Lately, I —
some writing, music, pictures, reviews, and other attempts at artistic authenticity
The Vibe Recently, A Playlist:
I am writing a short story backwards and this is the last paragraph [Spoilers!]:
This is a happy ending. A happy happy ending. The end. Because the conflict is resolved and the story is now over and I’m living happily ever after. Thank you. The end. No. That cannot be. “Happy ending” is an oxymoron. For the phrase implies that happiness is ending. But being happy should be forever because that is the rule for how stories should resolve — happily ever after, forever and ever. Maybe “resolution” is not actually synonymous with “ending.” But, still, the book closes. The story runs out of words. To you, I am happy forever, because that is where you left off — the resolution. And if being happy is what is remembered, then that is what is true. For story is memory and memory is history and history is fact and fact is a thing that is known or proven to be true. I live happily ever after. Now, reader, go about your day. Finish your day. Change into pajamas. Set aside your glasses. Kiss your partner on the cheek. Turn off the lights. Sleep. Start over. Live many days. Remember: I live happily ever after. Then, keep on living. Lead a full life, with ups and downs and twists and turns. Maybe, you are lucky enough to live happily ever after too. Then what? You die. But don’t worry, your happy kids go on to tell happy stories about you, and me. Because, you did tell them about me — right? Good. We get to keep on being happy. Your kids grow up and are happy and they die. Then what? What happens to me then? Tell me. For what is a happy ending if happiness, existence, ends with us? What really happens to me? Tell me. Is it happy?
A Critique of Grammar Rules:
A Cover Art Analysis by an Unqualified Art Critic:
Cage the Elephant’s second live album Unpeeled is graced by some of my favorite cover art. It depicts a woman, whose tongue is reaching down towards a sliced blood orange that is positioned on top of a knife. Above her, a blue translucent hand, dripping in metallic liquid reaches down towards the same fruit. The image saturation and shadows are enhanced, drawing attention to both the orange and the woman’s eyes. Yet, the image is offset, skewed to the bottom left corner of the album and bordered by lighter beige. The dark, borderline seductive, image is packaged and cornered, creating a contrast that forces you to examine it even closer. Upon doing so, you notice that the woman’s hair grazes just past her bare shoulders and that the orange slice has a delicate hole that’s perfectly centered. It’s the perfect image to pin onto bedroom walls and print onto overpriced tee shirts. It’s edgy and indie and intimate — almost dangerously so. The point is, it’s a perfect album cover. Especially for a live Cage the Elephant record. It captures how, when performed live, the songs are vulnerable, raw and alluring. The vocals, like the cover art, like the bare shoulder, like the sliced orange and the sharp contrast of light and dark are: Unpeeled.
Some Things I am Currently Enjoying:
- “The New Yorker: Fiction” and “The New Yorker: The Writer’s Voice”— A podcast.
- The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
- Poetry by Stephen Dunn. My favorites are “The Sacred,” “Story” and “Emptiness”
- The Hirshhorn Museum’s exhibit on Laurie Anderson.
- My blue acrylic nails that make it hard to grip a pencil, forcing me to slow down while I write.
- Pineapple and Sweet Potato Fries (as two separate things)
- Walks by the docks at dusk//mildly judging people based on the kind of dog they own.
I shoved my ill fitting retainer into my mouth. And other things I attempted just to feel something:
I shoved my ill-fitting retainer into my mouth. The one I “forgot” to wear every night for the last year, forcing myself to feel guilt in the form of pain, for wasting the money my parents poured into orthodontics. Trading pain for beauty, the straight teeth boys can potentially see if they come close enough to my lips. God forbid boys see any imperfections. Imperfections: I must feel them. Feel what it is to live and not be perfect. I submitted an unfinished assignment rather than asking for allowed extensions, reconciling the notion that I am not a timely student. I walked to class in Wisconsin winters without a coat: feeling the cold that comes with overconfidence. I dialed my dad’s phone number from the bathroom floor, hanging up after it rang once. Feeling the shaky vulnerability as I try to call to say — I miss you. I’m homesick — I’m living out his dream. I type out texts to friends, give up, and write this poem. Feeling loneliness. Feeling alone. For what is art if not fueled by longing — to love, to belong, to crave more. And what are wannabe artists if not pretentious, self denying masochists?
I shoved my ill-fitting retainer into my mouth in the name of feeling, in the name of art. In the name of trying to profit from feeling as if other people do not feel feelings too. And nobody once asked me to do any of this.
I am writing ANOTHER short story backwards and this is the second to last paragraph [Spoilers!]:
It was at this point I realized that I had fallen in love with her, seen her, seen through her, and then grown weary of her. That’s how these sorts of stories always go. The story that is life. Where we go around loving and living so recklessly that we always mistake seeing for believing and then have to work to then see through all the false beliefs. Where we grow weary of that struggle and then give up on it all entirely. Because that’s what falling out of love really is — it’s giving up on belief, it’s opening your eyes.
I saw a small child, wearing those little rubber lined goggle glasses — with the clasp in the back — and:
I realized that small children, under age five, with glasses always make me a little sad because I think of how long it took anybody to realize that the child needed glasses in the first place. How until that moment of realization, as the child was growing and learning, it could not see clearly — how it could not properly see reality. How it was learning it all wrong: the world was soft and blurry instead of angled and sharp. How unprepared that child would be. And how learning to navigate the world without reality, clarity, is such a scary and dangerous notion.
But not too dangerous. Because the child has glasses. Somebody had noticed. Perhaps a parent or preschool teacher; regardless, there is hope in knowing that someone noticed the child could not see and then helped them too. To help them slowly adjust them to the truth and then rubber line it. To clasp clarity on each morning and take it off each night so the child could still dream, still float off to things soft and blurry.
But I then start to think of the children whose parents work two shifts or have an overworked preschool teacher or the plethora of other imaginable situations where nobody can help the child finally see clearly. I wonder: how many small children cannot see the world for what it is? How many tether on the edge of something dangerous? This makes me even sadder.
And as I wallow in this sadness it soon turns to envy because — with my glasses, as an adult, I do see the world clearly — but not clearly enough to notice all the children who need glasses, painfully conscious of my own inadequacy.
The clasp at the back of my head is stuck — I know too much, I know I need glasses to see, I know what I see without them is wrong.
I take them off anyways, from time to time. When I’m in someone’s passenger seat, in the safety of my own bed, or — right now — when I’m people-watching in the park — yearning to be a child but not be treated like one, yearning to tether on the edge of something dangerous without seeing consequences.
I watch the blurry outline of a small child, wearing those little rubber lined goggle glasses — with the clasp in the back — and I close my eyes.
Someone Asked Me What I Wanted From My Life:
And I haven’t got the slightest clue. How I once said my favorite color was blue at age twelve and then stuck to it. How my favorite songs have not changed in eight years. How disliking nothing somehow became synonymous with enjoying everything. How enjoyment is now monotonous. How I love people so hard that I accidentally lose myself to them. And how the problem might be less about these other people and more in the method I go about loving them. And how that method is a composition of life.
It’s seeing flowers and thinking of my mother, texting her pictures of azaleas and geraniums and peonies. Only wearing lilac perfume because it reminds me of her garden. Teaching myself names and variants, learning how florals fare in both direct and indirect sunlight. Painting my thumb green each morning, letting my paint stain my skin, matching hers.
Similar to how I see my little sister whenever I hear the saxophone. How I listen to jazz whenever I miss her. How I listen to jazz all of the time. The way I conditioned myself to like the taste of tea when I was previously indifferent. How each flavor now corresponds to a specific place and person. How I now have a bad habit of overfilling teacups to the brim — greedy for warmth, drinking four cups a day. Or how, in the seventh grade, I met a girl who I don’t talk to anymore. But this girl wrote her “A’s” the way a typewriter does. Arched and pointed, with a little loop. Like the tiny letter “D” with the stick bent down, hugging the enclosed section. How I began to mimic my handwriting to match hers — the arched loop, the pointed tail. My writing slow and shaky, at thirteen, like a small child’s. We were learning.
In high school, I wrote somebody a letter, my heart and handwriting on display. They noted how they preferred the normal way of handwriting the letter “A’s” — it’s easier to read. Wanting to be read, analyzed, and understood — I switched back. Trading typewritten for an oval with a tail. How I noticed last week, at age twenty, that I write my name, Ria Dhingra, with two letter A’s. On my official government signature each A is written differently. One looped with a tail. The other mimicking the print of a print. There’s some symbolism for you.
So when someone asks me what I want from my life, what I want to be when I grow up: I say I want to love and be loved. I want to be known as well as I think I know others — I want to know what it is I must know about myself and then know it. To see flowers and first be able to decide if they’re beautiful or not. To know which ones are my favorite colors on impulse. To hear music and truly listen to it, to hear sound and not see memories. To decide if I actually like tea.
When I grow up, I want to write my name without thinking about how I should write it. To know myself before making myself available to be loved by others.
Some Other Writings/Publications From The Past Semester:
And Another Playlist. Because, Why Not?:
Stay lovely.
Some Pictures:
