I can tell what I'm reading by how I write
Idea: Bill Withers plucks a pod from a tree, takes the pod home to his apartment, and nurtures it in a shallow bowl of water until it hatches a human baby, which is me. Bill Withers raises me and I bear witness, though I am very young, to his earliest recording sessions and the beginning of his fame in the music business. Bill is a good and loving father. I am the only one with him when he hears one of his songs played on the radio for the first time.
Idea: My mom dates Ben Gazzara for a brief period in my teens. I am enamored of my mom's wily, handsome boyfriend, but in the end he turns out to be too wily. He steals away the night before my 9th birthday party. The birthday party turns out to be strange. We celebrate at a roller rink then come home to discover that a thousand tiny frogs have descended from the hillside near our house and are covering the street and driveway.
In actuality that 9th birthday party was the last birthday party my father attended before he died, and the episode with the thousand tiny frogs is completely true. In my teens I interpreted the event as significant in some way, as if God had made the event remarkable so I wouldn't forget it. Today that sort of explanation makes little sense to me. I was never religious; I am decidedly atheist now. I remember the frogs and I remember my father. These are two discrete phenomena.
I sometimes think about how many tiny frogs we must have run over with the car as we approached the house, before we understood that they were everywhere.
Phenomenology: In its most basic form, phenomenology attempts to create conditions for the objective study of topics usually regarded as subjective: consciousness and the content of conscious experiences such as judgments, perceptions, and emotions. Although phenomenology seeks to be scientific, it does not attempt to study consciousness from the perspective of clinical psychology or neurology. Instead, it seeks through systematic reflection to determine the essential properties and structures of consciousness and conscious experience.
I would talk like this more but it embarrasses me to try.
Julia Roberts' realization as she acted (being a made-up person) for the first time before a camera manned by her cinematographer husband (being a real person): that what we (actors) do is silly.
Idea: To faithfully recreate a W-2 form and reproduce it over and over, changing one line at a time.
I am constantly reining myself in, softening the edges of my opinions, in order to be polite or to keep a conversation within the limits of comfort. I understand why I do this. But too many concessions like this can accumulate, and don't they eventually amount to a kind of lying?
What I want today is to eat a french dip sandwich at Philippe's and watch House at the New Beverly.
Watched last night: Still Bill; Romy and Michele's High School Reunion. In the latter there is a moment in which Michele reveals that she didn't know she was unpopular in high school until it was pointed out to her. That insular quality to our experiences is what is missing from most high school movies.
I feel like every time I cum in my boyfriend's mouth, a tea party-er dies.
We shouldn't talk about body weight as if it were a fixed thing. Our bodies change; we lose and gain weight; we grow muscular with exercise and soft with rest. We should be able to observe these things about each other without hurt feelings. But I don't live in that world, either.
(1. Wikipedia 2. an episode of Oprah 3. Dan Savage)