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PianoMarn
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Name: Marnie
Birthday: 2/10/1989
Gender: Female
Interests: Playing piano,The Beatles, COUNTING CROWS, Flogging Molly, Jamie Cullum, Five for Fighting, Goo Goo Dolls, Green Day, Train, Sister Hazel, American English, theatre (seeing it and doing it), drums(haha I suck at them), traveling, reading, being a skeptic, and all that jazz.
Expertise: Obsessing over things that probably bug all my friends. Adam Duritz, anyone?
Occupation: Retired
Industry: Art
Message: message me
AIM:  PianoMarn
Member Since:
9/25/2004
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| So, did you know that the final Harry Potter movie came out Friday?
You may have heard this, if you have an affinity for tracking 476-million-dollar ventures.
I was there among the ranks at 12:01 a.m. Friday morning, uncostumed but poster-clutching and giddy all the same; however, this time around more than any other (and believe me when I say I know a thing or two about midnight wizardry), I detected something newly palpable at a Harry Potter event: a thick and heavy sadness before the reel had even begun.
This, as we all know, is it. Even when the final book served as a perfectly poignant cap to our high school years (and, consequently, our childhood), the world was still abuzz with all that was yet to come: four movies still, at least, to console us in our withdrawal and allay our potential misery. For the moment, we were sated.
Flash forward through a cluster of college years where Rowling's thick hardcover volumes perhaps didn't find space on our dorm room shelves. We still showed up en masse to be the first to critique Radcliffe's interpretation of our unmatched hero, even though a trimester schedule pitted this veritable pop culture monolith most inconveniently against final exams. We still held this world close to us, because it, for over a decade, has been the one we've had an open invitation to build. We've assumed the very image of our best loved characters, seen the construction of a wizarding Florida facsimile. We've tasted chocolate frogs. Maintained the guilt or innocence of Snape with the fiery passion of a Hollywoodized courtroom. We have openly admitted our tears, because we know they solidify this world we know. It is a place whose losses are mourned, and legitimately so: I'll have known Sirius Black longer than anyone I eventually marry, for example, and would consider myself a sub-par parent if I didn't raise a child to believe all this, too.
Which brings me to my original point: that Friday morning sadness, all costumed and waiting. Mural-sized posters were plastered on every wall of the theatre, heralding the final film's declarative tagline:
IT ALL ENDS 7.15.11
And that's true. We're at the bitter end of something, a 14-year-something, our global and whimsical immersion. We have constructed a world of our own enthusiasm, a world where a book, our book, becomes the language and the camaraderie we've known longer than any other. When this ends, we are mournful -- not merely for ourselves, but for the knowledge that no one hereafter will know what we know. That our children will never learn this grand lesson in deferred gratification, because everything they wish to discover about an orphaned boy under a Little Whinging staircase will already be at their fingertips. None of this will come to them by way of midnight.
It's something, to know how lucky we are. But at the end of it all, it turns out that we do have one more thing to anticipate: the perpetuation of this phenomenon, with all our original euphoria. The task of passing the world of Harry Potter down, and outward, and on.
“Tell me one last thing,” said Harry. “Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?”
“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”
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| I'm in a new city. I've been told it's a mile high, and I have no reason to disbelieve that.
To be fair, I've spent 36 hours here before now, but given that the bulk of that day-and-a-half was spent inside fast food chains and a pulmonary hospital, I'd like to count my time at the Denver Publishing Institute as my first foray into a place where I've counted more instances of something called "Good Times" than I have McDonalds'.
A few first impressions, since I'm only here for a month and need to amass all the impressions I can:
*Everyone, everyone, everyone has a dog here. I expect that, in a place of such tolerable sunshine, a pet is just one more excuse to be outside as much as possible.
*Blue Moon is bottled in Golden, Colorado, and thus tastes all the more orange-y than it does on the Illinois Prairie.
* I'm more awake here. See fourth bullet point for my theory on why this is.
*Last night's storm saw more lightning than I'd ever seen in a single downpour. Every time one bolt faded, another lit the sky, in a continuous fluorescent stream. It's the mountains; I have to think so, because mountains are a new and easy explanation for anything else I haven't experienced before.
Lightning doesn't just touch down to the ground all on its own. It completes a circuit, as it were, by connecting to a positive streamer of energy that snakes upward from the ground to meet it. You can even catch them on film sometimes: little glowing bolts-in-reverse, only thrown into bright relief if the sky's caught hold of another one nearby.
So all this constant Denver lightning must point to a surge of atypical energy levels in the ground itself. This, then, isn't an unreasonable explanation for my own sense of energy, my chipper 6:45am mornings and my nearly uncaffeinated daytimes.
But maybe any new place has this energy littering the ground. Maybe as a diploma'd and commenced thing, I'm taking a novel energy with me wherever I go -- the invigorating idea that I myself am new, newly mobile, newly inquisitive...newly marketable, yes, but principally new in a much simpler way: I, like the mountains, am infused with something ready to reach outward and connect, illuminate.
The point I'm making here is tired. The point I'm making is happiness.
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| Pardon the seven-month absence. Time behaves this way.
Since then, I'm done and done. Graduated. Degreed. Mortar Boarded -- the latter of which is in some ways its own torture.
I don't think I anticipated the arrival at any grand conclusions upon leaving Knox, nor the Galesburg that envelops and inextricably shapes it. But the first thought to hit me like a brick amidst all my decided lasts came the Monday after our Saturday commencement, as I slid out of western Illinois on the tracks of the 382 Carl Sandburg.
It was this: Maybe I'll never see these employees again.
In and of itself, the dissipation of these kind smilers from my quotidian life isn't the end of the world. But it seemed to underline, at 6:56pm that evening, just how unceremoniously I left all those favored places, the favored faces, and it reminded me of a line by poet Ralph Angel: "Because it all just breaks apart,/and the pieces scatter and rearrange themselves without much fanfare or notice."
No one might know the hurt of last month's leaving, because to any outsider of Galesburg, the lack of train wailing will never cause a pit in them, a hollow. Because they wont be left craving the habitation of stoops. Meanwhile, we who know it, we linger. Hours, we linger. Once, in this sycamore, every one of us was glad. It cannot be this way again, and so something is, albeit necessarily, irrevocable and lost.
I'm now reading Lydia Davis, and I find her arrestingly relevant. She has been what I've read on sand this summer, and will be my transition out of a place that knew me as well as this and better, and she'll steer me toward the notion that a place with such understanding must be left behind if we're ever going to quantify it. To think of its -- Knox's, Galesburg's -- influence, its span, is to think with that part of memory which changes and is changing all the time.
There are always new ways to consider our time at Knox that may terrify us.
Was it quick?
Was I looking?
Or, am I skewed by the habit of viewing time as that which flies, when in fact it was a languid and disposable thing for so long that I learned the worst ways of wasting it?
Life's long hereafter. But I'll never know what parts of the previous four years could have lasted. The Galesburg "here" steadily slips behind and West of me, even now. The "here" that's now a past tense. The "here" we gain character by losing. The "here" that, despite the finality our diplomas might indicate, I hope we recreate with any small amount of grace -- in the shadows of tall buildings, larger places, in a coalition of our idiosyncratic skin.
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| In packing up our possessions for a move to this new location:
  
....which we will have to eventually refer to as our home, I have found that the heaviest box of my own packing has been, perhaps unsurprisingly, the one full of my journals. From age four until now, I've kept somewhere around thirty diaries/logs/bound-something-or-others, though I notice that I only ever committed to filling an entire one cover-to-cover once I hit college. I guess that's some form of buckling down.
There was no question that I compile them all in one place and move them wherever we go, now or hereafter. As I packed, I flipped to a random page in each one to check the various milestones, like the changes in crushes, slang terms, or my handwriting (which everyone else insists has not changed one iota but which I am convinced has undergone quite a facelift). There was no question that I'd spend careful time piling them up chronologically, cushioning them with rolled-up T-shirts, and labeling the box with instructions to Handle With Care. All this I did, without question.
Because when you stop to question the keeping of a journal -- not in the sense of writing in one daily, but quite literally keeping it, hanging onto it after it's complete -- it becomes more of an anthropological fascination than any indispensable act. The composing of a journal is, I would argue, completely necessary to my continued existence. I cannot sleep if I haven't pulled something out, any thought that's crowding the pillow. But to hang onto it after penning that last page may in fact be masturbatory, mightn't it? Then the book becomes not the therapy it was as it was created, but is instead a chronicle, an implication that anyone would want to re-read the tribulations of someone as white-bread as Marnie Catherine Bernadette Shure. It scares me sometimes, to think that such forethought may have been swimming around my six-year-old brain as I flipped my Goosebumps memo pad shut for the last time. It's no accident that any of this was held onto. No question.
But I would hope that this isn't the case. That I might humbly hold onto the often-embarrassing, often-mistaken years of a life more than half-filled with them. For me, and me alone, I wish to keep them. I wish to be reminded of a history that can't be changed.
The compromise might then be thus: to keep them, keep them chronological, but keep them, above all, in an unassuming drawer or box, never on any type of accessible display. That way, when someone can tell you what your favorite stuffed animal was when you were ten, you know you're either dealing with true love or a snoop. One in the same, perhaps.
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| The winter we remember has arrived as a reminder on our thinnest skin. My fresh piece of gum nearly cracked on the train instead of yielding to my mouth, and that's a cold you don't forget. It's heartily displaced to the storage lobes of our brain in the peak of summer sweat, it's true, but it comes back fierce enough to fog my glasses are now and that's some flesh memory, long and deep. Nevertheless, the train yesterday was packed with those headed right toward a frosty lake -- our city is ours twelve months a year.
The cold pulls me out my nose. And we let it! One time Hobbes the tiger thought he and Calvin had traveled forward in time, but they were unwittingly in the humid Jurassic -- and he, Hobbes, expressed disappointment that we hadn't yet been able to control the weather in the future. In the cold, I think of that every year, and my conclusion is that I'm glad we haven't, glad we won't.
We are slaves to it. We combat it how we can but cannot eliminate it or dictate it or even influence it. Cold will be cold and the heat will cause its deaths and clashing fronts will keep the words "natural disaster" in our vocabulary. Something must point to a god, and must do so rudely, if all else fails. No particular deity, of course, but simply something larger than this, us all. If that force be the cold itself, that would be enough; no need to add an iconography or the letters "-ist" to our faith if our prayers keep us honest. An umbrella is a prayer. A scarf is a prayer.
And in case you were wondering, the train arrived perfectly on time to our beloved frozen city.
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