A Nun's Tit

So, I’m a huge fan of Avatar: The Last Airbender. (The television show, not the movie adaptation directed by the dismal M. Night Shyamalan, may his name drown forever in ignominy, nor the famous film about blue Indians.) And there’s this one episode I love in book two called “The Guru,” where the show’s protagonist, Aang, learns how to control the avatar state by consulting, you know, a guru. (The avatar state is sort of this special power mode Aang can level up to by channeling the energies of all his past lives, which makes his tattoos glow and gives him super-bending abilities and elongates his penis to ten times its usual size because how else are they going to make beautiful Katara hooking up with this goofy little kid appear at all plausible?) 

The guru suggests that in order to control the avatar state Aang must cleanse the seven portals of energy in his body called chakras. (You may also have heard about chakras if you subscribe to Hindu beliefs or spend a lot of your free time googling rainbows.) Chakras, the guru says, are like connected, swirling pools of water that can become clogged with sludge and gunk comparable to the vicissitudes of mortal life. 

I don’t really believe in energy portals or similar hippy dippy stuff, like auras or chi, but I think they’re a cool concept. Soooo, for fun, I’m going to follow the Guru’s outline and attempt to unblock all my holes, thereupon unleashing the TRUE LIFE CUNT STATE! (The ‘true life state of cuntitude’? HMMM) Yeah, the rest of this blog is going to be boring and personal and all about feelings … but hey, maybe this’ll make my small titty grow to twice its usual size and at last they’ll be even. Chorus: “As has been prophesied!”

The first chakra is the earth chakra, located at the base of the spine, which deals with survival and is blocked by fear. My fears include: climate change, getting cancer, losing a parent before I’m ready, never being kissed … *closes her eyes* I am proud that my fears are realistic (to me, anyway; I suppose everyone’s fears make sense unto themselves), but I also find them vexingly self-interested, and I wish that I were more truly concerned for the well-being of other people.

When I focus, though, I can release my fears pretty easily, so maybe I’m not quite as concerned for myself as I sometimes appear? Maybe I’m just not a person who’s deeply motivated by fear in general?

The second chakra is the water chakra—located in the sacrum (vazgine, genitals, they don’t mention this in the show), deals with pleasure, blocked by guilt. I often feel guilty for imposing my personality on other people—for talking too much, too much about myself, especially when I mess up and say stupid things. In reality, everyone does this (yet probably not as often, nor to the same extent that I do).

A lot of my worst memories are of times when I said a stupid thing I hadn’t really thought through, or said something hard, but which was true, to which another person responded by hating or deserting or castigating me. I feel guilty for everything I could have done better, all the friendships I may have saved, by being smarter about what I said. 

I think part of this folly in me comes from my extroversion. I think by talking out loud; even as I write these words, they are upon my lips. And you know, your first thought about something isn’t always the most intelligent, it isn’t even always what you consider to be ‘what you really think.’ That, combined with my innately and intensely dramatic spirit, has resulted in my saying some pretty dumb fucking sh—gah, I’m supposed to be forgiving myself here.

The third chakra is fire, located in the stomach, deals with willpower. (And to help fuel it, I’m going to have some bananas and sour cream & onion pringles.) Shame is the crud that festers in this chakra. It’s closely linked to guilt, but has to do with offenses against our pride, as opposed to mistakes we couldn’t help but make. I am ashamed for not going to university, for not being a better, more productive, creative writer, for not taking better care of my body—for a lot of things I do not do or have not done, I guess. 

This pond is probably the most infested, mosquitoey, garbage-filled of my sacred spinal river. I have no drive. No … ambition. I’ve been depressed on and off for a long time now, especially in regards to my future. It hadn’t really occurred to me before this that these issues might be rooted in shame. I don’t feel like a proud person, but maybe I used to be and just fucked up so badly that I gave up on everything? No, I believe it’s more complicated than this purification system allows for. Yeah, that’s right, System. You don’t own me. I CAN BE SATISFIED AS A GENTLE UNICORN LOPING THROUGH THE FOREST IF I WANT.

The fourth chakra is the air chakra, residing in the heart, dealing with love, supposedly blocked by grief. Obviously the death of my friend and former lover has been the prevailing source of grief in my life for the past month. I’ve never dealt with a literal death like this before, but I have lost a lot of people. 

For some reason, I don’t really want to talk about all the characters I miss from my life. Instead I want to describe the sunrise I can partially glimpse through the foreground barrier of my curtain and the middle ground barrier of my backyard trees. From this heavily obscured view, the sky looks striped. Gold at the bottom, orange above that, then a kind of fiery, unnatural white, more orange, pink faded to blue above the tree-tops. I’m not usually one for appreciating nature in all its widely extolled majesty, but it really bugs me that my dead friend doesn’t get any more sunrises, or grass, even. Fuck. 

Fifth is the sound chakra—of the throat, as you might imagine. (It’s pretty obvious the direction we’re travelling along the body. Not likely to veer off into the left earlobe.) It deals with truth and is blocked by lies (the ones we tell ourselves, says Gurumastermanyoucan’tevenbendwheredidyoucomefrom). Ugh, how am I supposed to figure out a lie I’ve been telling myself? I really care about the truth, too, this isn’t some bullshit soul searching for the sake of completing bullet point #5.

Maybe … maybe it’s that I have more power than I think I do—power to write, power to leave,  power to challenge my destiny. Pretty sure that certain individuals I shant name (or deign to provide with a gay nickname) are nodding their heads right about now. Shut up. 

Sixth is light, forehead, insight, blocked by illusion and the devil’s pet demon monkey. The greatest illusion of all is the illusion of separation between republicans, democrats, the mainstream media, and international corporations. They are all trying to fuck you in the ass. Like the human centipede, all their bullshit is connected. Everything is connected. 

The last chakra is the thought chakra, located at the crown of the head. It deals with pure cosmic energy and is blocked by earthly attachments. I am deeply attached to my personal narrative, my own story. When I think about dying, it kills me that this character I’ve had a hate/love relationship with for so many years will be gone, for real. No more growth or pain or adventure. I don’t know how to let it go because it’s the only thing that keeps me going at all for so much of the time. But maybe if I could just stop thinking about my life and get out of this storybook mind-set, the pure cosmic energy would flow, and I could be the harry potter avatar. I don’t know. 

As I’ve been reminded by a carriage load of cold shoulders and a market place of malevolent glances, I fucking promised I would blog about the Canada Trip, so that’s what this is. Yeah, they let me into Canada. And yeah, they let me back into the United States.

I mean, I was momentarily halted in my return for trying to sneak an apple into this fat ass country, but I pointed out to them that I also had a twinkie in my bag, to prove I was one of them, and it worked. (All true Americans love stuff with cream inside.)

Why did I go to Canada? The same reasons why most people travel: romance, architecture, and to flee an oppressive circumstance—that of being alone. I went to visit some internet-based friends of mine, who will hereafter be referred to by the following code names (right now I don’t even know if I’m going to mention them again, I just like coming up with names): Gaybarbie, Gaysword, Gayhair, Gaysheep, Gaychips, and Gayhulahoop. (I’m really good at it too, right?)

But before I talk about what happened while I was there, I think I need to talk about what’s happened since I got back. *hides behind curtain of her own hair for twenty minutes while thinking of how to explain* Basically, things have gotten a whole lot lonelier for me than they have been in awhile. One of my friends has stopped talking to me for good (Gaysword), one of my friends is a completely different person to me now and not in an awesome way (Gaybarbie), and one of my friends is dead (someone I regretfully never went to visit in person). All this came to be in two days time. 

Honestly, it’s a lot of friend-loss to take, and I don’t know exactly how I’m dealing with it. I haven’t fallen apart or anything, I don’t think, but I don’t know if that makes me strong, cold, or still in shock. I don’t really have anyone to talk to about it. Most of my remaining friends “don’t know what to say” or “don’t think there’s anything to say,” and I guess I’m inclined to agree with them because I don’t know what to say to myself either, and for some reason I feel really guilty about saying anything at all, like I always say too much or too much that’s stupid. I think this is supposed to be one of those moments when you turn to your family for support, but I have a very difficult time being emotional or honest about who I really am with my family. (They’re good, but crass people. If people can be both good and crass.) And I live with them, so I kind of have to pretend like nothing’s happened anyway.

[Tonight I’ve been listening to a lot of Esther Earl, the girl who served as John Green’s reluctant teenage muse before and after she died of thyroid cancer at age sixteen. More specifically, I’ve been replaying this video of hers a thousand times, which I always do when I really like a video. And that’s why I’m talking about feelings and being all vulnerable and stuff—because she inspires me. And I’m wondering a lot about if she would have liked my blog, and what she would have been like if she never had the cancer, and if she was ever kissed, and if John Green ever kissed her, and how dark is it in my friend’s coffin right now and if the bugs will ever have dinner with him, and when will I die and what will my last words be, and where does the consciousness go when there’s no brain to channel or manifest it, and could I ever be as cool and beautiful and real as Esther Earl when she was only sixteen? Going on seventeen, baby, it’s time to stop thinking about this stuff for awhile.]

It’s like I’m at the end of a long-winded book, and the Trip was in the prologue, and I have to flip back and try to remember what it felt like to be the person who started reading this story two months ago, in a zealously disinfected blue cubicle lit by fluorescent overheads, thinking that losing a couple hundred dollars to that purported Pakistani computer wizard would be the worst thing to happen to me for awhile. But I’ll try.

Things I Learned From The Canada Trip 
(in no particular order)
(and with no particular guarantee of credibility)
(because somehow I got it into my head that this trip should be defined by what I learned)
(certainly I can’t define it by the number of pivotal moments packed with meaning, as the one lifetime moment I was hoping for never happened, and the one that did happen happened after I’d already left Canada—goo goo gjoob) 

1. I don’t mean to blast anyone’s patronizing misconceptions about internet relationships and how fake they’re all supposed to be, but it truly is possible to know people over the internet. (If you spend half your life talking to them, I mean.) When I got to Canada, all I could think was that my friends were exactly the same in person, and all they could tell me in reply was that I was exactly the same too. Nobody was a serial killer, nobody was more than two years older than the age they declared themselves to be online, and nobody was six hundred pounds, although I felt perilously close to it when standing beside my slim, statuesque best friend and hostess on my first ever subway ride. 

This may surprise you with my preface about losing two of the friends I went to visit, but think about what I’m saying. “It was exactly the same.” Meaning that, not only was it no worse, it was no better. Our relationship issues weren’t magically resolved by meeting face to face. Nobody transformed, and I’ll admit that I was hoping to transform a little. This isn’t to say that it wasn’t great being able to touch and observe the physicality of my close pals for the first time. And I think, if any of us had been romantically involved, that element could indeed have been transformative.

2. Ladies&gays, have you never wondered why you rarely see two cute, clever, and cultured guys near the same location in the same lifetime? It’s because they’re all travelling. They lurk in the bus stations and airports and submarine docks and space rocket launchpads of our world, trekking from one obscure combination library and burger hut to the next, littering the highways with broken hearts and empty mountain dew cans. (Not really though, because truly attractive men don’t litter.) 

I was just surprised by the large number of quality guys I met and actually talked to (yeah) during my travels. There was this one bus ride where I sat next to a hot French guy, and I was able to understand some of what he said, and he asked me to make a text he was writing into “good English,” and I did, and I felt nearly half as unjustifiably sophisticated as Sarah Palin at CPAC. (I wrote about it all over my body.)

3. Either travelling is remarkably easy or I have finally become a capable person. I made it to another country and back without a fully fledged cellular device. (That is, my mom’s tracfone stopped working when I crossed the border, and I don’t have an ipod or anything, which is apparently pretty fucking unusual these days.) I feel like I could go anywhere as long as I had somewhere to stay when I got there. And on that note—one day, when I have my own place to offer people, I think it would be really cool to create an underground network of houses across the U.S. that are both free for people to stay at and guaranteed to be safe by some committee or whatever. I know, I could not be more idealistic if I thought things would be the same after the Fire Nation attacked, but.

If I have any practical wisdom (hah) to share with other young people who want to travel, it’s probably: travel light (I took a small backpack patterned with triforces and a medium-sized black duffel-bag); make check-lists (almost forgot my ticket verification number); talk to strangers (but don’t touch them or follow them anywhere); and trust your instincts (mine are more reliable than I thought, it seems).

[Ugh, how can I feel so drained after writing this post when I didn’t say anything of importance or interest or inherent novelty? I’d do better to just talk about what dreams I had last morning than to put any more goddamned opinions or meaningless observations of mine to page.]

I’m almost done, but I mentioned two pivotal moments packed with meaning up there ^ and I should probably explain them, for fear of leaving any mystery about myself to myself. Let’s just say the one that didn’t happen didn’t happen because someone was a coward, you understand? And the one that did happen happened in New York, which was right somehow.