But Only In My Dreams...

Last night, I had a dream about Zac Efron. What a nice surprise, especially upon waking up, and how lucky that I was able to remember it. I wonder how many fabulous dreams I have had which have never entered consciousness, but slipped away instead as if they never happened...my own thoughts, realized, but hidden from myself. So. Dreams have always frightened me because they are a glimpse of my renegade mind--compilations of my own thoughts which I view on a trip I have no control over. I like being in control. I don't like seeing what weird things my brain comes up with.

In my dream, Zac lived in Salt Lake City with his parents, in a not very nice house. For some reason, a few friends (sorry--I don't remember who, but probably liz) and I were at his house, not in a creepy fan way but because we were neighbors. I remember thinking that I expected he would be funnier and better looking...isn't that ironic, that my dream downsized him instead of expanding his greatness? Of course, since it was MY dream, he payed especial attention to me, and wanted to drive me home.... I felt a little weird about this--what about Vanessa? Won't she be jealous? A real concern. I also remember something about him having several Nalgene bottles full of beer. Another disappointment. The rest of the dream is a blur that I can only feel and not express in reasonable words or broad daylight. Let me just say that now when I look at his picture, I feel like I am looking at someone I know, having passed an evening with him. May the rest of you only dream of being so fortunate.

Sisters, sisters, ladeedadeedadeedadee sisters...

p.s. the costumes were jane's idea--i am a star and she is mother earth...

Wednesday night is Beginning Modern, down at the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center. I haven’t been to a dance class since I was seven years old, living in my purple leotard, and jumping from mat to mat across the studio at Miss Tad’s cue. At lunch yesterday, my sister Jane tried to psychoanalyze my past for some reason why I stopped dancing. Did someone offend me, had I been embarrassed, was there any event I could remember that pushed me to shin guards and half-time treats? Unfortunately, my memory goes dark—I’ve told all that I know. Purple leotard, Miss Tad, jumping on mats.
Jane and I are two years apart, but we look like twins. When we both lived at home, we always shared a room. First, it was next to mom and dad’s and there was only one bed and two girls and an explosion of dollies and picture books. Then it was the room on the landing that is now the study; the room where the lamp caught my pillow on fire when I fell asleep reading; the room with the bunk beds and the tee-ball stand and the mailbox. I’ve never been to another house where the mailbox burps into a bedroom, which is probably why it became the study. Finally, when we were most childish, we moved into a room in the basement, right on the heels of fresh paint, new carpet, and new matching but separate beds.
Our relationship used to be like a middle school summer reading assignment—it’s something you might enjoy on your own, but the fact that it’s assigned takes away all hope of fun. We were pushed together in everything—bedrooms, after-school programs, birthday party invitations, haircut styles, parent-teacher conferences, piano lessons, you name it. Naturally, we resisted the pressure to merge into one child. We chose our respective worlds, gave up the rest, and minded our own business. I can see now that this happened, but I can’t imagine being aware of it at the time. Jane was master of art; from drawing to crafts to decorating to oils to fashion to dance to sewing to cooking. I latched on to the rules and structure of school, waking up early on Saturdays to do my homework in the fourth grade, and almost unreachable when inside a book, which was most of the time.
Now we live apart. Jane is married, but we still have regular sleepovers—as if we couldn’t break the habit of eighteen years. It’s ridiculous to still live half a life, expecting Jane to compensate, but not being the artistic one has become part of my identity, just as not being the smart one has become part of hers.
Wednesday was a downer day, for no reason but the time of year and the constant forward motion to the year anniversary of mom’s death. Everything depressed me, from a UTA bus at an intersection to the chipping red polish on my toes. I felt like I was stuck in a Salinger novel, preferably Franny & Zooey. That night, Jane stopped at my house after work to recruit me for dance class.
My response to all things dance is immediate and automated. No. No question; no. This time, Jane persisted; she’d pay for the class, she’d promise not to look at me, I could sit out whenever I wanted, and it was a beginner class. Not to mention, it would get me over being depressed, and that was a guarantee. So I went.
I laughed my way through the class, amused by the contortions I forced out of my body instead of the graceful motions I saw in the teacher. I missed steps and got lost in the routines; I stared at myself in the mirrors with fascination, on stage for the first time. But it felt good to move—to really move—and to put the body first instead of words when I had something I needed to say. Maybe someday I will take myself to dance class, but for now I enter Jane’s domain by invitation only.

In Tribute, Part Deux

I, along with many out there, love The Office. Here are my favorite Michael Scott moments from last week.

On agism:

"You can't teach an old dog new tricks...because it's illegal."

On children:

"I have some of my own I plan on having someday."

How true that is.

Feel free to share favorite quotations.

I know, I know, I'm getting ahead of myself, but here are some thoughts on THANKSGIVING

Thanksgiving Day—A day devoted by persons with inflammatory rheumatism to thanking a loving Father that it is not hydrophobia.
-H.L. Mencken

Thanksgiving is the most demanding holiday. Or if you can think of another, bring it forward now. You say Christmas, with its months of preparation, its infiltration into the weeks before and after on your party calendar, its slow consumption of at least one room in your house, its unapologetic ransom on your wallet, its persistent and penetrating stream of music on every station, in every room, under each tongue. Of course, Christmas is the only reasonable contender.
My blue ribbon still goes to Thanksgiving, because there is nothing compulsory about the demands of Christmas. It is demanding because we make it so; it’s just the marketing team behind every large retail company doing their job. Thanksgiving, on the other hand, is a semantic trick. Short of rejecting the holiday entirely, you cannot escape the demands.
There may be those who believe Thanksgiving to be, like many other holidays, only a celebration of a specific historical event—the landmark dinner where Squanto and the Plymouth Pilgrims sat down together to celebrate the efficacy of fish-heads and corn seeds, mutually admiring the other’s moccasins or dainty heels with gold buckles. At least, that is the version I vividly remember learning when I came to fourth grade dressed as a pilgrim and the whole school packed into the cafeteria for a re-enactment feast. Gold buckles and all.
Though Thanksgiving does have a significant origination, it was maintained as a holiday not to commemorate the first Thanksgiving (luckily, since that is an awfully hazy event), but to offer current thanksgiving to God—yes, there is an intended recipient for all this gratitude—for the year’s abundance and harvest. Well, things have changed. I don’t even know what harvest means outside of metaphors and textbook explanations. My aunt, whom I often eat Thanksgiving dinner with, is fond of dinner conversations prompted by questions like, “What riches do you find in your emotional harvest this year?” Or, “Share with us the abundance you find in your life.”
Abundance has always been a relative term, but the qualifications for its use are getting larger and larger. Curse inflation—emotional, material or otherwise. My most memorable Thanksgivings are the two where the day didn’t go as planned. In one case my family ended up eating pizza and cold lima beans in a cafeteria; and in the other, the organic turkey that was so difficult to procure wasn’t ready until 9:00 pm because my mom forgot to turn on the oven. I’d like to say that I rose to the occasions and saw beyond the meal to the “true meaning of the holiday,” but I didn’t. I was annoyed, both times. I had the presence of mind to catch the irony of my irritation, but I didn’t care.
We set ourselves up, don’t we? Celebrating a day of thanks with an elaborate and extensive feast that binds us to the kitchen for days—as though we must create an appropriate abundance to be grateful for. Are we only grateful for the abundant harvests? The excess? This Thanksgiving Day seems to expose the fact that we have removed both God and gratitude from our daily lives; that our lives are so busy we must have a holiday that compels us to focus on where things come from and whose hand they come by. Or perhaps it’s just another day off work and an excuse for a big meal.

In Full

Following is the poem from which I took my signature quotation. Wanted you to be able to read it all--it's awesome!

Writing in the Afterlife

I imagined the atmosphere would be clear,
shot with pristine light,
not this sulfurous haze,
the air ionized as before a thunderstorm.

Many have pictured a river here,
but no one mentioned all the boats,
their benches crowded with naked passengers,
each bent over a writing tablet.

I knew I would not always be a child
with a model train and a model tunnel,
and I knew I would not live forever,
jumping all day through the hoop of myself.

I had heard about the journey to the other side
and the clink of the final coin
in the leather purse of the man holding the oar,
but how could anyone have guessed

that as soon as we arrived
we would be asked to describe this place
and to include as much detail as possible--
not just the water, he insists,

rather the oily, fathomless, rat-happy water,
not simply the shackles, but the rusty,
iron, ankle-shredding shackles--
and that our next assignment would be

to jot down, off the tops of our heads,
our thoughts and feelings about being dead,
not really an assignment,
the man rotating the oar keeps telling us--

think of it more as an exercise, he groans,
think of writing as a process,
a never-ending, infernal process,
and now the boats have become jammed together,

bow against stern, stern locked to bow,
and not a thing is moving, only our diligent pens.

Billy Collins

Correction--I know your father

So I was having a little chat over dinner with the fam and the issues talked about in the last blog post came up and I learned something new. New and quite important. In the last entry, I said something like, "hence the trip back to the drawing board after Satan presented his plan." My bro-in-law Jim told me that there was only one plan presented--God's plan--and there was opposition to that plan (which we call Satan's plan.) There was only ever God's plan. Interesting. Is this a new idea for anyone else?

words and ladeeeda words again

Write what you want, what occurs to you. Be free at the hour of creation. What’s important is the expression. What’s important is to let out the things you want to say, the things that want to come out, either because they hurt too much inside, all these bits of broken glass that cut you, or because they want to be shared, want to be contagious, want to give of themselves. Always be free and defend your liberty with blood and fire.
-Eduardo Galeano

My dad always says about me, “Catherine has never met a rule she didn’t like.” Mostly, he’s right. I feel safe in a black and white world, one with limits and expectations, rubrics and correct answers. You may be wondering, where is such a world? Welcome to my brain. I hope you enjoy your stay.
I can think of a couple examples of black and white worlds in my favorite young adult literature. While I’m talking about it, let it be known that I still prefer the young adult section in the public library. How does one know when she has graduated to the adult section of the library and is graduation ever compulsory?
The first book that comes to mind is The Giver, by Lois Lowry. The town where the book is set is literally black and white. People take pills to suppress their desires, and the rule book for behavior is exhaustive. There is no such thing as doing ‘what you want,’ because there is no concept of want. The Giver exists to contain all of the ambiguity inherent in the world—he is the keeper of memories, of the past, of pain.
Then there is the town of Camazotz in Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. This is a town completely taken by IT, the over-sized brain (which was always repulsive to me as a child) whose pulsing dictates the shadow of evil spreading across the universe. Sounds dramatic, and I suppose it is, being the childish version of the good vs. evil, love conquers all sort of tale. Anyway, the pulse of this brain rules the town too. Balls bounce to it, paper boys throw to it, and business men walk to it. There is no individuality. Happiness does not exist, beyond conforming to the beat.
Moral of the story: black and white, rule-driven worlds are a bad idea. Hence, the trip back to the drawing board after Satan presented his plan. In Camazotz and The Giver, rules functioned to replace choice; they obliviated the emotions that let you know what you want and why.
Being a rule-lover, I have to be careful. I am asking myself now, do I keep rules because I want to keep rules or do I keep rules because they happen to coincide with what I want? I was going to say that obedience for obedience’s sake is silly, just as subversion for subversion’s sake is silly—but I’m not sure. It all depends on where the rules are coming from, doesn’t it? Maybe obedience and subversion should not be set up opposite each other. Maybe a better match for subversion is conformity. There’s another gospel paradox. Conformity that maintains and supports individuality.
I have often heard from people that when in doubt, start obeying the rule just to obey. The desire will come later. This works fine in a gospel context, but I don’t think this is a very good pattern for life in general. (Here I go separating life and the gospel again; shouldn’t they be the same thing? What in the world is a gospel context?) A lot of rules are total crap, and that’s what Galeano is talking about—knowing what you want enough to chuck the rules that don’t suit you. He’s talking about giving up the rules so that you can know what you want.

Vanity, Vanity! All is Vanity!

Well, I've decided to continue posting my own words. I thought I would post some of the stuff I've had to write for my class, and then I thought how vain! To post what I'm writing! I should just write something instead. "Your logic is dizzying." "Wait til I get going!" So here goes, Catherine Curtis as herself, as usual.

Okay. I'm still considering. Because the stuff I write for class is usually quite long. And possibly boring. (Unlike the other things I post, of course. "For Stephanie. Of course." Isn't that a fabulous book inscription..."And for Gilbert." Ahh.) So I guess I will post them, but they will be long and you don't have to read. (Unlike the other things I post, which are required, of course.)
I can say no more.

Transience

I found out yesterday that I've never really known my city. I've lived in Salt Lake my whole twenty-three years and I've always been grateful to have never changed my view.... But you sure miss a lot when you walk the same way to life each morning. Yesterday I changed things up a little, and rode old UTA to school in Provo. Besides the fact that it was a five-hour ordeal (I'm talking actual transit time only), I completely enjoyed myself. I felt like a tourist trying to be a local, feigning ease on the local transportation system while gripping bus schedules and printed itineraries deep in my bag....

Downtown felt a lot more like downtowns I have visited--I saw the commotion of surivival, all across a scale, from bums shuffling from garbage can to garbage can to money-makers rushing to the next big deal. I've had a hard time seeing this from the inside of my car. It's like driving around in a bubble, especially the way I play my music. And the buildings looked more beautiful. I second what Jana B said about what Dorothy said about finding everything in your own backyard. (Didn't Anne Shirley have something to say about that too?) If only I could approach my own home with the same zest and interest as I do those places I travel to, believing in the "infinite suggestiveness of finite things" right outside my door.

Several things I like about public transportation:
-HUGE windows
-a perfect set-up for disguised eavesdropping

-being able to read, sleep, daydream to my heart's content

-not having to even think about traffic
and mostly,
-the way it builds my sense of community.

Seriously, at every stop it is as though the kaleidoscope has been turned and I am on the inside while the picture changes. The doors open and it's all motion; it settles down and the faces are different and the conversations are different. It is strange to sit through so many stops as people come and go, noticing when they get on and when they get off and following them in my mind as they go to their homes and realizing that they each have lives as complete and consuming as mine is to me. Prepare yourselves for an obvious comment: What I am to me, everyone else is to themselves. Profound, eh? I am the master of these sort of awareness moments; I am reminded of the time it occurred to me that there were only two genders in the whole world. You're either one or the other...there's no other option. I was with my Dad at the time, who first said something about the sea horse being genderless, and then mocked me for such a childish observation. Well, sometimes things hit me like a brick dropping out of the sky and it is after that, in my mentally-altered state, that I have these realizations. Really though, everyone is stuck with themselves, doing the best they can with what they've got.

Riding TRAX also reminded me of the old days in Paris on the metro. Strange how quickly things become commonplace (like riding the metro for hours everyday, relying on it to get everywhere) and how quickly they fade from memory. The metro (or TRAX or public transportation in general) really has a lot to teach about human interaction, especially in its unspoken rules. Never look someone across from you in the face if they are looking back. Never bump knees. Never look at the panhandlers. Never smile or acknowledge ridiculous conversations around you. Never look happy. Never look interested in anything. UNLESS someone speaks to you, and then you may, if you want, act like a human being.