Remembering remembering remembering

The day after I turned 20, I bought a notebook at the old Borders on State Street in Chicago.

It was stupidly overpriced—something like $6 for a composition book—but my need for it was desperate.

I was two weeks deep in a summer spent at my parents’ house. The misery was more constant than increasing, so to say it foreshadowed the divorce would be biased, if not false.

Either way, though, I needed, badly, to remind myself of the world outside LaPorte, Ind.—and so I wound up sitting in the window on the second floor of Borders, scratching words into a notebook.

I remember those moments like a snapshot: the protestors on the street below (and the passersby stubbornly ignoring them), the people scanning the shelves that sandwiched me, the tiny handwriting defying my paper’s wide lines—simple, yeah, but bizarrely clear.

The next months, in my head, are exactly the same. I remember that notebook, and everything else I remember only in its context.

To be clear, I journal like a fiend, but never have I treated it like a chronicle or a diary. I record thoughts, feelings, books, ideas, but almost never things that actually happen.

Those things, then—I remember them because I was writing.

I learned once that we remember some events and not others because of the presence of other people. We remember socially, our strongest flashbacks always with a co-star.

If you know me at all though, you know that I am mad introverted and would probably set a building on fire if I don't get enough alone time, a fact that should in theory wipe out a good chunk of memories. But for whatever reason, they’re still there.

My hypothesis? Writing. Well, writing and reading.

Both make my mind shut up, forcing me to feel the blood in my veins and the fact of my breathing—forcing me to remember my often-forgotten aliveness.

And maybe they’re social, too. Both presuppose two people: writer and reader (even if she’s a future self).

The terrifying bit, then? What happens to moments where I didn’t read or write or speak? Do they just vanish, the first to be forgotten?

Mayhap. I remember nothing else of that day in Chicago. I must have taken the train in, eaten lunch somewhere. But all I remember is sitting in that window at Borders, like the rest of the day didn't even happen.

Hell, maybe that’s why I read and write almost obsessively. If all we have of the past are memories, then what happens to a past we forget?

Bitch can't dance

I spent Friday night watching clips of So You Think You Can Dance and crying like a baby.

Sorry to disappoint anyone who might’ve thought my existence was somehow cool. I’m bilingual and play the ukulele and once hitchhiked across the fine country of Denmark, but at heart I’m a playground-visiting, linguistics-researching, goose-bumps-seeking nerd.

(I posit, then, that while cool is ephemeral nonsense, kickass we can attain by, you know, unabashedly liking shit and being nice to people.)

Anyway, in the world of the kickass and nerdy, 9 o’clock (or, perhaps more accurately, “a bottle of champagne in”) on a Friday tends mean being on your stomach watching Youtube videos of competitive dancing TV shows.

Three things should be mentioned here. One, I know absolute dick about dancing; two, I am oddly obsessed with SYTYCD despite never having seen an episode; and three, I am consistently the least graceful of any given group of people.

This was a given from pretty early on — I’m talking glasses at 18 months old — but the more serious consequences of my literal lack of depth perception didn't pop up until a few years later. I was about five and, because God apparently needed a giggle, wound up on a YMCA basketball team.

It was during the first game of my kiddie hoops career that I let a basketball hit me in the face because I lacked the instinct to throw my hands up to block it.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” my father says when he recounts the story. “It was just so…bizarre.”

True life. My dad, by the way, was the coach of that particular basketball team, and he even laughed when it happened.

So no — God no — no dancing for me. Unless, of course, you count my friends making me play DDR so they can laugh at me, something I can’t even be mad about because it’s so genuinely entertaining.

Thank God, though, that the appreciation of dance is something far more innate and carnal than the actual ability to do it. The world’s supply of Melanie Moores is limited, but the number of us stunned to silence upon watching her? How can that not approach 7 billion?

To watch someone dance is to watch something human, as essentially familiar as it is alien.

I watch Melanie Moore and comprehend that the thing creating the beauty — the body — is something I have, too, by simple virtue of my aliveness. Though, on most of us, the body usually is far from awe-inspiring, leaning instead toward wholly unremarkable.

And why shouldn’t it be? Why take heed of something as commonplace as a body? What in a body merits awe?

Those questions become so much less rhetorical when I watch Melanie Moore dance.

My mind and mouth shut up, opting, maybe not by choice, for awe instead of hate.

That’s a body. That’s what I have. That’s what people can do.

Dancing, then, tempts us: Maybe the reality of the commonplace is its potential for beauty.

Writing, to me, is just the same. It’s words. It’s language. And for it we can only thank the fact of our humanity.

But somehow, when the pen is in the right hand, when the right mind strings the words together, it transcends language without ever becoming something else.

Using the ordinary, it creates something that breaks up the sickest illusion of being a grown-up (or, maybe, of being alive): the illusion of the limits of monotony.