with her interpretation of this, "I really like this one because I think, you know, it's just so true and...the imagery...the...it's like, you can just imagine some guy in a suit, in, like, an office building, in some corporate job...who just never does anything!"  At this point she was waving her hands around, perhaps trying to show us exactly what he looked like. 

She paused for a moment, and everyone else paused too. In confusion.  I was on the verge of laughter, picturing a business tycoon who just sat at a desk all day, smirking, commanding everyone else to run around madly stapling papers for him - and that's ALL HE DID.

Analise turned to Mr. Watson and said, "You know?"  Mr. Watson seemed at a loss for words. He opened his mouth but Analise got there before him, with waving arms.

"Like, he never does anything for himself, it's always other people who do the work.  And, when I look - er- read this, it just makes me think of people who never do anything with their hands-" Here Zohra and Hannah exchanged frowning glances, Katherine leaned forward like she was going to disagree, Ben had ceased tapping his pencil against the side of his face, and Roop had looked up from the iTouch that was cleverly concealed among the papers on her desk. 

She went on to say, still gesturing by putting her hands behind her back, "Like they don't work with their hands, they only do stuff with their mouth-" She opened her mouth very wide to demonstrate how "they" went about their careers. When this apparently failed to convey her meaning, she started using her hands, forming mouth like shapes that appeared to be pecking at something, while saying, "It's like they feed off the work...they benefit from the stuff that everyone else does, but they don't do anything." Analise paused, looking at her hands extended in front of her. 

Then I said, quite reasonably, I thought, "Would you say a vampire is a parasite?" 

Everyone turned and looked at me as if I'd just suggested that we jump off the roof.  Analise had this look of utter confusion on her face, and said slowly, "N-no." It sounded like a question. I thought to myself, Ah, yes, those carpenter vampires, how could I forget.

So I said, tentatively, "Parasites don't necessarily have to do everything with their mouth...They could also probably do some things...with their hands."  Everyone frowned at me, I frowned at Analise. She frowned back at me. 

Then the room erupted. Approximately 10 people had tried to say something all at once and when they realized someone else was talking, they promptly started shouting, to no one in particular.  It took a minute for Mr. Watson to get everyone under control.

And that was our first class discussion.

April Vacation - On My Day Off

My April vacation was not the most restful vacation I've ever had.  I worked everyday except two at Shaw's (By the way, I decided I want, nay, deserve a new job) and on one of the day I didn't work a construction guy was banging on my door at 7:30 in the morning demanding to know who had flushed the toilet.  It was on that day that our lawn was dug up and we had no water, couldn't flush the toilet, or anything.  By the way, no one actually had flushed the toilet, we were asleep and had had no warning a bunch of sewer people were going to descend upon us with a back hoe and jack hammer.  When we came outside, one guy turned to us from observing the 5 ft deep trench being dug in our lawn to ask, "You're the ones with the sewer problems, right?"  We looked at him, blankly.  My mom said confusedly, "No..."  The guy looked at her and said, "You're not?" My mom looked very decisive all of a sudden and said, "No, we're not.  We haven't had any problems. Everything's working fine." Then she amended herself with a glance at the trench, "Well, everything was working fine."  She glared at the guys gathered and said in a loud voice, "No one told us you were coming today, we've had no notice of anything, and now you're saying that we can't even use our toilet?" The guys looked at her. "That is what you're saying right? We can't take showers, or do laundry, or anything, right? And we're just finding out about this, now?"  The guys exchanged glances and then one took a step closer and said authoritatively, "You just can't let anything drain. You didn't know we were coming today?" We shook our heads and my mom inhaled to start on something again but then the guy cut her off with something else.  My mom tried calling the office, who also did not know the sewer people were coming and then decided that our best option would be to just get the hell out of their.  We went to the Watertown mall and washed in the bathroom there.  My mom resolved that I had to take my permit test again, and to avoid a fight I didn't try arguing with her because I could that anything I said to her would be taken the wrong way and she wouldn't actually listen to my message. So we went to the DMV.  All the while she kept asking me, "Do you think you can pass it? Can you pass the test?" and I kept saying, "I think I can," not really committing to anything and then she left me there to go to work and I failed the permit test by one question.  So then I walked across the street to the Arsenal Mall and started window shopping, feeling somewhat disappointed with myself. 
But then I found prom shoes!  My mom was not happy at all, of course, but really what could she expect? I forgot the pages I had to study in our haste to escape the house.  From that comment she seemed to think I was saying it was her fault that I had failed and this opened a whole new topic of discussion and she almost started going on on of those rants that connects all of my character flaws when I said sharply to her, because I'd had enough, "I'm not saying it's your fault, I'm fully aware of my own actions and I don't blame you for all the things you think I blame you for. I don't have to.  You blame yourself for all those things. Now please shut up. Whatever you're about to say to me, I'm not in the mood to hear it and I'll only resent you for it later."
"You're never in the mood to hear it."
"Well, right now I'm really not in the mood to hear it and Mom, you should recognize, from your fifty years of experience, that sometimes you have to respect that."
We didn't really talk for the next 15 minutes but then started a conversation about something else before spotting Caitie Horan, a girl to be avoided.  We got out of there only to run into her mother, who my mother avoids at all costs, and who had apparently recently become blond.  We acknowledged each other hurriedly and maybe somewhat coldly, and walked faster.

The Last Night of April Vacation

April Vacation passed in a blur and before I knew it, I found myself late Sunday night seriously starting to freak out about having to encounter the general population of my high school again.  I also found myself freaking out because we had to hot water or gas and I had to somehow get clean and wash my hair.  Which I had not been able to do for the last four days.  I wasn't that concerned considering that my mother and I had lived for about a year without heat or hot water.  But we'd had an electric stove.  In this apartment we had a gas one.  Around 11 o'clock I found a hotplate from the basement and it was just before two that I realized it really did not work. My plan to boil water and pour it into the bathtub defeated, I brought in a space heater and turn the bathroom into a mini sauna, so that I would be able to get into the cold water just to cool off.  In theory this seemed like it was going to work but in actuality it was a horrible experience for multiple reasons but also because just as I had gotten in the bathtub I noticed a GIGANTIC spider making its way down the wall.  At that instant, some sort of flying thing appeared to come out of the heater and started hurling itself at the light. In about four inches of 50 degree water I struggled to wash my hair, while keeping one eye on the giant spider and another on the flying beetle (I think).  I remember dunking my head under the water hurriedly and then emerging to realize that the beetle thing was gone.  I searched the murky water.  Then I realized that the beetle was the least of my problems.  I got out of the tub as soon as possible then realized I hadn't washed my face. I was not getting back in there, so I had to wash in the cold water from the sink.  It was after three am before I finally got to go to bed.  Then I had to read something to distract myself to fall asleep.  But I got really caught up in it and so I ended up going to bed at 4:30 to be woken up by the sounds of my mother yelling at my as she burst in my door at 6:47, screaming, "Your gonna be late!"
Needless to say, my day from that point forward did not go very well.

My Youtube Channel

I recieved an odd notification in my email the other day saying someone had subscribed to my youtube channel.  I clicked on the lone subscriber's name (Liam Wade) and had a pleasent surprise:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GZJpcTmE-g&feature=colike

Enjoy!

Dear Ice Cream Truck,

I don't know why you feel the need to suddenly swoop into my neighborhood around 9:45 at night.  I don't think the type of kids your enterprise is targeted at are listening for the faint strains of your music at that time of day. Night.  Evening. In fact, I'm willing to bet a great majority of them may be asleep.  So why are you swinging into my neighborhood with the music blasting from the speaker attached to your roof?  I tell you now, it is unnecessary and leads people to wonder about your motives.  Like what else are you selling?  After dark are the peak business hours yet to come? 

You have done the above mentioned not once, not twice, but all week.  Tonight when you came breezing around corner, you were silent. your music only came on after you had turned onto my street.  Then you parked at the curb and your music stayed on for a few minutes.  Getting used to your patterns as I am, I expected this.  But then the car alarm of the vehicle next to you started going off. Then a few dogs started barking.  Then you started beeping your horn. 

After squinting out my window I determined that a child of around 7 had commandeered your keys and had locked all those of adult influence out of the truck and himself in the truck. A group of people had gathered a little ways away and seemed to be avidly watching two youngish men who were positioned on either side of the truck, at different times yelling and banging on the passenger and driver door/windows. The ice cream truck's music continued to provide the proper soundtrack material.  Then, it seemed as if one of the young men had a novel idea.  He disappeared behind the back of the truck and a moment later the little demon child was snatched out of the front seat and deposited out a door.  The music shut off.  I don't know what happened to the car alarm.  I lost interest.

As momentarily entertaining as that was, will this sort of spectacle be happening a lot? Should I prepare a camcorder next time?  Are you trying to give us all diabetes by inducing massive sugar cravings after 9 o'clock at night?  Will you be doing this all summer and do you carry Hagen-Daz?

Sincerely,
Anonymous Neighbor

Discovering Photo Booth App at School

 The boy next to me kept looking over at me like he was going to say something.  It's because when the picture is taken the whole screen flashes white, alerting the entire room to surreptitious doings.  This is me now, compared to my profile picture which I think is four years old.  I recently cut off over eleven inches of my hair, so it's kinda short now, but I really like it.  Can't really tell how short it is in pictures.

APOLOGIZE?

So the other day in Calculus (a class I am not in, thank God) apparently people had been talking about Sasha (who isn't in that class either) for some reason, and Ben (who is in that class) had burst out with, "I don't care about her, I wish she were dead!" in one of his usual over neurotic fits.  Now, when I heard this my instinctual reaction was, "I second that motion," because, you know, the world would be a better place, but Tessa's (is in that class) first reaction was to go and tell Sasha that he had said this, and Sasha's first reaction was to tell her mother about it. Whatever her mother's first reaction was, it ended with a heated call to Guidance and a demand for some sort of punishment for Ben.  I heard Tessa and Sasha talking about it to each other in Law and their faces were gleeful with the anticipation of punishment for Ben.  Sasha has been heard on many different occasions talking derisively about Ben, how he should be on meds, or in seclusion or something, and her latest kick was that he shouldn't be allowed to take the AP exam with everyone else, that he should be taken into a separate room.  Sasha is too insecure to be of much encouragement to anyone because her main goal in life seems to be to make everyone around her feel dumb, or at least less than she is.  She wants people put in "their place," that way she has less competition, she doesn't really care for what is morally right as long as she is seen as closer to it than everyone else.  Sasha is a cutthroat, self-centered, petty little girl who can't see much beyond the end of her nose and isn't really interested in the lives of people around her as long as they don't pose a threat to her vision of what hers should be (one of entitlement).  Ben is actually highly intelligent and much nicer than Sasha. He has a moral compass and could possibly be a bully to Sasha if he wasn't so preoccupied and concerned with himself.  As it is, he's too neurotic to care about what kind of threat other people would be to him.
After talking to some people, apparently Sasha took what Ben said as a death threat.  Trust me, I know what a death threat is and that wasn't one. None of the death threats I have ever received have sounded like that.  But anyway it seems that now Ben must apologize to Sasha for having voiced his opinion of her while not even in her presence. 
I want to ask Sasha if this means that she has to apologize to Ben and everyone else about all the cruel things she says about them behind their backs on a daily basis.  I am really tempted. 
I feel like I should have a larger sense of entitlement.
I want to find someone, anyone in a position of authority or just tell everyone that no one apologized to me.  
No one apologized to me for all the crap I had to go through last spring. 
No one apologized for the death threats in my voice mail saying the halls would run with my blood, Julienne Therese Fraser didn't apologize for the text messages, the harassment, and the social ostracism, Melisa Butler and her pot-head boyfriend didn't apologize for egging my old house or screaming "everyone hates you" at me when I went running, Brett McManus didn't apologize for starting the whole episode or for coming to my house stoned to interrogate me, neither Tina Halvagian for promising to "mess that girl up in bio tomorrow" on Facebook, and neither did anyone else.  No one apologized for handling the situation so clumsily, no one apologized to me for anything.
And I think I deserve one. I think I deserve an apology from every single one of the people who wronged me, as well as an apology from Brett McManus's mother, Laurie J. McManus, Secretary of the School Committee of Watertown, because out of everyone, I think she should feel the most obligated.

Encounter Explained

I found myself sitting next to Linh in sixth period.  When I sat down I noticed something was wrong with her face, expression-wise.  I asked her if anything was wrong and she said, "Of course not" and flashed me a smile.
I didn't really buy it but went with it enough to exchange a few jokes, but she was still preoccupied.  I felt a flash of annoyance with people who do a sub-par job of holding it together.  Then I told her about what PJ had said to me earlier about really not being able to stand anyone in this school anymore, making it lighter than it had been, laughing, not telling my real reaction to it.  Then I asked her what it had been about, because I felt like she knew something.  She sort of nodded and kind of closed her eyes.  She looked away from me, drew in a breath, looked back at me with a little extra shine in her eyes and said, "Yeah," on a sigh. "So," she continued and told me about how these girls, particularly one named Amanda Natale, have been spreading rumors around that she cheated on PJ, that Meghan Kelly and Krysta Breugger have been saying things.  She talked about how she used to not pay it any mind but lately it's sort of gotten really bad.
I sympathized with her, knowing this was not the full story because she probably didn't have enough self-control to really talk about everything.  I said I thought the very idea of her cheating on PJ was ridiculous because who would she cheat on him with? There aren't really any other good-looking boys around.  I told her that those girls were just jealous because they've been trying to hard to hook a boy into going to prom with them, or going out with them and she's actually going to go to prom with a boyfriend who goes to this school and is actually one of the better-looking, nicer guys. She didn't have to make any real effort, they've been going out for over a year.  I made a joke and sort of swing back in my chair from the little huddle we'd made and to my shock crashed into Emilio.  A full body crash, mind you.  It appeared that Emilio had sort of been trying to listen in and had steadily been getting closer and closer to us as we whispered.  His chair was touching mine, and when i had swung backward my head had hit his.  This was a little bit startling.  We all sort of fell into conversation and ended up not doing any work at all.  It wasn't until later that I thought about what Linh had told me.  PJ had talked to me because in his mind, he'd connected what was happening to Linh right now with what had happened to me last spring.  Oddly enough, this isn't the first time that something like this has happened.  I have been approached a total of five different times from people I didn't know so well or didn't know at all to tell me about bullying going on in all different areas of the school.  It all sort of gives me an off feeling, like why are these people coming to me? They don't know about each other, so why does it seem like I am the common denominator?

Odd Encounter

Innocently writing my English paper when I noticed PJ in the corner of my eye.  He came up next to me in a friendly manner and said, "Hey , Parisa, mind if I use this computer?" I said of course not, he said Linh was taking a test, and I said ohh, and then told him the password to the computer.  He put his stuff down on the desk, and said, still friendly, "And how are you, Parisa?" and I gave some sort of automatic response and directed the question at him for a similar answer.  He had already said more to me than usual.
Then he opened his bag but paused said, "You know, Parisa, -" And I always listen when someone says my name like that because people rarely say it like they mean something, "- I really hate everyone I'm in school with now... I really- ... I really can't stand them." I paused in thinking about Hitchcock and sort of looked at him out of the corner of my eye,  "- I just, I see how selfish they are. Now that I'm a senior, and can distance myself from it all I realize how petty and pointless the drama and everything is... Like now that I'm sort of on the outside," I sort of made an agreeing noise and commented on the sad irony of it, sort of smiling what I think was a bitter sort of smile but I couldn't really hold it back.   He went on with:
"It's like I see how it really is now, how people have this sense of entitlement but they haven't done anything to earn it." He went on on this track for a bit, mostly putting together sentances saying the same things, and I sort of nodded and listened because I could tell that he wanted to say it somehow and he wanted to share it with me.  He had my complete and undivided attention now.  I was looking directly at him.
In my head I think I was laughing a scoffing sort of a laugh.  This whole time he's been standing in front of the desk beside mine. I leaned back in my chair to see him better and he sort of fidgeted.  I said something like "yeah, I know what you mean." But I was also sort of confused because it all sounded strangely apologetic.  I wondered where this was coming from and I think for a minute I dropped the facade of preoccupation and distance I always keep in my eyes.  My real feelings of anger, bittersweet amusement and maybe a little bit of loneliness (becuase it's hard to see things that no one else around you does, to feel aware) showed through.
At the same time I didnt really know what to say.  I knew that although this was a sort of expression of support, it was being expressed in the past tense, meaning the danger, as wimpy people see it, was mostly over.  Or maybe it was prompted by some sort of left-over feelings, new perspective, sense of morality, and a coming of the end of the year when we all would be set free and never have to see each other again. 
Then PJ spotted someone entering the library and sort of perked up.   I heard Linh's voice and he turned to me and said "Actually I'm gonna go over there," zipped up his backpack, and flung in over one shoulder.  We smiled at each other, some something friendly/dismissive then he suddenly turned back and said, "Sorry, Parisa," with a smile over his shoulder. I laughed and said no problem and then for some reason called out thanks. He said something else over his shoulder that I didn't really get and turned the corner.  Altogether he'd said my name about 4 times. It felt odd becuase he'd pronounced it clearly and completely every time.  Teachers usually call me Per - i - sa or Puh-reese, or sort of blend my name together.  Other people in school rarely say my name because most of the people I talk to either don't know it, forgot it, or it's not important.  The people at the lunch table I sometimes sit at don't talk directly to me.  I initiate most of the conversations I have with random classmates so no one ever is trying to get my attention.
I like my name.