So rather than post another previously published Collegian article, I thought perhaps it was time to enter the real world of blogging. I'm pretty new to this -- I actually googled "how to blog" -- so I'm just going to jump into this head first and see where it takes me.
I guess I'm a bit confused as to what this whole blogging thing is about. I mean, sure, I read my share of Perez Hilton and Obscure Sound, but what do they have in common? So I did a little research. And for anyone who's half as puzzled as myself, here's what I dug up:
Blog= web log. It differs little from an online diary. Wow. Helpful, right?
The Weblog Project offered some information in the form of a video remix:
WEBLOG PROJECT - THE REMIX
But what could I possibly say that has any relevance to the rest of the world? Who would want to read this, anyway? I'll just have to find out...
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So what can you expect from me? To learn how a cynic survives college. To hear rants about anything from TV to politics to my personal life. To get a laugh or two at my expense.
It's after midnight on Friday (Saturday morning?) and I'm still moving into my dorm room, hauling shit in trashbags from my car to my undersized single in Reid Hall. But at least I wasn't ousted from a suite that I obtained with my seniority and tucked away in a dilapidated double room with a Korean exchange student (Sorry Mary!). My ass is exhausted -- and unfortunately not from a night of hard partying -- so I'm off to b-e-d to get a few good hours of sleep.
More later.
-L
Friday, August 22, 2008
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
A Thrift Store-y
There’s something inexplicably thrilling about thrift stores. Among all (well, some) things vintage, with trash-to-treasure tolerance, you search the discarded merchandise in hope of unearthing a signature item or two.
Perhaps my favorite parts of thrift shopping are the things I cannot buy—the memories, the histories. I find myself dreaming up a story behind every object.
Jim Jones’ steel-toed cowboy boots sit on the top shelf among a hundred other pairs of boots. They haven’t been shined since he lost the ranch. After his land was repossessed the family moved from Lincoln County to a suburb outside Omaha. He wore his boots around the house for a while, their jingling haunting every footstep, until all the dirt and dust had worn from their soles and he couldn’t bear to look at them anymore.
She was the most popular girl in school—voted both homecoming and prom queen during her senior year, named by the school yearbook “most likely to succeed” and awarded valedictorian of the graduating class of 1987. Ten years later, with her newborn daughter on her size six hip, she found her purple taffeta prom gown at the back of her closet. She thought to keep it forever, to have it wrapped in airtight plastic and preserved at the back of that closet to remember the days when everyone adored her. The next week she put it in a bag with her matching purple pumps and called to have them taken away.
Everyone knew Elizabeth as Frizzy Lizzie, but he knew her as Beth. And Beth was beautiful when she was with him. He wrote her sonnets praising her milky skin and fiery hair, rubaiyats and villanelles that she kept in a box beneath her bed, and at night, when she combed her unwieldy red hair in front of the mirror, she would read them. Of course, the poems dwindled as quickly as her bank account, and when he disappeared without so much as a limerick the box [and its contents] found itself in the farthest reaches of her attic. In the ‘60s she took to ironing her hair and calling herself Liz.
All little girls must grow up sometime, and at twelve Grace Mary Sanders thought that it was time she put her childhood behind her. After all, in nine months she would be a teenage woman, and she would certainly meet the man of her dreams and fall in love—or at least be a freshman in high school. With tears in her eyes she climbed onto a chair and gathered her collection of dolls from their places on the shelf: first Eliza with her perfect blond hair, Carrie with the pretty flowered dress, Haley with the dimples, Jenna, Margaret, Ashley, Lindsay. She laid them carefully in a basket, side by side, so that none of them fell on top of the others, and she carried them to the Goodwill herself. Some other lucky little girl will get to keep them, Grace Mary Sanders concluded, and she will love them just the same.
John never wanted to be a father—not until he saw his son’s face in the delivery room. Even after he and his wife divorced John fought for custody of little Nicholas, and eventually, he won. Then John got a promotion at work, and though he didn’t love Nicholas any less he wasn’t home enough to watch him grow up. For his fourth birthday, to make up for the last one that he missed, John bought Nicholas a magnificent painted rocking horse. Nicholas loved it; in fact, he refused to get off it, and one evening while John was at work Nicholas rocked himself off his horse and broke his neck. John kept the horse in the attic for ten years, until he remarried, and his new wife convinced him to forgive himself and get rid of the old rocking horse.
A pair of ballet flats, worn and retired with love when the ballerina graduated to toe shoes, were hidden beneath a pile of children’s slippers. There was also, lying on a shelf, that singing fish (you know, the Big Mouth Bass on a plastic plaque) that someone’s uncle got them as a present. Recycling it was the only way for it not to end up on the living room wall—or in the dumpster. An antique china tea set was lost after it had been passed down for generations, displayed next to a mug with a bare-breasted woman on it. Large round glasses lay in a basket with dozens of other discarded pairs, unique only because they were missing a temple and were therefore useless. A Japanese peasant hat made of bamboo was hanging among the women’s Sunday morning church hats and a few baseball caps, painfully conspicuous, perhaps the souvenir of some world traveler with no one to leave his exotic treasures to.
For a moment I feel almost like a thief, borrowing someone else’s memory and making it my own for a handful of pocket change. It is nearly inconceivable that so many lives and moments are able to come together all at once. But here are these treasures, discards and painful reminders heaped one upon the other in endless piles and spilling out from boxes and shelves. I will never truly know the history of the brass clock that I dredged up from a box suspiciously labeled “electronics and such,” but as it sits on my bedside table I am forever conjuring stories of its past, and I feel lucky to have found it.
Perhaps my favorite parts of thrift shopping are the things I cannot buy—the memories, the histories. I find myself dreaming up a story behind every object.
Jim Jones’ steel-toed cowboy boots sit on the top shelf among a hundred other pairs of boots. They haven’t been shined since he lost the ranch. After his land was repossessed the family moved from Lincoln County to a suburb outside Omaha. He wore his boots around the house for a while, their jingling haunting every footstep, until all the dirt and dust had worn from their soles and he couldn’t bear to look at them anymore.
She was the most popular girl in school—voted both homecoming and prom queen during her senior year, named by the school yearbook “most likely to succeed” and awarded valedictorian of the graduating class of 1987. Ten years later, with her newborn daughter on her size six hip, she found her purple taffeta prom gown at the back of her closet. She thought to keep it forever, to have it wrapped in airtight plastic and preserved at the back of that closet to remember the days when everyone adored her. The next week she put it in a bag with her matching purple pumps and called to have them taken away.
Everyone knew Elizabeth as Frizzy Lizzie, but he knew her as Beth. And Beth was beautiful when she was with him. He wrote her sonnets praising her milky skin and fiery hair, rubaiyats and villanelles that she kept in a box beneath her bed, and at night, when she combed her unwieldy red hair in front of the mirror, she would read them. Of course, the poems dwindled as quickly as her bank account, and when he disappeared without so much as a limerick the box [and its contents] found itself in the farthest reaches of her attic. In the ‘60s she took to ironing her hair and calling herself Liz.
All little girls must grow up sometime, and at twelve Grace Mary Sanders thought that it was time she put her childhood behind her. After all, in nine months she would be a teenage woman, and she would certainly meet the man of her dreams and fall in love—or at least be a freshman in high school. With tears in her eyes she climbed onto a chair and gathered her collection of dolls from their places on the shelf: first Eliza with her perfect blond hair, Carrie with the pretty flowered dress, Haley with the dimples, Jenna, Margaret, Ashley, Lindsay. She laid them carefully in a basket, side by side, so that none of them fell on top of the others, and she carried them to the Goodwill herself. Some other lucky little girl will get to keep them, Grace Mary Sanders concluded, and she will love them just the same.
John never wanted to be a father—not until he saw his son’s face in the delivery room. Even after he and his wife divorced John fought for custody of little Nicholas, and eventually, he won. Then John got a promotion at work, and though he didn’t love Nicholas any less he wasn’t home enough to watch him grow up. For his fourth birthday, to make up for the last one that he missed, John bought Nicholas a magnificent painted rocking horse. Nicholas loved it; in fact, he refused to get off it, and one evening while John was at work Nicholas rocked himself off his horse and broke his neck. John kept the horse in the attic for ten years, until he remarried, and his new wife convinced him to forgive himself and get rid of the old rocking horse.
A pair of ballet flats, worn and retired with love when the ballerina graduated to toe shoes, were hidden beneath a pile of children’s slippers. There was also, lying on a shelf, that singing fish (you know, the Big Mouth Bass on a plastic plaque) that someone’s uncle got them as a present. Recycling it was the only way for it not to end up on the living room wall—or in the dumpster. An antique china tea set was lost after it had been passed down for generations, displayed next to a mug with a bare-breasted woman on it. Large round glasses lay in a basket with dozens of other discarded pairs, unique only because they were missing a temple and were therefore useless. A Japanese peasant hat made of bamboo was hanging among the women’s Sunday morning church hats and a few baseball caps, painfully conspicuous, perhaps the souvenir of some world traveler with no one to leave his exotic treasures to.
For a moment I feel almost like a thief, borrowing someone else’s memory and making it my own for a handful of pocket change. It is nearly inconceivable that so many lives and moments are able to come together all at once. But here are these treasures, discards and painful reminders heaped one upon the other in endless piles and spilling out from boxes and shelves. I will never truly know the history of the brass clock that I dredged up from a box suspiciously labeled “electronics and such,” but as it sits on my bedside table I am forever conjuring stories of its past, and I feel lucky to have found it.
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