nebulous

last night, we fell asleep to what he called improv gamelan pinging against my windowpane. this morning i woke to the purring of his uberaffectionate cat above my head, feeling him erect against me, snoring, wanting to linger, languid, wrap him cozily and groggily around me for the rest of the day, but she had to get to school and, well, this job. arizona or nyc, he asked, would i be willing to relocate to either, he imagined not, but what kind of dodgy, quasi-meaningful question is that? he said no reason, just wondering, just thought he'd ask. sometimes i need to be the drill on pi boring into his brain, extracting the mystical compound that makes him say his characteristic unexpected, unelaborated bits. this morning he told her to have a good day and hugged her while he thanked her for her note of two days ago, the note that rocked my world. she loves him. and i need an impenetrable bubble, a masters of the universe forcefield to suddenly descend, for everyone's sake.
today is one of reckoning. i'm trying not to anticipate. i'm trying not to care. he said he'd come back to be there for the results. another unexpected sweetness. blue line or no, the sun will rise tomorrow. i can't get swallowed by possibility. and tonight will be an interesting 20 minutes of insight into her academic and social persona, which could be fulfilling or devastating. again, wonder is worthless.
michael jackson. is anyone shocked? all that should be remarkable is that it's taken this long. ten years and how many boys after the first accusation..................every time i think of him, i can't shake the image of her first sighting, his face, moldy with fearsome facial hair, mangled from too much scalpel sculpting, filling the front page of a tabloid in the grocery store. so vivid: her gasping, pointing, wide-eyed, what IS that? he is some piece of work.
eminem. generally, i'm quite the fan. i love his '97 bonnie and clyde, superman, stan. he elicits some lovely controversy and, although he plays it for all it's worth, there is something to be said for that. and no one can dispute the fact that his lyrics, brimming with double, triple, quadruple entendres (however offensive), are pure brilliance. although i find the recently released lyrics from his less talented past nothing short of utterly abhorrent, there's a sympathetic twinge. lord knows i've done some shameful things.
we're supposed to have so much of it, shame. sex is supposed to be shameful and secretive. we're supposed to blush at lascivious remarks. we're supposed to abide by the cultural spectrum of acceptable behaviors and attitudes and attire. women are supposed to be coy, quiet, captive sexual beings. not loudly roar, not come like freight trains, not post personal ads overtly requesting males interested in lengthy, mindblowing cunnilingus. outrageous expressions are supposed to be shameful. we are supposed to walk on eggshells, careful not to piss anyone off, careful not to trod on any special interest groups. the prism of instilled shame twists according to special interest group, but it's all essentially the same: shame for eating animals, shame for wearing wool, shame for asian fetishes, shame for voting republican, shame for being too leftist with waist-length dreads and little career direction, shame for the extra ten pounds, shame for superficially trying to shed them, shame for being assertive or unkind, shame for being too submissive, shame for wanting to fuck your boss, shame for doing it, shame for driving the six blocks to work, shame for laughing at racial humor, shame for wrinkles and gray hair, shame for drinking too heavily, dancing too provocatively, laughing too hysterically, needing too desperately.
but what if everyone were shameless?
must be a middle ground somewhere.
she did a lovely job this morning, but scrambled to keep up with them as they ran over with notions of masochism and alcoholism and sexism: the boys talked loudly about booze and porn while the girls talked more somberly about appreciating physical pain. she was not where they were and she didn't know how to get there, so she squelched them, new topic, because she didn't know how to help them. i thought maybe that i could. i thought maybe what they really needed was not a bulging book full of curricula specifically designed to heighten their life satisfaction. maybe they just need someone to listen. maybe they just need someone to care, someone who won't freak out when their ideas seem askew, someone who will just listen and accept them for who they are: fourteen and trying to find a foothold.
knocked up needs to be completed. knocked up needs to be more powerful. knocked up needs to scream loudly to the world. and it needs a male counterpart, which might be the next project. observing these kids, for all their obnoxious ways, for all their feeble attempts to be revered by their peers, for all their disgruntled rejection of education, might prove a more useful tool than i'd thought.