Webster Hall

I had a very cool day today. I went into the city and met up with my cousins to go to lunch at this little Polish place. My cousin's husband mentioned that we were near Webster Hall, which I hadn't heard of. He told us that his grandfather used to own Webster Hall, so we walked over to see it. There was a guy dressed in black jeans and a black button down shirt smoking on the steps outside. He asked if we had any questions, and my cousin's husband told him about his grandfather. The guy, Gerard, asked us if we wanted to go inside. He ended up giving us a tour around the whole thing, which was really, really cool. We walked in, and there was a band setting up on stage. It was pretty dark in there, and all of the walls and floors were wooden. The walls were old looking and kind of peeling a little, although it looked like it was supposed to be that way. Gerard introduced us to this band, and then he took us upstairs. On the side of the staircase, there was a photo shoot going on of this really tall, gorgeous girl dressed in amazing clothes. He showed us around the other four rooms in the place. They were all really big and beautiful and Gerard seemed to know a lot. He was an interesting guy. He told us that he wants to change his title from manager to curator or creative director. He was telling us about all of the people who performed there. He showed us a stage where Harry Connick Jr. performed two weeks ago. Lady Gaga performed there New Year's Eve.
I looked it up on Wikipedia which says that other bands that have performed there are:
Nine Inch Nails, Tiësto, Bright Eyes, The Roots, Elbow (band), John Mayer, Rhett Miller, Beth Orton, Sonic Youth, Sleater-Kinney, Pink, The Jesus And Mary Chain, +44, The Bravery, Brian Jonestown Massacre, Mogwai, Spoon, Rollins Band, John Butler Trio, Explosions in the Sky, The Flaming Lips, Dispatch, Linkin Park, Green Day, Infected Mushroom, DeVotchKa, Lady GaGa, Mew, AKB48, Dr. Dog, Modest Mouse, Usher, Evanescence, Joss Stone, Good Charlotte, Linkin Park, Nelly, Duran Duran, Franz Ferdinand, Alicia Keys, Prince, and The Hives.
It also serves as a recording studio. Julie Andrews, Harry Belafonte, Tony Bennett, Ray Charles, Peter Nero, Perry Como, Elvis Presley, and Frank Sinatra all recorded there.
AND.. it also has art shows. Gerard showed us some paintings from the last person who had their art on display and hadn't came to pick it up yet. According to wikipedia, Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Stella have both been to Webster Hall.
It was by far the coolest thing I've ever done with my family. My cousin asked how much it would cost to have the whole thing for a night, and he said a quarter million dollars. My cousin' husband told us he had his bar mitzvah there, for free, of course, being that it was owned by his grandfather. Thanks to the picture phone, I got to take some pictures, so here are a few. Some really good ones I didn't get because my nine year old cousin kept jumping in front of the camera.

Just Checking In

I was in Florida this week. I didn't like it. It wasn't warm. The most exciting conversation I had was with a parrot named Murphy that just said "hewwo". Having lived in the same place for my whole life, getting home from a week away felt the same as getting home from school. And although I didn't much enjoy Florida, I'm not exactly thrilled to be coming home to school again. It wasn't so bad, I guess. It's just that we stayed on this creepy little island with nothing to do but "look at nature", and all the old people rode their bikes everywhere and rung their little bells when they rode by.
Anyway, I kept up with my poem a day although most of them weren't much to be proud of. Discipline first, though, and I did them all. Tonight will be the eighteenth. I'm finding that with writing them, even though I sometimes don't like what I get, it always seems to say to me what I wanted it to. I think it happens that way because I tend to do them kind of backwards. I think of how I want my poem to feel, and then I try to convey it. There must be more than one way it can be for it to feel like it's what I meant to do. If it comes out the way I wanted it to, I should like it and think it's good, but sometimes I don't.

Daily Practice

I'm really liking this daily practice thing. I narrowed mine down to a poem a day. It's certainty; if I write a poem a day, in a year, I'll have written 365 poems. That's all there is to it. It will be that way, and the only way it won't is if I don't write a poem every day. I find that I'm hardly resenting my new obligation; I actually look forward to it. It's a break from homework, it's better than watching TV, and I genuinely enjoy doing it. I honestly didn't expect it to be that way. What's keeping me going is how excited I'll be in a year, writing Day 365 at the top of my page. I'm even excited to write Day 15. Anyway, here I am on Day 4 and already feeling a hell of a lot better than I felt a week ago. Here's poem numero 4.

February decided to stay a while, so we
adjusted to salting the frozen rain
on the doorstep. Crunchy grass began our
days. Our down-filled coats never made it back
to the closet. I knew that if you called
to me, the hot water must be done, and if your
guitar was away when I walked
in the door, you had heard me
coming. Your words sounded like
footsteps upstairs. You walked like you
were facing the wind. The radiator
covered midnight silence. I'd fall asleep
aware of the light
in the bathroom where you shaved your graying
beard.

Core Values & Issues

Values:
Certainty, the inevitable
Things that exist vs. things that don't
Empathy

Issues:
Fact vs. opinion/belief
religion
selfishness
knowing or understanding a person
influence

Enneagram Test

The test said I was a 5w4, then a 4w5, then a 5w6, so I must be mostly 5. I hope that doesn't mean I'm too much of a pain in the ass. "The language of emotion is not their native tongue". Well, that's not good. I don't know how I feel about this test. I do tend to come off as emotionless, and that impression is indeed very wrong. It's true that I never ask anyone for help; I usually assume that no one cares to deal with my problems. I'm not great with relationships. I can talk to people pretty easily, but I'm not good at joining in on big groups of people who already know each other. When I do talk to people who I don't usually talk to or haven't spoken to in a while, I have to be a little different. I don't lie about my opinions or anything, but something is different about me. I feel like I behave differently around every different person I know. The test said that the people I have relationships with are usually lifelong friends. I don't know; I think I have a lot of relationships with people who I have no intention of keeping around forever. I can make small talk; I just don't like to.
I definitely am a thinker. I think a lot because I'm alone a lot. I'm alone all the time. If I'm not talking and no one is talking to me, I think as if I'm alone. Being a typically quiet person, that's a lot of thinking. I was talking to Luke the other day about words and things that can't be put into words. Sometimes I think so much that one of those things comes up and then everything kind of goes into a black hole because there are concepts that I just can't understand. I don't know if I think more than anyone else, but it sure seems abnormal. I know everyone's always thinking. My thinking makes me tired. It makes me want to bang my head on something. I have to read to shut myself up. I think about thinking. I notice patterns in my thinking. Thinking makes me sad. I argue with myself. I whisper "shut up" to myself so my voice can drown out my thoughts. It makes me lonely. I think so much that I forget to fall asleep.
Fear of inadequacy: true.
This test is a little too accurate. I don't like the idea that everybody can be put into a category and there's only nine. It makes people seem sort of boring. I guess I just don't like being told what I am. Are these numbers permanent? Not that any one number is better than the other (or maybe it is), but I'm wondering if you can go from one to another. And if we control which number we are.

Artist Statement

I've been thinking about today a ton and this is what I have. I'm not going to explain the values yet because I'm not sure that they're right and I need to think about them a little more.

Values:
Certainty, the inevitable
things that exist vs. things that don't exist- Actually, I'm pretty sure about this one. Last year I wrote a story about a man's relationship with his imaginary friend (which really represented a number of things). And I realized that the poem I posted just last week had a line about colors that don't exist.
routine

Issues:
Fact vs. opinion/belief- I had down religion, but I figure it ties into this. I don't believe in god; in fact, I'm sure that there isn't one. Not only do I believe in every corner of my mind that there is no god, I hold it as fact. Still, there are people who know that there is a god. They don't just believe it, they know it. These two blatant opposites are facts. They are as opposite as life and death, but to somebody, each is a fact.
Selfishness: I'm hung up on the idea that everything that everybody does is for themselves, no matter how generous. A person who spends years volunteering to build houses for tsunami victims or Hurricane Katrina victims or starts a charity fund for Darfur or Haiti or anything along these lines is doing it solely for themselves. The furthest I've ever been from selfishness is when my grandpa died and what made me saddest was that his best friend couldn't go to the supermarket where everyone thought they were brothers every morning anymore. They had done it every morning for fifty years. But even that was selfish; that was a part of me, of my identity. I was no longer someone who had a grandpa who went to the supermarket every morning with his best friend where everyone thought they were brothers. That couldn't be a part of me anymore.
Knowing/understanding a person: Mainly a family member. There is so much to everybody. How can we possibly know a quarter of a person's life and true personality when we're so caught up in our own lives? A parent can love their child without even knowing them. Yes, parents may know their children more than the children can understand, but if we don't understand ourselves, how can anybody else? And why is it just common knowledge that your family knows you better than anyone else? Do you have to love your family?

STAC Live

Just after ninth period on Friday when we were still in the auditorium, some kid who was sitting directly behind us said to his friend, "Yo, we should join STAC". The friend said, "Am I gay?" Then they laughed because it was just the funniest thing since the atomic bomb. I turned around and gave them my "are you serious?" look. One kid was like, "Sorry." I told him not to apologize, just that if they came to insult us, not to sit right behind us. The idiot goes "Don't worry. I'll join STAC".
I wasn't offended. I haven't cared what people like that think about me for a while. I guess I pride myself on that. I was going to write that I couldn't believe how ignorant people could be, but then I realized that I could believe it very easily and that's what makes me sad. "Don't worry. I'll join STAC." Is that really what he got out of what I said? So I put myself in his position. We all play different roles. We are different people depending on who we're with, right? I'm thinking now about what we did at the community center when we became our characters. We do that every day, don't we? We believe we are the person that we project onto people around us. Maybe that's what the kid was doing. When he comes to school every day, he is a character. He tilts his hat to the side and is ready for action. He sees his friends and his character has sunk in. He sneers at anything and everything that he can possibly place himself above on the social hierarchy. He starts his sentences with "Yo". So when he came to STAC Live, he stayed in character. I'm not saying that secretly he loved it and went home and built a secret shrine to it in his closet, but maybe if he hadn't spent years creating and sinking into this character of his, he would have had a more open mind. At least I'm going to tell myself this because it makes me very sad that there are people who can't peer outside the norm and see that it's okay to like something that isn't drugs, alcohol, 50 cent, or not using their brains.
Rather than being offended by these kids, I was genuinely proud. I hate knowing something (STAC is full of smart, creative people, for example) and knowing that there are tons of people who will never believe you. It's like having a ghost follow you around. Why even try to convince anyone it's there? As much as I hate it, I thought, at least I'm one of the ones who knows. I had never felt more proud to be in STAC, not even the day I opened the acceptance letter. I was also proud of my ability to tell these kids off, or at least let them know I heard and make them look kind of stupid. Incredibly, I used to be even more of a nervous wreck than I am now. I'm in the two major groups of outcasts in school, STAC and track. Both are called gay cults. For some reason, I'm able to stand up for these groups when I hear stupid remarks. A couple of years ago, I would probably laugh along. I know that trying to change people's opinions is a useless effort, so I don't try to. I just pride myself on my new found ability to be a mirror to people being stupid. Last week, this nice kid trying to do his homework was being bullied by these kids who I've known since kindergarten and who I know to be idiots. Last year, during cross country season, my team ran past them during a warm up. As we ran by, they yelled "Fags" and laughed. As I ran that day, I planned out what I would have said to them and came up with a nice little comeback. I still know it by heart. And I hated that I hadn't said it. This time, the first thing that came to me was "What the hell are you doing? You're going to rot in guido hell", so I said it. They were kind of speechless (Like I said, I couldn't always do that). Then they apologized to the kid and walked away and started being stupid again. You can hardly change a person, but you can make them ashamed of themselves. It's more about me, though. They're kids who I've hated for most of my life, and I, a STACie and trackie had just put them in their place.
This is going to be then end of my venting about anti-STAC feelings. It's not really worth acknowledging, although I just spent a while acknowledging it. I just hope that if anybody is actually bothered by the people who hate us or pretend to hate us because it's the cool thing, they can take my mentality. At least we know that STAC is good. At least we're the ones who know.