Jame Is With You All Ways

April 24, 2015 3:16 am Leave a Comment

Well, these are it. Yes, it has come to that time we all knew it would be at last. Even in our jibbliest of days everyone could have told you, yes, it does happen that it will end, but the future was so many from then, and how could you count? It has been so good to be your little Jame all of these years, but even the things of the world we love must come to end. My fellow folks, it is time for even me to bid a doo to the little boys and girls of Yale and bid a hello to the big boys and girls of Rest of Life.

Gradulation is almost here, and it means that I will never be a writer of pages like these in the Yale “Daily” News again. But even though I have filled of my bucket with tears, you, my fellow folks, should only smile at your bucket, for we have here in these very words below one more time together — and this time is to be the time of all! I am to give you now one last words, all of the advises I have learned, so that even as I am to gradulate and say goodbye to these times as I enter Rest of Life, you, my little pudgles, can never have to say goodbye to Jame.

And these they are:

• Be kind of creatures. Once I was going upon the field, and I came upon a little anamal. These anamals, though they may be the teeniest or tiniest, make up all our world and, dare I say, are even just like us. Treat them as you would a close pal or fireman to save your life of a fire. You never know if one of them might even save to yours, like hero dog.

• Fall in love to a woman. As Wise Man said, “You are never to be, if you are not love to me.” That is a word to live by, my friend! If you see of one beautiful flower of them to love, take of her in the arms and do sweet nothing to her ear. Though this has not ever once happen to me, I am recommend it to all of my friends. I am trying.

• Remember a glass is only half empty when it is run out of what makes it to make it full. Always, dear fellow folks, there may find a faucet near by you, and it could be a faucet of friendships, or one hundred dances, or even of life itself. Take of it, put it in your glass or pocket, and drink it up like the biddle boy you maybe were once before at his proverbial mother’s teeps.

• Have of no egrets. Do NOT, as it was, look into your passed as if it were a monster that had chased you all of the days. I myself even have looked into my passed, thinking of things I might had did, or if I had did them, if I had did them too much or wrong or in the wrong orders, or if they hadn’t have been done at all, what may have been done instead? I myself have had egret — I once did see of a little dog and it bited of my hand. But later of the day, as I was healing my wombs, I realized that my greatest egret was egretting too much.

• But most important of every advise I know, it is to be together on the people that you love to you, to hug on to them all of the day and every night. Every single one of us is a person to be seen and heard, just as you would your own mother. Give piece a chance to your enemy and friend and birds of the sky a like. They don’t know what they did to you when they did, and neither even did you! To air is human, and to fly away home with all of friends is the vine. Take them in your body and take of them your own. For, if one isn’t to be laughing and dancing in a field, where are you? Truly, that is of it, the morls of life, to be and be and be again with each other and with the world. If you see a hand in need, then a hand indeed.

I am to go now. Its time to gradulate. To Rest of Life. But don’t you worry about little Jame, I am to be fine. Just know to this: Wherever you go, even if it is in the smallest bushes of the land, Jame is there. If you climb to the tallest mountain or boat on the sea, Jame is there. Even in the midnight of the darkest night, where there is to seem no hopes or dreams, and no man or woman will love to you, and each creature of the land will crawl away from you and you feel that you are not right at all, Jame, little Jame, is still with you. Because Jame loves you. All ways.

10th Middle School Reunion

April 17, 2015 3:27 am Leave a Comment

It’s been 10 years since you aced your final spelling test, but now it’s time to go back. Your 10th Middle School Reunion (only losers go to the fifth) is a time to show that you’ve emerged from your prepubescent cocoon as a magnificent, collegiate butterfly. Tonight is a big night: time to make a good impression.

9:00: Arrive at the party exactly on time, like cool people do.

9:01: At least they’ve rented a nice room in a big convention center. I’ll never forgive my middle school for that eighth grade graduation we spent at Chuck E. Cheez.

9:05: Furiously text the one person I’ve stayed in touch with, reminding him that we agreed to come to this as a joke and he better fucking show up.

9:10: I hear that the sketchy kid who definitely grew up to be a drug dealer is operating a makeshift bar out of his car in the parking lot.

9:10 and 30 seconds: I am in the parking lot at the bar where I do shots with that girl whose foot I stepped on at our eighth grade Winter Formal. Her toenail literally cracked in half. It was gross.

9:15: Notice that none of the people I was friends with in middle school have showed up.

9:20: Shove a generous handful of cheese puffs into my mouth just as that nice cool kid comes up to ask me how I am. I spray a fine mist of orange cheese on his face as I attempt to say that college is pretty fun.

9:21: Back in parking lot. Do more shots.

9:28: Aggressively force my way into a conversation with a group of best friends I almost never spoke to. They’re talking about college so I say the word “Yale” as often as humanly possible and then leave abruptly.

9:36: Someone I don’t remember at all starts a conversation with me. After it becomes clear that I don’t know who they are, I immediately blame living in a bubble of Ivy League Privilege (mentioning Yale again) and excuse myself.

9:41: My soon-to-be-ex-favorite-person from middle school texts me saying that they will definitely not be making it.

9:42: Parking Lot.

9:50: Invade another conversation. Find out that the kid with the lazy eye also turned out gay.

9:52: Start hitting on kid with lazy eye.

9:53: Kid with lazy eye tells me he doesn’t really “go for desperate.” Well played.

9:57: Talking to this kid who clearly doesn’t remember me, but I’m pretending for his sake not to notice.

9:58: Same kid exclaims out of nowhere “Oh, I remember you. You were the kid who fell off the stage at the Christmas Pageant.” After an uncomfortably long pause I say something bizarre like “Gotta keep on keeping on” and stumble away.

10:00: My relationship with parking-lot-bar-guy has truly blossomed. He looks concerned and says, “You’re kind of a mess, aren’t you?” “Takes one to know one,” I respond, and playfully punch his arm before bursting into tears.

10:05: Burst into another conversation that no one wants me to be a part of and yell “I can’t believe I’m getting smashed with the kids from middle school.” At this point I realize everyone else has been sipping their drinks like normal people and I’m the only person who’s drunk. I mutter something about it being performance art and leave.

10:07: The cool kid who used to be mean to me walks in with his insanely gorgeous girlfriend.

10:08: Parking lot with my new buddy.

10:10: Go up to mean cool kid and scream “FUCK YOU!” Then I realize I’m actually talking to his nearly identical twelve-year-old brother, who is tall for his age.

10:15: Mean cool kid’s little brother is my new best friend. After a renewed bout of sobbing, he has agreed to sit down at a table in the corner and listen to me talk about how no one is genuine anymore.

10:17: My new best friend and I have had a falling out.

10:18: Parking lot. Shots.

10:25: Someone asks me how I’m doing. I scream “I’M AT YALE, BITCH.”

10:27: The cheese puffs are literally the best thing I’ve ever tasted.

10:30: They’ve brought out pizza rolls. Nothing else matters because now I have pizza rolls.

10:35: I have single-handedly eaten about a third of the party’s pizza rolls and people are judging.

10:36: Realize that a certain column resembles a stripper pole and I try an impromptu spin but go a little too fast and fly off, landing on ol’ lazy eye.

10:37-10:56: ???

10:57: Mean cool kid (or maybe his little brother, I honestly have no idea) asks me if I’m okay. I blame my behavior on caring TOO much about poverty, then mention that I go to Yale now, and then throw up on his shoes.

11:00: I am escorted away from the reunion knowing that I’ve made quite the impression.

A Genealogy of Solitude

March 27, 2015 3:32 am Leave a Comment

I am going to begin by saying something in poor taste. But I am holding out my hand to you as I say it, and I hope you will trust me.

I don’t much like people. It’s not that we’re too selfish or too boring or too cruel, because how can that be when there’s nothing and no one to compare us to? Rather, it’s that flowers have been kinder to me.

I was told recently that there were no flowers in the age of the dinosaurs. That makes me sad for the dinosaurs, but it also means the world can exist without flowers and therefore can exist without me, who devote myself to them. It frees me to love the flowers without the grandeur of a savior. Although I must admit a bit of disappointment that I am no longer a savior. Disappointment and relief.

I laugh when I think that I might someday be forgotten. The idea that I could keep myself a secret from all of mankind awakens in me a delight in mischief of which I didn’t know I was capable. But the fact that I am keeping myself a secret is also a secret because I still strive to be remembered. So it is even a secret from myself.

Make no mistake: I want to be famous. But even more than being famous, I want to know that I could have been famous but wasn’t. Then my life will have been a magnificent joke. All along I was thought to be just another sleepwalker but that is only because you didn’t see the splendor of my inner kingdoms.

I was about to lie and tell you that I save my best phrases for the flowers so that the world will never hear them, but I couldn’t bear it, I want them to ring in your ears. Anyway, if my joke is to play out, I can’t be aware that it’s happening, and neither can you. So let’s both forget about it.

What I want you to know is this: I am an empty cathedral in search of a congregation — and the song of bells which I feel inside my body is my great call of love. I want to be heard for miles.

But I only know how to be beautiful for the sake of a phrase, not for another person. And even phrases aren’t enough. My writing forgets about me as soon as I put down my pen. When the sun wakes me I am always sad because, though my dreams were populated by splendid beings, my bed is empty except for me. To wake up alone is like waking up to the world after you have died: Everything has gone on without you. Especially when you wake up late in the afternoon, as is my custom.

Ah but I never feel so in love with the world as when I write to it, it is an ecstasy to abandon myself to phrases. I wonder if I am the only one who has visions of a sea of pink peonies? I do not doubt that there are others but I do not know in what quiet rooms they are hiding, all the time telling no one of the splendor of the peonies. Perhaps those whose hearts are most like mine are also those who remain most out of reach.

If you have dreams of pink peonies will you write and tell me so? Or even if you have other strange and wonderful dreams and think from my words that a kinship is possible. Then we can both descend our marble staircases, leave our palaces behind, and meet miles beneath the clouds, speaking unforgettable phrases.

Or am I too delicate to be a human? It is dangerous to speak and be spoken to, the great wings of our emotions thrashing about us as we speak. And the subtler thoughts, too, which flutter lightly about our heads and are so easily crushed if we are not careful. If only we had the delicacy to feel their sacred fluttering against our cheeks.

I have always asked too much of friendship. I have asked my friends to love me when I do not love myself. Although I do love and glorify myself as a writer, I don’t love myself as a person, and it is as a person that I spend most of my time.

As a writer I can say, “I looked out my window by the beach and saw there a sea of pink peonies scattering petals against the shore.” You may find that phrase magnificent or dull, depending on your mood, and your taste in literature, and your inclination towards or against flowers, though if you don’t like flowers I imagine you will have stopped reading by now. If you do find that phrase dull, feel free to exchange it for one you prefer — there are plenty in this essay. Yet to write even the most magnificent sentence is easier for me than to walk down the street and face one thousand nameless eyes.

But I cannot be a writer for more than a few hours at a time. It is exhausting to be whimsical and serious all at once, which I must be, in order to be inspired. I am in pursuit of the intimate and illogical heart of language. Beneath language is the heart of language and in the heart there is nothing but peacocks spreading their plumage. Or something much more luminous but which I do not know how to express, except as peacocks. That is to say, I cannot speak of the heart of language at all, or only in a hermetic phrase. When you look into the heart of language you may not, so to speak, see peacocks. That is not my concern: you will have your own paradisiacal visions.

If you do see peacocks, however, do not forget me. I will be waiting in my quiet room, sitting at my love-letter desk from 1890, surrounded by the scrolls of Qing dynasty poetry I have hung on my wall, and the map of Albany from 1770, and the print of Mount Fuji from the 1980s, and the fairy lights, and my painted mugs from Mexico, and my pillows from France and India, and all my books, young and old, and my perfumes. I am not like a monk despite my solitude—my splendors are as often material as they are spiritual. Often enough, material splendors inspire me unto the spiritual. These artifacts are of so many eras that I may make of them a lineage which roots me to the centuries. It gives me the illusion, at least, that I am part of a grand history. When it comes to emotions it’s the illusion that matters.

But for you this is a feeble illusion and you see through it. Why, you might ask, are you listing your possessions? I must admit I have tried to cultivate a certain sense of elegance; the eclectic elegance of one who knows a story that others do not, one who perceives a harmony invisible to everyone else. If my lineage did reside in a single object, though, wouldn’t it be my fountain pen? I could not have written were it not for the one who, in some distant workshop, crafted this pen from teak and steel; I could not have written were it not for the lumberjack who cut down the tree from which the workman made the pen. So perhaps it would be more honest to write a history not of my disparate possessions but of my pen and ink and paper. Perhaps they are my secret history, and the designer of the pen my true comrade.

But my great-grandfather was a maker of paintbrushes. So perhaps my true lineage does not reside in objects at all, or only obscurely. Perhaps my lineage is in the blood itself and he prefigured my artistry with his paintbrushes.

To return to my subject: I cannot be a writer for very long each day, but I find most conversations dull, or unnecessary. (So that I lie less, I am trying to speak as little as possible. Do not ask me “how are you” because I have learned that most people cannot endure the delicacy of my wings, or their multitude. Intimacy with me is like a swarm of butterflies — an unbearable splendor.)

What, then, is the use of someone like me? I do not know. Do not forget that very few butterflies survive into adulthood. The death of the butterflies is a matter of many more thousands of pages, but I will end my prayer now because I am exhausted and must return to being a person. Amen.

The Real World Comes to Yale

October 31, 2014 3:23 am Leave a Comment

Last week my little sib’s laptop and wallet got stolen straight out of his common room. I don’t know whether it’s within my familial obligations to do anything except console him about it, so I don’t think it’s crossing a line to tell you the story. This is what happened: The suite door was propped open with someone’s shoe, Will was in his room with the door closed, and this guy walked in, grabbed what caught his fancy and strolled out. Will didn’t hear anything, and his roommate was asleep.

I found this flabbergasting. My suite is never locked, primarily because I lost my key in September, and I leave everything in the common room. I’ve never imagined this being a problem. And I’d figured that, worst-case scenario, if someone breaks — or rather, walks — in, I would be able to do something about it if I were in the suite. But I guess this isn’t actually the worst-case scenario. It’s like the guy didn’t even think about it, just felt like walking up some stairs in Bingham and maybe making a couple hundred bucks for his trip, #casual.

I think I’m particularly unsettled because at home, I don’t lock my doors and neither do any of my neighbors. I’d walk into friends’ houses when no one was home to pick up textbooks I’d forgotten, reach into neighbors’ gardens to pick tangerines off their trees, walk through parks alone at midnight at the age of thirteen. My town’s most prevalent crime is bike theft, and I never, ever, lock my bike. I am from Irvine, California, the safest city in America.

That said, I am — OK, I try to be — very conscious of being an Irvinian. There are horror stories of eighteen-year-old children, having never left Irvine in their lives, going off to college in Not Suburbia, USA and getting mugged in broad daylight because they were, like, sitting on the curb and counting their money while talking on their iPhone. I don’t want to be that girl.

There are also the stories we tell, which aren’t horror stories, but imply horrifying things about our upbringing. Like, “Oh my god, I was in Compton this weekend, and there was this black guy walking down the street. I thought I was gonna get mugged, I was so scared!” And the response: “Oh my god, that’s so scary, literally I’m never leaving Irvine, hahaha, I can’t handle the real world, hahaha.” Because it’s really funny to be trapped in a 66-square-mile bubble for your whole life.

As the proud possessors of the safest city title, we guard our position meticulously. Once, my neighbor saw one of her gardeners walking around on our street at night. To my knowledge, in the morning, nothing was missing, or broken, or tagged. The next day she organized a “street watch,” and suggested that we have the adults on the block take turns patrolling Perkins Court each night. Every single night.

It’s the little things like these that make me worry I grew up surrounded by psycho-paranoid adults with no concept of what true safety is. And because of that, I reckon, neither do I. When I decided to go to school in New Haven, of course the first thing my mom did was find a statistic labeling it “the most dangerous city in America.” Of course, I said, “That’s definitely not true and you just think that because we live in Irvine.” But upon arrival, I was made very aware that New Haven is not Irvine. Still, I was determined to prove the statistic’s untruth. I found the fact that campus is locked at night dumb and elitist; I refused to participate in discussions about being sketched out by the Green; I thought the existence of Yale Security was over the top and a little ridiculous. Honestly, the instance of the stolen wallet and computer doesn’t change these sentiments. These things happen, but they don’t mean that New Haven merits the title “most dangerous city in America.” Whether in Irvine or New Haven, there are certain precautions we all need to take in the real world — that’s what makes it real.

A leap from the brink

October 4, 2013 2:44 am Leave a Comment

Most changes happen gradually. A tree grows with the accumulation of years. The seasons change in time with the imperceptible drift of sunrise and sunset. Big, important changes arrive slowly. Over the course of four years, no one will tell you when you are at the single, defining moment of your college experience — or even if that moment exists.

At WEEKEND, however, we are faced with a change that is impossible to ignore. Three new editors: Yanan, a Canadian cat girl; Elaina, a fierce, high-blessed, girl from Alabama; and Jackson, an over-preppy Californian with a penchant for poetry under the influence. Will things suddenly become more real and less vague? Will the lounge, now home to birds and belugas, prosper with its new inhabitants?

Last year’s editors dedicated themselves to a wholehearted renovation of the WEEKEND brand. They dived into daring reporting, gave no quarter to the machinations of the administration and championed both nudity and student activism. They said they were fading, but the thread was strong.

This year, we sit pledged to the changes that our forbearers made. We believe in their causes, and live with the roughness (wot? oatmeal, porridge, slipped) of their language. But for all their greatness, we cannot be the same as they were, and we don’t intend to be.

So here’s to the future — to pitch meetings in the lounge, to Thursday night dance parties, to a redesigned ticker and to interactive doubletrucks. Here’s to checking our bless and naming our baby bamboo. Here’s to whatever comes next.

WEEKEND, as we see it, is set for another round of changes. We’ve proposed some of them already, having made our champagne-soaked pledge to fight for the good of the lounge. As the year draws on, we’ll build our staff of freshmen and sophomores, find new and unexpected voices around campus and refine our own editorial styles.

Still, the precipice exists — the break that will surely exist before and after our tenures as editors. Maybe it’s just the difference between having our names on the masthead. Maybe editors from years past will return to their home and find other differences: rearranged seats, added decorations, conversations held entirely in Chinese.

But there is one good thing to do when you find yourself balanced on the brink-jump. We can’t stay still forever. We have deadline to make, reporters to email and pages to layout in the future. All this is to say that here at WEEKEND we’re not about to deny the future. It’s coming, not just the drift of seasons and the march toward graduation, but the big moments: our first issue, our first time on the masthead, our first (hopefully not fatal) errors on K4.

The future may seem scary, but up in the lounge, we’re perched and ready.

Yale Daily News

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