theology&geometry

When the Japan quake and tsunami hit, I started thinking about two Japanese girls I used to be pen pals with in grade school. Girls? Yikes. They’d be old ladies like I am now. I couldn’t conjure up the name of one of the girls, but the other’s name has stuck with me my whole life: Hitomi Imanaka. I remember the stationery she’d use when she wrote me: It was etched with one of those quintessentially Japanese androgynous smiling cartoon characters, and shellacked with stickers. Her English was rough (my Japanese was nonexistent) and her handwriting was shaky with large counters and bowls — very deliberate. I don’t remember what we wrote each other about, but if I had to guess: Pets, television, movies, school. I have her letters somewhere. I hope, as I continue my spring cleaning, I’ll run across them.

I searched Facebook and found a Hitomi Imanaka. I sent her a message, asking if she was my pen pal from ages ago. I mostly wanted to ask her where she lived and if she was okay.

It wasn’t the same girl.

I don’t remember how I heard about them but I was in high school, trying to scavenge for what bits of cool I could (I wore Walmart knockoffs of Airwalks until I could weasel my way into a real pair) when I heard about the Toadies. One day I found myself with my grandmother at the Old Hickory Mall in Jackson, in Camelot Music (which is now FYE, I think), with Rubberneck in hand, heading for the checkout counter. My grandmother looked at the album and the song names and asked me what kind of music that was.

I came from a household where Hells Bells was required viewing and Depeche Mode’s Violator had been summarily removed from my sister’s tape deck and destroyed because it contained a song called “Personal Jesus.” And Aerosmith, despite my dad having loooved that band as a teenager/young adult, was frowned upon in all its iterations.

So I told Grandmaw, while skimming the band thank-yous in the liner notes and pointing out that they had given thanks to a pastor, “They’re some kind of Christian band, see?”

Here it is, more than 12 years later, and I still love this album like the first day I heard it. I find it impossible to listen to Rubberneck‘s songs without thrashing about a bit. Visual aid:

So help me Jeeeeesus from Lindsey Turner on Vimeo.

I am having a super productive run lately. Got several commissioned photography projects I’m working on — including my first official Etsy sale! — that are keeping me occupied. I’m putting new and interesting things in the ground thanks to saraclark, and I can’t wait to see them shine next spring and summer. I am seeing more of my friends these past few days than I have in the past half year. I am behind on phone calls and finding the urge to write but not the time. October has almost gotten out from under me and I’ve not yet visited a single haunted place in this city, as was my intention at the end of September. I don’t know when I’d do it, or with whom. Any takers? I need to feel the goosebumps of Halloween every year or else I don’t quite start the steady coast into the festiveness of Thanksgiving and beyond. Superstitious, maybe. I just have high expectations for the last quarter of the year, that’s all, and a spooky October is my lucky gameday sock, so to speak.

This time last year I was waiting to close on my house, and stressing out to high heaven about it. Work was insanely busy (and has been this week, oddly enough) and I was run ragged by last-minute loan finagling and the notion that everything I had been working for could crumble at any second in part because I had lost my wallet and license on a road trip. Dumb. I see that I posted a Promise Ring video this time last year, too. How weird is that? Incredibly weird. Who’s running this show, anyway, and why do I even bother trying to control it?

This October has had its moments of pure humiliating suckitude but so far it’s been markedly better than 2009′s October, which eventually put me in the ER with some crazy allergic reaction that kept me out of work for a week with an ongoing migraine and hive outbreaks. I am lucky that nothing has ever put me down like that before or since, but it still freaks me out to think that my body can break down like that under just the weight of mental pressure. I have to remember that I have limits. And I have to learn how to respect those limits because they will kick my ass if I don’t.

Anyway, back to editing photos. I can’t wait to share some from my photoshoot with Jerm and Krissi and Piper at the Botanic Gardens. It feels nice to feel like I’m learning and growing as a photographer and artist, but it also feels really nice to be able to help people capture moments in their lives that they will cherish forever. I’m pleased with how things are going lately.

Sometimes I wish I could get back the outlook on life I had when this album was spinning nonstop in my car in high school. I thought I had things figured out. That was a long, long time before I realized that I will never have much of anything figured out. Anything.

The oldest nephew is a sophomore in high school (eeeep!) and is a band kid, just like his dear ol’ auntie. He plays the tenors, and gets to do the intro to the cool new cadence. I always wanted to play percussion but I lack the ability to wail on objects with any sense of rhythm. I find it deliciously bitchin’ that both my brother and my nephew have drum-related talent.

Friday night the fella and I hauled ass to Hardin County to catch a home football game so I could see Casey perform in the halftime show. The band’s show this year is Beatles themed, and while I am not the biggest Beatles fan who ever ironically traversed a crosswalk, I thought it was fun. (For the record, I tend to prefer highly funk-based field shows that involve lots of inappropriate dancing and maybe even some shouting.) The kids sounded great. The mellophones wailed like antelopes, just like old times. I wanted more oomph out of my beloved trombone section, naturally. There were at least a dozen of them; they should have melted my earwax with their sound. But then again, my band directors always had a hard time getting a big sound out of little ol’ modest me. Which kind of blows my mind now. If I played an instrument in 2010, you’d be hard pressed to ever get me to drop below forte. Truth.

I’m proud of Casey. My parents give him a hard time for sleeping late and being lazy and sort of flighty and teenagery, but when he’s in his element, he is on point. I hope he keeps it up. Fun sidenote: During the band’s third-quarter rest period, I spied him schmoozing with a cute girl named Paige. They were all laughing and joking and taking cell phone pictures of themselves together, and it was adorable. The youngest nephew made sure to stay around them and bug the everloving shit out of them (is it wrong to use the term “cockblock” when talking about your youngish nephews? yes, yes I think it is), so I got a good kick out of that. They are growing up too damned fast for my taste but it’s fun to watch it happen.

This is the one family heirloom that my sister and I might actually eventually fight over. We have always called it “the umbrella chair,” but I think it’s actually called a canopy chair. This chair always kept a prominent spot in my mother’s mother’s house (trailer) while I was growing up. Snagging a spot in this chair during family gatherings was always a tough job, as everyone always wanted to sit in it. Its red velour and tiny little brown thatched roof were like a big ol’ retro hug. I want that in my house some day, even though the upholstery needs a major overhaul. This thing has been sitting in my parents’ loft for years, sadly neglected.

Frown.

Also, if the title of this post puts a song in your head, then I hope that means you loved the show as much as I did when I was a kid.

Sometimes it’s 11 p.m. and the boy you’re smitten with emerges from the office, where he’s been studying, and says, “Want to go for a drive?” because he’s got to run some fancy magic juice through his gas tank so he can pass his emissions test in the morning. And that is how you will find yourself going east, east, east, and telling him to drive you past your very first Memphis apartment, which gives you an excuse to talk about your life many lives ago when things were so vastly different from the way they are now. And that is how you will find yourself going even further east and getting a tour of his first apartment complex, whose story doesn’t have an ideal ending, but which rough drafts do? And that is how you will find yourself wandering aimlessly through the aisles of the fanciest Kroger you’ve ever seen and consenting to the purchase of discounted black-forest cheesecake that you will later declare gross. And that is how you will find yourself on the interstate, heading South toward Graceland, and then Mississippi, and then Tunica, where you will be utterly confused and overwhelmed and amazed at the amount of ancient people in wheelchairs pushing blinking buttons in a smoke-stale, very loud, brightly carpeted room at 2 in the morning. And that is how you will squander $30 playing games you don’t understand but win back $20 at video Blackjack, your remaining $10 nestled safely in the belly of a game called — fittingly — “Miss Kitty.” And that, as you are walking sleepily through the parking lot back to the car, whose gas gauge has managed to nearly stay put despite all the traveling, is when you will hold that boy’s hand and hope that he is having as much fun on the adventure as you are.

I remember that peach jogging suit. I was 10 or 11. I was doing the tango with puberty. It was an ugly, lumpy time.

I have been up all night scanning old photos with the new fancy scanner that doesn’t even need me to draw boundaries around photos before saving them. IT JUST KNOWSSS!!! Technology is the best.

A metric crapload of what I uploaded tonight got transfered to Flickr and Facebook; blame the booze and my need to recall and connect elements from my past to my present to reassure me that this crazy life is one long sequence and not just fits and starts. I am having a more-than-quarter-life crisis this week and can be forgiven a giant photodump, ya heard?

While digging through old photos today to scan into the new scanner I recently introduced to my other electronics (they are getting along swimmingly for now), I found a photo of the boys in my fifth-grade class, their names labeled on the back. And I remembered I went to school with an Elvis. Try and figure out which kid is named after the King:

Click the picture to be taken to Flickr to see the answer.

Last weekend I traveled to my hometown to reunite with two of my very oldest friends, Tamara and Crystal. We were thick as thieves in high school (with bouts of adolescent spattiness throughout our friendships, of course), and then went our separate ways after graduation. Tamara and I — with the exception of some months of no communication because we are sometimes stubborn, foolish girls — have mostly kept in constant contact, but I lost touch with Crystal. The three of us got together in Alabama back in … 2003? My memory is bad. But that was the last time we all hung out. Until last weekend.

I’d like to be able to say it was just like old times, and I guess in some ways it was, but it was incredible how much we all had changed. And not just the way we’d changed, but the ways in which the very worlds around us had changed and changed us. Our families have expanded and contracted, often simultaneously. We’ve had to confront the mortality and vulnerability of our parents and our own bodies. We are no longer invincible, and we know it.

It is always so interesting getting with your oldest friends and telling old stories. They remember what I’ve forgotten and I remember what they don’t. Except some things they remember seem so improbable to me (Crystal said she remembered being at my house the night Princess Diana was killed, and how we’d spent time at my grandmother’s house, trying to sneak cigarettes; I would have DIED of stress overload trying to smoke around my house or my grandmother’s house), and really prove that memories are just stories we console ourselves with. What I think I know about myself — or anyone else — is not necessarily what’s true. (Yes, please do insert “what is truth?” tangent here.)

Crystal brought along another of our classmates, Tim, who showed us pictures and video on his phone of his two kids. These are not tiny baby children; he is a proud pop of a little girl who is old enough to know all the dance moves to some popular song I’ve never heard but who is still too naive to realize her dad is making a video of her on his phone that will embarrass her for the rest of her life, if he thinks to put it on a disc. It is not quite right to think of anyone I went to school with as being in charge of anyone else’s tiny life, but as I coast into my thirties (and Facebookstalk everyone from HCHS who friends me), I’m willing to bet that my and Tamara’s and Crystal’s childfree status puts us firmly in the minority. I’m taking bets on which one of us will end up knocked up first.

“Are y’all going to the reunion?” Crystal asked us. Without hesitation, a chorus of “uh, no” erupted from all mouths in the room. Although, I’ll admit, I’m conflicted. There are some people I really would like to catch up with. I do still get a little sick to my stomach when I think about high school, but I wonder if I’ve not grown up enough to be over most of that by now. It wasn’t all that bad, was it? I imagine the sickness I feel is actually shame over how I acted in high school. I was a wet blanket — a stone-faced high-horsin’ bitch a lot of the time, partially as a function of what was back then clearly some serious social anxiety. I’m terrified that I will never be forgiven for that, the way that I still have not quite forgiven some people for being who they were in high school too.

Whew. High school. What a country.

I want to get up to Buffalo to visit Tamara this winter. Yes, that’s insane, I know. But that’s when I’ll have time off and, well, winter is just around the corner, don’t you know, and if I am going to truly experience her chosen home for its charms, I think in the middle of a backbreaking snow storm would be the perfect way to do it. I hope the manfriend isn’t sick of me by then, so we can both go and he can go see his beloved Bills lose in person. Heh.