Irony, A La The Little Mermaid

My all-time favorite Disney movie is The Little Mermaid. I was seven years old when the movie came out, and at that influential age, Ariel was everything I looked up to.

I can vividly recall my enthusiasm at the idea of putting on my own live action production of the movie - way before Broadway suits came up with the idea. I bought everything from an Ariel nightlight (which glowed eerily) to Little Mermaid sheets to plastic cutlery sets emblazoned with likenesses of the main characters. Something about a story of a brazen young woman who overcomes all obstacles in order to be with her love seemed... well, magical. Her fierce spirit and determination appealed greatly to me. Ariel seemed to be swimming to the beat of her own crustacean band, and even at that tender age, I related to her. She was willing to part with everything she knew (her underwater world) in order to have a future that was well beyond her grasp. She maintained her sense of self, battled obstacles, fought a sea witch, and married her (first?) love, Eric.

Years after watching Ariel become human, I watched the beginning of The Little Mermaid 2.

Now, I'm hoping that I have my facts mixed up, but from what I recall, the plot of the second installment of The Little Mermaid started like this: Ariel and Eric have a daughter (Melody), and said daughter wants to become a mermaid.

That's right folks: Mommy went through all the trouble of disrespecting her father (with the possibility of alienating him indefinitely) AND took the risk of becoming a nasty-looking seawood clump with eyes; Daddy got put under the spell of a sea witch, almost married her, and almost died in the process of figuring it all out. Despite all this, little Melody decides she wants to go back where her mother came from. She decides she wants to live the life her mother didn't fulfill: the life of a mermaid.

Okay, so I'm probably drawing conclusions to things that don't really lend themselves to each other, but this is exactly how my life is right now.

My parents left the Philippines in order to forge a better future in the United States. They left behind family, friends, the entire context in which their lives were understood - and they came here. A few years after they were married, I was born, and five years after that, my brother was born. Things were idyllic for a while.

Or, at least, in the version of this story that I'm imparting now, things were idyllic for a while. (No sense in having only one version of the story anyway.) See, after a while, I grew up, started hanging out with the wrong crowd, and became a "problem child." I stayed out at all hours of the night, had sex, did drugs, yada yada... It's all cliche, right?

The thing is, though, I've never been "stable." I've always yearned for more than what's available. There's a homeless population? An environmental problem? A higher education issue? I became an activist. The family needed someone to take charge? I did it, even though I was too young to really know what I was doing. Were my friends "too ghetto"? I got new friends: ones who couldn't be any more white, or they'd be clear.

I shuffled around people, around lives, around dreams and actions - all because I've never known what it is that I truly want to do with myself. No reality has ever been good enough for me.

But now, the opportunity has arisen to travel to the Philippines, earn a BA in physician's assistance, and simultaneously do activism (teaching English to orphans). I'll be in a tropical climate with my little brother (aka my favorite person in the world). I'll be earning a decent living (in Filipino standards), and getting a degree that has potential for six-digits-of-dollars-earning. I'll be learning more about myself and my family than I've ever known before. And the fact that I'll be in a warm, sunny place makes me think I won't suffer from as many mood swings/melancholic moments as I've been susceptible to in the States.

So in this analogy, I'm Melody. I'm going back to a place my parents left, and ironically, I'll be going there for the same reason they left: I want a better future. I want another option. I want to change my destiny.

Time happened. I loved. I fucked. I lost. I won.

Everything can be summed up in those four verbs, and it makes life feel subjective - like nothing anyone can do is worth dick. We just keep on keeping on, and the best of us happen to learn a thing or two - but communication? That's what keeps us living even after our lungs have collapsed and our hearts have stopped beating and our fists are retreating from the fights that we've fought and the disasters we've wrought and the lies we've bought ourselves into. We trade information and experiences, let our lives flow into each others' footsteps, retrace the paths we've so novicely maneuvered, and deftly control the trembles in our chins that give away our minds' inability to process our realities. Our selves are wholes that are smaller than the sum of their parts. Our present is a future tense achieved by our former selves - people we abandoned in order to become the people we are today. I know this. I'm almost certain I knew a variation of this fact back then.

***

I once watched a documentary about Charles Bukowski. Never had I realized that he spent so much time in front of the typewriter all day, just banging the shit out of it, making sure that some kind of beautiful music came from it. He said that he’d worry later if the piece was any good, if it made any sense. As I’m banging the shit out of my laptop, I have to keep my eyes closed in order to follow his method. Do not look, I tell myself. If I look at the screen I’ll want to change something that can be changed later, after this high of interest has piqued and there’s nothing left to say.

***

The need to get laid is just as valid a sentiment as any other, though some shmuck will probably say that it’s not a valid sentiment and that I shouldn’t say anything like that - especially because I’m a woman and god forbid that I want some guy’s cum all over me, inside of me, suffocating me with its thick, white stickiness. Licking the results of a bukake movie in my bedroom every night is not enough to ensure that my sexual appetite is appeased.

***

It is as if my love for the written word were that for a childhood beau whose arrival I have eagerly awaited with livid hope and breath long bated.

I file away all other priorities and prepare to spend quiet quality time, just we two, alone in a room, figuring out what has been lost and what has been gained during our time apart. I do not hesitate to feel out his body with thirsty hands clamoring to be soaked again in a puddle of our mixed perspiration. I crave no tangible evidence of our union - dreams of a potential future together are enough to satisfy my romantic urges.

Thus, I am swallowed whole by this permanent capacity to continue the act of Love. For making words and making love are the same, and I do not intend to lay down my pen.

***

Life invades the lungs of words whispered between the walls of one’s mind, causing each thought to resound down the echoey corridor of memory to one day splash in a pool of pure purpose and be activated by action.

***

George W. Bush is a man of limited ability put in a position of power. He attempts to decipher his own meager reality while unapologetically staking claim as “Leader of the Free World.” My egotism allows me to empathize.

***

The perfect distance between words and their readers is an amount only distinguishable by quantum physicists and creative geniuses - and only so in the realm populated by no one but their own subjective attitudes and hypothetical realities.

***

My otherwise sharp tongue imprisoned in a dull haze, I articulate my thoughts improperly in several silly turns of phrase.

A Commitment Phobic's First Serious Relationship

I wrote this poem when I was 16 years old. The boy who inspired it is now a man in North Carolina, earning his degree in dentistry. I've performed it maybe 100 times, and on 11/28/07, the words (which I'd committed to memory) finally lost their meaning to me, so I lost them completely, onstage, at Nuyorican. It cost me the lowest score I've ever gotten at a slam.

In retrospect, I realize that this incident was a blessing in disguise. I now write incessantly, and feel more challenged than ever before.

I know you care for me
But, honey, you've gotta bear with me.
See, I know all you've been hearin' 'bout lately
Is stuff about my problems with intimacy
And I know that guys don't typically
Like conversations that start with "We've gotta talk."
But, uh, seriously: We've gotta talk.

You and I both know that, like rivers, we could flow
Massively, unabondonedly, entirely
Down this river of as-ifs and maybes and opportunities
That could lead to something resembling being married
Instead of dating casually.

Yeah, I know that it's only been a couple of weeks
But we talk like we think from the same brain
And it being all the same, writing being a main part of both our games,
I dig the way you read Fitzgerald and think Lifetime TV.
Before I met you, I thought I was the only one who knew
The connection between the Golden Girls and the Great Gatsby.
But seriously: We've gotta talk.

You speak of truth and time and plans
As if they were of the same knife,
Cutting through the layers of confusion
That we pile onto our plates and platters
As if nothing at all matters
But me and you and
Don't you know?
We're setting ourselves up for a fall!
A HUGE fall!
Me, with my commitment issues, and strange sentimentanlity
And mind that borders on the definition of insanity,
And you, eager to go through the motions,
Willing to drink love potions, willing to smooth lotion
On you until everything either becomes perfect or falls through and

Why can't you make up your motherfucking mind?!
Tell me what I'm getting myself into before I up and leave my world behind.
Explain to me the process by which you determine frankness and earnestness and
Please please please have the mind to let me know who the fuck Frank and Earnest are if you insist on spending so much motherfucking time with them!

Don't you know that I am going through the process of falling for you?
That if I allow myself to see myself, in those white, beaded, open-toe shoes, walking down an aisle a million miles away from everything and everything I know,
It could very well happen?
Don't you know that we're approaching the dreaded part in the relationship when everything could very well get "serious"?
Yes! "Serious!" With the dreaded quotation marks!
The kind of serious that denotes long-term but could exist between two passengers of the A train line.
I'm talking about a non-defined, altogether different kind of mentality,
In which our minds coexist and jazz music plays
As people become the way they ought to be
On stage or on TV when the curtain falls or the season ends and
The melodramatic contempo-pop singer belts out a tune I cry to.

I'm talking about the earth-shattering, silently-still, above all EVIL manner in which
We could mend each other.
Come together like twin grains of wood,
Become something so right, so good,
It could only be evil because
What is evil but the total dependence on another?
The complete, undiluted, undivided trust instilled in
Someone other than yourself
With the faith that he or she alone can make or break or shake you to your core?
I'm talking about influence at its most extreme:
I mean, when you whisper, when you scream, whether it be for pain
Or because you're happy,
I'm gonna take the sweetest, innermost heart of me
And spoonfeed it to you because of something bigger than physical attraction or gratitude.
I'm gonna do it because, in this world of lies, you alone are a fact that is true.
Nothing and no one could have prepared me for what I found in you.

And as words of truth and light, words that are wrong and right,
Ooze forth from my lips, and I tell you that I live for your kiss,
And you say you want to be the reason that I exist,
My entire world lifts and elevates, and I resign myself to a different fate
Cuz most guys would think I'm crazy
But you're just the opposite.
It makes me think "Shit. This might really be it."

Why I Call Myself an Honest Con Artist

Seven years ago, I was introduced to the world of slam poetry. This was pre-Def Poetry, pre-Bowery Poetry Club, pre-Me. I was a shell of a person, unable to understand or control my devious chameleon ways. I was an "acceptable opportunist"*, always shape-shifting to fit the role of whatever person best fit a situation. I was equal parts street-smart hustler and book-smart student. I did people wrong, but played their hearts and minds so well that they excused my behavior and let me back into their lives (and their beds). I took advantage of feelings, played people for fools, and felt entitled to my actions; I was, undoubtedly, a shadow without any source of acknowledgement, and in that sad state, I was too pathetic for even ME to care about. It was a circle of conundrums: I was too pitiful for even my own acknowledgment.

Poetry fed into my need to distill my various realities. My rich JAP-y friends were immortalized in funny fluff pieces. My "around the way" girls were placed in syrupy sentimental shit. And everyone else found a spot in my canon of perspectives: the sexually abused high school student, the commitment phobic, the kleptomaniac. There was something so powerful and beautiful in figuring everyone out - and my God complex didn't help matters. I felt like it was my job to figure out everything and everyone. Furthermore, I felt like I had to run that shit as if it were mine to run. It was as if I needed supreme validation: someone had to know that I was that good. That I could keep people in the dark about me, even as they all professed to being my "best friend." I needed people to believe that there was no one above me, and at the same time be conducting myself in a manner contradictory to peoples' beliefs about me. Only then could I truly be said to "own" people. Only then could I really be believed to be the ultimate in anything I did.

The fact is, I was born a fully-formed visionary; I had been born ready to rule the world. True: I hadn't been equipped with a conscience telling me that my natural instinct was correct. No one ever told me to trust my mind or my body. No one ever taught me how to take advantage of a situation without feeling dirty or sinful. No one ever validated the fact that I knew better than most. But I knew instinctively what to do. I knew instinctively how to morph into versions of myself and that would successfully complete specific tasks.

Now, I look back and am aware that I was (am?) an "Honest Con Artist." I had somehow rationalized my actions and beliefs into easily digestable justifications of my id. Without a sense of "Me" I couldn't identify with my actions, and thus was able to do anything. Now, it's like I'm a paleontologist, studying the bare bones of my situation. Who am I? How'd I become this version of myself? And is that version of myself - the present, ever-changing, me - good? Am I a good person?

I strip away the walls which form my boxed-in life, and wonder where in that context is the Me.

Use Your Words - Not Mine

It's 11:30 on a Tuesday morning, and instead of writing papers and getting ready to go to my internship at the English Major's Office, I'm feeling defeated. Deflated. Depressed. Yes, I'm depressed. That unholiest of adjectives within an Asian family. My pseudo-boyfriend-cum-actual-boyfriend, Robert, just left my bedroom, and it's depressing. No - we're depressing.

We entered this relationship as two individuals and now we've succumbed to co-dependency. He's a twenty-six year old who never learned what it's like to be a full-fledged adult; I'm a twenty-three year old who's always known the responsibilities of full-fledged adulthood. Between the two of us, we are children playing dress-up. We "see" better in the dark, with our senses heightened and our awareness keen - and it's a good thing, because our parents have kept us in the dark about a lot of things.

I, for example, am well aware that mail should be checked daily, bills paid on time, and work handled fastidiously. But I don't know why I'm not supposed to like my job. I don't know why I've entered a relationship with a man who does not know how to fulfill my relationship demands. Most of all, I don't know why I fall in love with people who will never learn to take care of me, and who will always need to be taken care of.

Robert, on the other hand, knows how to hold his temper, how to compromise, and how to soothe my agitations. But he doesn't know how to hold down a job. He doesn't have any direction or any motivation to do anything with his life. He doesn't know how not to waste away. Most of all, he doesn't know how to be a fully-functioning, independent adult who is worthy of respect.

So why are we even together? Why are my parents still married after twenty-five years of adultery, betrayal, and bastard children? Why does Robert claim that his parents still love each other, even after they've spent most of his lifetime divorced and battling in court rooms for money? Why is anyone together, for that matter? Or, no: Drop that "why." Is anyone together? Like, really together? The kind of "together" that we grew up fantasizing about?

Or is that kind of coupledom - just like the job that is challenging, well-paid, and fulfilling - nothing more than a fantasy?

What is a couple? What is a job? And what is a blog? The connotations, implications, and definitions of these terms (and maybe every word) fluctuate and are altered by society and time. But right now, sole possession of these words and every other word are my property. The world is mine. In this manic state of writing, I am my megalomaniac self.