4/28 Writing Exercise: 20-minute creepy stalker story @ Java Supreme
“A PhD in the Sociology of the Internet — what the fuck was I thinking,” Clarissa muttered as she stumbled out of her condo on Valencia and 17th. Red hair ruffled, glasses practically falling off her face, jeans fitting loosely around her waist after weeks of forgetting to eat, Clarissa locked the door and zipped shut her backpack which was spilling out with papers.
The irony was that Clarissa in her own affairs made a concerted effort to avoid the Internet, and technology overall, really. Email, text messages, and instant chat were the bane of her existence. Her research demonstrated that the uses of all these options were far more nuanced than simply providing impersonal alternatives to face-to-face interaction — but she had grown up in a big family with lots of warm, personal affection, and the clicking away in this large but lonely city just wasn’t doing it for her.
After walking a few blocks, Clarissa swung open the door to the neighborhood coffee shop and took a seat in the corner, laying out all her papers. “Water,” she said to herself, “Let me first get some water.” She retrieved a cup from the counter and poured some water for herself, taking a long gulp that included most of the water in the cup before setting it down. “Food,” she said to herself next. She went up to the counter with her pen in her hand, and deliriously pointed the pen up to her face while perusing the menu, causing a few stray marks resembling a beard to appear on her chin. “Healthy, I need to be healthy,” she thought, and she ordered a salad. She paced up and down the aisle behind the counter until the salad was ready, then paid for it and sat back down.
Clarissa sighed, surveying all the materials that lay in front of her. The draft of her dissertation was due in less than a week, and she still had a good 30 pages to go. She retrieved a pencil from her bag to mark up any relevant material and crossed her legs, opening up a periodical about youth and technology. Occasionally taking bites from her salad, she flipped through the entire periodical within five minutes. “Useless,” she concluded, setting the periodical on the corner of the table and taking more bites from the salad.
Tell-Fail Battery
Pleased to have enjoyed an evening replete with intellectual and physical rigor in equal parts, I turn on the heater, cozy up in flannel pajamas, and snuggle up under the sheets with a delirious smile spreading across my lips. I recount specific events of the day and the few days before it, the thoughts shifting and melding into lower and lower levels of coherence.
I am almost asleep when a brief, mechanical shriek interrupts my reverie. Ah, the godforsaken smoke detector. It had sounded earlier in the day, too, and somehow stopped arbitrarily. It just had to make its come-back at this moment, didn’t it?
I turn around and lie on my stomach. I press one ear into the pillow, and attempt stuffing the other ear with my blanket. No use. The chirping is salient, as disconcerting as a pale, blue vulture eye.
I finally click on my lamp and rub my eyes, squinting as they adjust to the light. I get out of bed and swing my desk chair a few feet over. I step on the chair and flip open the smoke detector, facing the failing battery head-on. I ruthlessly snatch it out.
If I am going to get burned, let me do so in oblivion. I would rather not be cautioned too late and in vain, and I would certainly rather not be kept awake with the shrill reminder of my chamber’s diminishing prowess in smoke detection.
A Handy Movement
Zaara was born left-handed. Or maybe she wasn’t, but she just preferred to use her left hand. No, it must be that somewhere in her early childhood she suffered some traumatic event that subconsciously triggered her defiance of right-handedness. Because you see, being right-handed was normal. It was the natural way. There had simply been no other acceptable way in the quaint town of El Derecho.
Still, Zaara for some reason just could not use her right hand the same way she could use her left. Her parents tried to teach her to use her right hand, and would sometimes supervise her while she was eating and doing homework to make sure she didn’t sneak in that sinister left hand. Her teacher would gaze at her disapprovingly, and her classmates would snicker as she used the wrong hand.
One time, she accidentally jabbed her elbow very hard into Jill, the girl that was sitting next to her and writing with the “right” hand.
“You freak!” Jill had growled, “Get that nasty hand away from me.” Jill then requested another seat, which the teacher promptly granted.
After that incident, Zaara was determined to learn to be right-handed. However, she was so upset and preoccupied with this goal that she was not able to concentrate on the actual tasks that needed to be performed with the hand. She started turning her homework in late because she was concentrating more on improving the manual dexterity of her awkward right hand than learning the material.
The children in her class were also unreceptive to her renewed efforts. “Dude, check out the freak trying to write with her right hand like us,” Jay muttered under his breath to Serena.
“Oh my God, what a dork,” Serena replied disgustedly, “Look, her hand is all fluttering. No matter what, she’ll always be a freak.”
When Zaara’s next report card came out, she had a C average, whereas when she had been using her left hand, she had mostly A’s and B’s. Zaara was very depressed; her parents were angry at her performance and her inability to adjust the use of her right hand, and she felt completely alone.
Then Takeshi moved to the neighborhood and joined her class. Takeshi also seemed to be inflicted with this left-handed disease, and the children had a new target. “Zaara and Takeshi, sittin’ in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G!” they would sing to their hearts’ delight.
Putas In the Park
Reena, Deena, and Sheena are all college freshmen, returned to their respective homes in the San Francisco Bay Area for winter break. Veena, Reena’s younger sister by two years, is decorating the Christmas tree as Reena looks on. Reena is waiting for Deena and Sheena to arrive so the three of them can go to Christmas in the Park . Reena and Veena are of South Asian descent, and Deena and Sheena of Southeast Asian, Arab, or Middle Eastern descent.
Scene 1: In Veena and Reena’s Living Room
A doorbell sounds, and then the door is opened; Deena and Sheena enter the living room where Veena is decorating and Reena is occasionally picking up and moving things around.
Veena: Will you just get out of here and go to your stupid Christmas in the Park thing? I want to decorate this my way.
Reena: You’re not even arranging things neatly or trying to make it look nice.
Veena: And since when have you been the poster child for effort?
Reena: Since the day your mama whipped your lazy ass out of her womb and nothing got done right anymore.
Deena: <Walking up into the tree area along with Sheena> Oh my God, you guys are terrible.
Sheena: “Guys”? They both look like women to me.
Deena: <Smiling apologetically> My bad, you women are terrible. “Womyn” with a y.
Sheena: <Smiling> I’m just sayin’… it’s easy to succumb to androcentric norms, especially with language. I’m just trying to be more conscious of it now. How you doing, Veena?
Veena: Not too bad. What about you guys? Um, girls?
Deena: Good, just trying to live up the holiday cheer!
Sheena: By the way, we’re not “girls”; we’ve all gotten our periods. <Smiles and winks>
Reena: Good deal. <Grabbing keys off table> OK, let’s bounce. Later, V. Have fun with your fugly tree decoration.
Deena: <Shaking head as they open door to exit house> You’re terrible.
So Are the Days of Our Lives
It’s weird. When I was younger, a year used to seem like such a long time. And for good reason, I suppose; when I was five, one year was 20% of my life. But now, one year is just under 4% of my life. One day is barely over one hundredth of one percent. Holy shit!
Now why should I feel any sense of responsibility toward a period of my life that constitutes a trifling hundredth of a percent?
And yet, when I look back on these 324 months I have lived, I can say that a cumulative 1% of my life has bore the most significant impact. That one percent did not come in one lump sum, but in bits and pieces: a conversation, a small gesture here and there, a chapter from a book — fractions coming in tenths, hundreds, thousandths, billionths, added together — microscopic golden epiphanies, embroidered into a quilt of giddy, giddy sloth.
I want golden embroidery to equate to more than one percent of my quilt. And yet with each passing day, the quilt helplessly expands, and the same quantity of golden thread that was once one percent is now becoming a smaller and smaller proportion, subsumed into the fabric of complacent inertia.
One hundredth of a percent does matter. Each day should be an indelible thread, and my quilt should radiate extraordinary simplicity.
Dammit.
OK, time for a nap.
Mean Girls
On many occasions in my youth, and, I won’t lie, on some recent occasions, I have sat down with friends to “analyze” other people, to ponder over why they did, said, wore, smoked the things they did. Our comprehensive investigation would always lead to a singular diagnosis: the person was insecure. In particular, if the unsuspecting psychiatric subject was female, there could be no alternative assessment. Check out these perfectly reasoned conclusions:
*She makes out with everyone ’cause she’s insecure.
*She acts all prude ’cause she’s insecure.
*She dresses up and acts like she’s all that ’cause she’s insecure.
*She’s all frumpy and doesn’t give a shit how she looks ’cause she’s insecure.
*She’s all skinny ’cause she has an eating disorder ’cause she’s insecure.
*She’s all fat ’cause she eats all the time ’cause she’s insecure.
*She bases her self-worth on her academic performance ’cause she’s insecure.
*She doesn’t care about school ’cause she’s insecure.
*She has all this attitude ’cause she’s insecure.
*She’s all nice to everyone ’cause she’s insecure.
It would be such a fun and simple activity. It would also have this comforting aspect to it, because the more qualities you could pair off with “insecurity,” especially of people that were very different from you, the lower your own correlation would be. On the other hand, those of us with more masochistic tendencies would gladly lay all of our own cards on the table to be shuffled and dealt into the hands of eager young sadists.
Somehow, we would never get around to having deep-seated conversations about people that possessed confidence in abundance, or in any capacity, for that matter. I’m not sure how I would recognize such a thing. Chances are, it’s not something I would have to worry about- the ostensibly “confident” person would just be frontin’ ’cause they’re insecure.
Cinematic Debut
In the summer of 2001, something possessed me to audition for a role in a zero-budget Hindi-language venture. The casting call had been put out by an aspiring Bollywood director, newly arrived from India and eager to put together this pilot project for Zee TV. I was going to be around Berkeley the whole summer with nothing to do after the 9-5 office space crap, so I figured, might as well see what’s up.
My acting ability, like my drawing ability, is something that only exists when I have some detailed example to bite blatantly. Before going into the audition, I popped in some Madhuri Dixit flick, which at the moment of necessity enabled me to ape the melodramatic lines and accompanying gestures with the greatest of ease. Because of this and the probable reluctance of many an aspiring actor to take up this shady unpaid gig, I landed a role as the “feminist friend” of the female lead.
The story was something along these lines: The male is is this dorky, persistent, but well-meaning guy who comes to an American college from India, and, while walking by McDonald’s, instantly falls in love with the female lead who happens to be passing by; she is American-born with “Indian values” (read: sexually modest, naive, and ultra-forgiving). Ooh, such deep irony in the East-West swap already — can you feel it?!
Now check this: the “feminist friend” is newly moved from Bombay (more irony!!), and, for some reason that the audience is not supposed to sympathize with, dislikes the persistent, bumbling Indian-born guy with pretty much no game. She instead sets the heroine up on a date with a jerk of an American-born Indian cocaine addict, who ends up tricking her into getting drunk (poor girl would never drink alcohol of her own volition, mind you; she thought it was just Coca Cola!) and… sexually assaults her. The heroine is traumatized because she feels responsible for having her “honor” toyed with, so she overdoses on the date rapist’s cocaine and ends up in the hospital. This is when dork man comes to hold her hand and tell her he loves her, and rapist dick also comes to apologize and beg for her not to take legal action. This gets dork incensed and ready to beat him up. However, sweet desi chick forgives rapist dick and tells dork man to leave him alone. Then dork man and forgiving dipshit chick fall in love and live happily ever after.
We shot a couple of scenes in my apartment, and during one such occasion, I thought I’d have a nice two-hour “discussion” with the director over a chai break.
Casual Carpool
I’ve taken the casual carpool about eight times now, and each time I hope to come out of it with a story worth telling. I don’t need anything too drastic to happen, like the driver pulling a knife on me, or having pictures of young boys plastered across his/her glove compartment, or driving into the bridge railing — but a little eccentricity wouldn’t hurt. Maybe the driver could be wearing dark sunglasses and a trenchcoat, and play Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy the Silence” on repeat. Maybe s/he could have a caged tarantula in the back seat. Maybe s/he could at least have a really dirty car.
Nothing. The drivers, and my fellow passengers, have been disappointingly normal.
I suppose I can’t complain, when I myself have not had the audacity to play out the interesting/quirky passenger.
I could bring my own case of CDs, and just thumb through it and help myself to the disc player and radio.
I could bring rose petals in my bag and shower them on the driver throughout the ride.
I could blow some balloons and also bring along streamers and confetti to decorate the car.
I could recline my seat all the way back and start meditating.
I could clutch the dashboard and shriek in fear every few moments, reprimanding the driver for his/her speed even if it is entirely reasonable.
Or, I could just laugh hysterically.
But I don’t.
And hence, alas, I contribute to the uneventfulness of the casual carpool. :\
