I have never/I have always:

I have never wanted to be an astronaut. Earth has always seemed a strange enough place to me, and human beings seem to wreak havoc on the new environments they enter. I am sure that the equilibrium on Mars is doing just fine without our influence. I can’t imagine how it would be possible to maintain satisfying relationships with people if you are an astronaut. I am sure the training is intense and you have to go to space for long periods of time to get anything accomplished (I think at least a month or two). I would have considered space camp as a child—though those advertisements with the smiling kid strapped into that machine that twirls them round and round always looked pretty intimidating to me. When I went to college and struggled in the astronomy classes everyone had told me were really throw-aways for football players, I considered it further confirmation that I should keep my explorations grounded on this planet. Besides, I have a feeling it is too late in life for me to launch a career as an astronaut (he he, launch career, I wonder how many times astronauts make that joke).
I have never known an astronaut. Honestly, the closest I have come is watching Apollo 13, and I really don’t think that counts, and I found it rather boring—Tom Hanks has failed me ever since Big—please, please don’t bring up Sleepless in Seattle. For the love of God. That movie was all well and good until they made You’ve Got Mail. Here’s an interesting question: Can an egregious sequel actually taint the fantastic original work that inspired it? Last night Ros and I were discussing Dirty Dancing (I was saying that I had not watched the movie in at least three years, and felt this was a significant problem. She, of course, agreed). But then, when I mentioned that I was channel surfing the other night, and came across Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights, she got red in the face and said, “Please don’t mention Havana Nights around me.” Fair enough. There are so many examples that come to mind in this vein (Godfather III, Major League II, etc.). Note: I do not put Dirty Dancing and Major League in the same camp as Godfather, and for the sake of this argument it is necessary to mention that Godfather II might very well be the greatest movie sequel of all time.
So how I got on to the sequels debate from thinking about astronauts is a mystery to me. Moving on…
I have never eaten monkey brains. I have never ridden on a motorcycle. I have never had sex in an elevator, though I am not opposed to the idea. I have never scored a goal in a soccer game—I don’t think. Perhaps in a three on three match with a few of my friends, but never in a formal setting. I have never taken heroin. I have never traveled to Asia, though I want to very much, especially Japan and India, and don’t I sound like a kindergartener by talking about Japan and India like they are these small places that you can just go to (ie. much more reasonable to mention specific locations/cities in these countries, but that’s not what’s going on right now).
I have always liked chocolate, though when I was growing up, I was pretty chubby, so it was hard to get my hands on it whenever I wanted it. I figured encountering a Snickers bar was comparable to hitting the jackpot at a slot machine. The only time of year that I really had full access to as much candy as I wanted was Halloween—though I found those miniature sizes frustrating—does this make me utterly American. The bigger is better mindset is so ingrained in me that I am dissatisfied with miniatures? One of the keys to Halloween’s success was that I went trick-or-treating with my friends in their neighborhoods. There was not a whole lot going on in my neighborhood other than big houses. My friend Chelsea, for example, she lived in a real neighborhood where all of the kids congregated on snow days, played kick the can until it got dark in the summer, and formed covert groups to go spy on the haunted house where weird old Mr. Jenkins lived with his mutt Sparky and a collection of shotguns. That’s a neighborhood. People have Fourth of July parties. There’s a boy next door who could potentially sneak into your bedroom through a window.
I have always loved the smell of gasoline. More so when I was younger, but I think saying you like the smell of gasoline carries less stigma when you are a child. I have also always loved the smell of permanent markers, even more so than the Mr. Sketch brand.
I have never worked construction, but in this period of being “between jobs,” I have spent a fair amount of time observing the workers who are somehow manipulating the roof across the street. I am still having a difficult time pinning down their vision, but I suspect I would enjoy construction work because you have something concrete to look at and hold up as finished at the end of the day.
I have always been terrible at origami. I am impatient in many ways when making art. Like I said earlier, I like to have something concrete to hold in my hands, but I want it fairly quickly. But yes, in true contradictory form, I am a slow worker. Or rather, I should be a slow worker because I tend to get sloppy when I try to produce quickly.
Chess has always held this magical feeling for me, like there is something there beyond the pieces, as if through building a chess set you could conjure something, a spirit, a life-force. I almost beat Mikey Teijtel—I was as surprised as he was. I went to the GT school, but was very quiet. I assumed everyone was more intelligent than me. There was this girl Dana Chu, very strange. Everyone else was running around the playground playing soccer or tag, Dana and I strolled around like two crotchety old men, talking about life and relationships. Dana always said I would make a great therapist. No one else has ever told me this, and I think it was a gross misjudgment on the part of her fifth-grade self.
I always liked playing four square though. Here are the rules of four square as I remember them, and you must also keep in mind that the King position has the right to make rules. But the basics. Four people, four squares. The king position, the top left corner, is most powerful, followed by the queen to his left, then the Jack, below her, and then I can’t remember what the fourth, lowest position is called. I want to say asshole, but 1. I don’t think all of the kids I played four square with in fourth grade would have been ok with being relegated to the asshole position and 2. oddly enough, college drinking games have clouded my memory, and yet in some ways, are some of my clearest memories.
So the power descends clockwise in four square. The king serves. In a classic four-square game, you play with a red rubber playground ball—slightly underflated, textured with little squares, makes a satisfying hollow weeeeeeeeeiiiiiirrrrrhhh noise if you punch it hard enough. The red ball can bounce only once in your square before you must do something with it, ie. tap it into someone else’s square. You can’t catch the ball. If it bounces in your square and then flies out of the court, you’re fucked, and if it bounces in your square and then bounces again before you do anything with it, you’re also fucked. So then there are some special techniques and depending on who’s running the kingdom, things can get pretty interesting. You’ve got cherry bombs, waterfalls, bobbles. A cherry bomb is smacking the ball as hard as you can so there’s no way the person who’s square receives the initial bounce will be able to return it to the court within the rules. The waterfall is a type of serve; you drop the ball up from very high so it does a single, low bounce that can be difficult to reach if you’re not anticipating the maneuver. And then there are bus stops, everyone races to get one foot into the center of the court, and corner stops, everyone races to get one foot to the corner of their square. Whoever is last in either scenario loses. I was quite good at four square, and I don’t generally say I’m good at much of anything, as far as I’m aware, particularly when I’m describing myself at that stage of life.
I was pretty manipulative when it came to trading lunch items. Like I said, I was chubby, Hostess didn’t know about the insides of my brown bag, but I knew about its absence. Maybe I was so good at trading lunches because I had more at stake than the other kids. The best arrangement I ever had, which went on for about four months in fifth grade, was with my good friend Lyddie Fitz. Lyddie was skinny and quite a talented soccer player. Her older brother Brian was a genius and he used to construct complicated scavenger hunts for us when I would sleep over. Every night after dinner, Lyddie’s mother would make caramel sauce from scratch and serve it over real coffee ice cream (not fro yo, like at my house). Everyday for lunch, Lyddie’s mother packed her saltines, slices of cheddar cheese, and slices of pepperoni. I managed to trade her my reduced-fat graham crackers everyday for her savory saltine delights. I can’t remember what ended the trading relationship. Perhaps that was around the time I decided I would lose weight. Maybe Lydia’s mother asked her if she was getting sick of the pepperoni (I certainly wasn’t) and Lyddie said, “No, I trade it to Sook everyday at lunch.”
Lyddie’s mother had such a kind face. Dark strawberry blonde hair she held back with tortoise shell headbands, and thick, chunky-stitched sweaters. Usually something cream-colored. Lyddie’s father and mother met at Princeton and I wonder if Lydia ended up at Princeton. Their house had this rustic, French country feel.
Chelsea’s family had something entirely different going on. I could totally see Chelsea’s mother having an affair with her tennis instructor, or something along those lines. But Chelsea always had the best Nintendo games. There were occasional sleepovers where we decided we would beat Super Mario 3, or else not sleep. It seemed such a virtuous and bold ambition at the time.

it's not that i think my life's interesting, but is suspect my perception is.

i went to ikea with my mother the other day. it's like a whole other world over there. all of the furnishings have these weird
(swedish?) porn star names: the pax stordal? sultan hasselback? tindra ljuv? i think little gnomes live in those model spaces they have set up...they hide in the dresser drawers and sneak out at night, all-hopped up on those mini meatballs and fat-free vanilla yogurt (they don't bother with cones, they simply stand beneath the dispenser open-mouthed while one of their friends turns the valve unleashing frozen, swirled crack . then they run through the store chanting, "come on over, the pax stordal is warm!"). i purchased the billy-god save us-a fine book shelf, neutral wood color, relatively simple assembly procedure. unfortunately there were some complications in the execution of said assembly procedure, but, my billy is, nonetheless, functional. i can't feel settled in a place without my books on display:

"I have my books and my poetry to protect me."

-Simon and Garfunkel

i had my books stacked in these haphazard piles all over the living room when i was in L.A. i could never just scan the titles, run my fingers on their spines. it made me anxious (welcome to my ocd lair). i finally got these dark shelves at the salvation army. they were coated in a pollen-like orange dust that got all over my car. but once i got started filling the shelves, it was so satisfying, picking through the piles, reading the back covers, touching the varying textures of all the pages. but i soon realized that many of my books were missing. it's strange. i don't own many movies, but there are definitely films that are very important to me. i am just fine with not owning all of them, although i would not complain if a certain mover and shaker returned MY copy of resivoir dogs and any given sunday. but with books it's different: i feel the need to own the texts that really speak to me. i like to reread my favorite passages when ever i want. look at their covers and think about the different places i curled up to read them. i'm afraid that if i don't have them i will forget, or the click they caused in my brain that left me different will be lost. sometimes it feels like there's a possibility that the prose will evaporate if i don't have a concrete version of it in my possession. can you imagine if you had read lolita and then woke up one day and it was as if the entire book had never existed? the probability of a human being producing words that beautiful is infintesimal. the sentences happen in a given moment. the proper sequence of nuerons fire and BAM! it's like mathematics in a way. when you finally solve the word equation. i like to think about everything that brought nabokov to the moment when he was capable of writing:

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palette to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

i imagine that he had to sleep afterward, spent. i imagine he was exhausted before he even wrote the words, because he had to write through all of the bullshit and throw it away until he could get to this. i wonder if he knew something amazing had just happened.

there's not really anything that floors me as much as words (ok, other than certain people), so i like to have my books.