"Viking Funeral"

To be published in the 2010 Suffolk Literary Magazine:

"Viking Funeral"

I spent the morning in the bath. The water was warm and warmer and scalding, but the bottom of the tub was stubborn and cold. I sat soaking. My skin pruned as I thought about osmosis and water transfer, as my pupils tightened and dripped like inkblots, watching the water evaporate. I watched the water move into the drain, swirling like a small, ineffective tornado. Forceful and destructive, but with a certain grace. I used to be so intrigued by that when I was small. I still am small.

A life of extremes can be exhausting. Up, down. In, out. Happy, manic. Drunk, sober. Starving, sickly full. Binge, purge; inhale, exhale. Daughter of Bacchus and Dido educated by the muses of lust and tragedy. Busy gal. Falling in love with duality isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be (or so I’m told). No one ever warns you what might happen if and when you actually become a ‘beautiful tragedy’. All that is left is sitting at the finish line only to see that it’s the same earth beyond it as it was before it. Sometimes I’m not sure what is worse: being passionate or passive.

The need for passion and creativity still breathes within me though, no matter how much bath water I try to drown it in. They go on flickering on and off, like a gas stove with a faulty pilot light. Not entirely broken, just in need of an adjustment. I am learning that sometimes the consequences of human destiny are there for a reason.

When I was a kid, my dad used to never let me re-light the pilot light on the stove in our apartment. The one time I did, instead of carefully situating the flame at the opening, I just turned on the gas on and struck a match near the burner.
"That is how you blow yourself up," he said.

it's really cold

it's really cold in my parent's house.

but then again, it's always been really cold in my parent's house. so i don't know why i expected anything to be different.

granted, they started turning on the heat not too long ago.

guess that phase is over.

in reflection, i'm not sure what in this scenario is stranger:

the fact that they stopped turning on the heat just as it actually got really cold out

or

the fact that i now refer to this place as "my parent's house"

Communication and Human Perspective: The Never-Ending Circular Logic Cycle

Human beings are infallible. What’s worse is that human memory is even more than infallible. The issues with being human lie in our inability to see anything beyond what our own two eyes can see, our own two ears can hear, and our own memories can remember. If by some happy chance, one can manage to do all of those things and actually create a memory, the complications are far from over. Humans are trapped in their own perspective, and can’t see everything. Beyond angles and sound waves and the physics of life, the human mind can choose to see certain things over others. But it doesn’t stop there! Human beings understand by relating to previous experiences, so not only do we suffer from our own perspective bias, we also suffer from the bias of those who taught us and everything else we have seen before hand (which we already know is a pretty shaky resource as it is). Then, just as it seems impossible that there could be any more complications to human understanding – language enters the equation.

Language is impossible. We learn words related to symbols and concepts. We are taught to speak by our elders who were in turn, were taught by their elders. When you extrapolate language like that, it comes down to generations of people sharing their experiences via person to person connections. Words really complicate things. Diction in and of itself is problematic, what selection of words I might think describe what I’ve seen perfectly, might not process in another person the same way. My audience’s imagination might not see it the way I see it. In fact, I would wager that largely it doesn’t, unless they come from the same cultural-symbolic background, but even then, the odds are absurd.

So with all that on the plate, seems like humans would have a very hard time communicating, right? Perhaps not. We can still convey ideas and share thoughts and experiences in various forms. Welcome to the birth of art. Seems easy, right? No matter how the facility of art can help or allow for the flow of ideas, expression, and interpretation, it is important to consider (and not forget!), that art is just that. Subjective. It is about what it means to you, the reader, the observer, the audience. (Granted, considering you cannot escape your own perspective it would have to be about you, wouldn’t it?)

Moral Dilemma #2346: Event Tickets and How to Sell Them

Once upon a time if you wanted to sell your event tickets you either a) found a friend who wanted them, b) took out an ad in the newspaper or put up a notice on a community bulletin board, or c) put on a baseball cap, hoodie, and sunglasses and stood outside the venue in front of your black mini-van.

Well, times have changed. The internet - whether we like it or not - has made ticket buying (and reselling) a more horrific form of exploitation than when Nike first stumbled upon Indonesia's "cheap laborer market".

In the internet age, if one is on top of things enough (read: awake or online when tickets first go on sale and with a ready and able finger to hit 'refresh' with) it is incredibly easy to buy several bajillion tickets for which you have no real intent on using and then reselling them to those who actually want to go who you coincidentally dooped out of buying their own from the site. I'm not saying EVERYONE does this, but it seems like more and more people are (I'm not crying the "hard economic times" wolf, but I mean, I could).

Granted, it's not always so extreme. There are still normal, sincere (naive) people out there looking to go to shows. But even then, it is not all sunshine and lollipops. We have all been there. Even now, when I am buying tickets to an event think "I should get at least one extra … I don't know which of my friends wants to go, and if no one ends up wanting to, I can always resell it."

This mentality is worrisome in and of itself, but beyond that, I am brought to my moral dilemma of the day. IF you want to (or in my case, HAVE to) sell your ticket to an event - how much do you charge ?

It is only human (excuse me, I meant American) to want to make a profit here. But the question becomes how MUCH of a profit. At what point is it no longer you trying to make a couple bucks off of some miscarried plans, but you trying to exploit those who you beat out in the game of time ?

I have sold tickets before, and usually I consider the fact that I'm going to have to take time out to go meet the buyer and find wherever they are. It's annoying, and I also take into account that I don't really know who I'm meeting and value my life (read: no serial killers/rapists need apply). I usually tack on $20 to the face value for this ... even though they're usually sort of doing me a karmic favor (waste not, want not, kids !).

Another factor to be accounted for is those darn purchasing fees. Obviously, one has to deal with and reimburse oneself for all those insane surcharges (fee for using bandwidth, fee for being cool enough to have access to "presale", fee for having a registered account on the ticket site, etc, etc) and it's easy to feel like if the major ticket companies are tacking on "convenience fees", well, shouldn't you ?

However, on the flipside of all this; I have also found myself buying resold tickets before. And sadly, I find it hard to report that other people do not seem to have such a moral dilemma with charging me until I am begging my credit card company for mercy so hard my kidneys explode.

So where does the axe fall ?

I find myself unsure of what to do. I have two tickets to a highly anticipated show in a highly accessible city and I find myself wondering do I take the easy road out and make a killing on having my plans to go fall through ? Or do I do what I would want someone to do to me - have mercy and keep it reasonable ?

The choice is almost too hard to make - which really depresses me in the first place. I bought the two tickets - with fees for $56.00. I think if anyone asks, I'll be charging 35.00 each (the little extra to cover my train fees and the time I'll probably take out of work to meet the person) and hope that my postive karma goes out and prospers.