Let It Snow
As I think I might have mentioned once or twice, Prozac agrees with me. (Well, generic fluoxetine does, anyway, if we're going to get technical.) I have developed an almost anthropomorphizing affection and gratitude for those dear little white ovals which, taken two at bedtime, all but eliminate my hair-trigger squirts of dread, while making my lows less low, my difficulties less difficult, my obstacles less obstacular. I know that some people have prohibitively unpleasant side-effects with this particular medication, but since my initial nausea and yuckiness during the run-in period, I have had almost nothing besides the mood elevation.
Almost nothing. The one side-effect that seems to be sticking around is this thing that it does to my dreams. I hesitate to say that it makes them more vivid, though that might in fact be accurate, because to me somehow the connotations of "vivid dreams" include garish colors and, I don't know, talking circus sea slugs or something. And what I'm getting instead is just night after night of these busy, detailed, absorbing alternate worlds. No electric blue singing molluscs, just a lot of the usual reality-based dream fare (heavy on high school and college graduations and reunions lately) but somehow kicked up a notch, and with a sensation, on awakening, of simply trading realities, that one for this.
As usual, my college friend Nora and my high school boyfriend figure fairly prominently in the cast of characters (whatever they represent to my psyche, it's clearly pretty central--they're always showing up in my head during REM). And then there are other friends and family members showing up here and there, occasional guest appearances by random famous people (most recently, the actor Jon Cryer), and lots of fully developed characters with faces and personalities and palpable essences but whom I've never met or seen in waking life.
A few nights ago, my dreams featured a starring role for a college classmate, the famous Lisa Chun. Well, she was famous in our class, anyway, and I daresay in years just above and just behind us. My senior-year girlfriend and her housemate used to roll their eyes and call her "the Wayne Newton of [our college's name here] lesbians," but I am here to tell you she was really the Elvis of [our college's name here] lesbians--you could argue that maybe she was a little sleazy, but her charisma was undeniably real. My little circle of friends were definitely outside the highest status clique (we called them the Cool Smoking Lesbians), but you know, it just wasn't that big a school, so we went to the same parties. Besides which, a cat may look at a king. I am not embarrassed to tell you (okay, maybe I'm a little embarrassed) that Lisa Chun made my knees weak. I suppose that it was a kind of cheeky acknowledgement of Lisa Chun's legend-in-her-own-time status that my friends and I had a whole repertoire of songs (show tunes, Christmas carols, jazz standards) reworded to include her name. Our "Some Enchanted Evening" was probably the most fun to sing, but I find that it's our "Let It Snow" that's been playing in my head a lot recently.
Anyway, the dream itself wasn't all that interesting. It involved some prank or otherwise slightly illicit mission, and we were climbing up gray metal ladders through a multi-story empty warehouse. There was something about various cans of colored paint up on the gravelly roof. I suppose if you were really intent on finding repressed sexuality in there, you could do it, but I'm a little dubious about the Freudian reading. Or maybe I just don't want to believe it, since by the end, Lisa Chun had more or less morphed into Angelina Jolie, who just plain gives me the willies. Be that as it may, since having the dream about Lisa Chun (and especially in the day or two afterwards, when I had that strange feeling of actually having seen her recently--you know how dreams can conjure so completely the feeling of someone, the smell of their personality?), I've been thinking about the phenomenon of bigger-than-life-ness.
The last time I actually did see Lisa Chun was at our 10th year college reunion. I had a weird twin reaction to her. Her lofty stature had to be diminished--she'd gained quite a bit of weight and therefore couldn't help but look kind of cushiony and motherly rather than just effortlessly cool-butch, and she was working in some desperately unglamorous place, like an insurance company or an HMO, while a lot of our classmates were truly in the thick of the fabulous careers we were all supposed to have. But at the same time, the feeling was stubbornly the same. I still couldn't really see her as an actual person. I still did an abominable job of making small talk with her, although I'd been happily and volubly catching up with everybody else, including a friend of hers and fellow-Cool-Smoking-Lesbian (who'd gone to nursing school and become a nurse practitioner, so we had a lot to talk about). I truly could barely be civil, I got so flustered and tongue-tied. I mean, it was really ridiculous. And the excruciating thing was (and is), I know she could tell. She seemed to find it a little bit entertaining. But then the dancing started, and I wasn't really having much of a conversation with anyone, because I'm most basically a dancing fool, and the awkwardness goes away because I'm just so happy to be dancing.
It was toward the end of the party, then, and just a few more songs before we were all going to head off into the night, and there was a bit of dead air as somebody changed the tape on the boom-box. Then, as the music was starting again, Lisa Chun herself came up to me and took my hand and wordlessly led me out onto the floor. And so this was my brush with greatness--a slow dance with the Elvis of [unnamed college] lesbians. I wish I could tell you what it was like, or how I felt, or even what song was playing, but it's frustratingly blank in my memory. I suppose it wasn't really so eventful, when it comes right down to it. But then, at the end of the dance, she stepped back slightly and, confidently and deliberately, kissed me.
Lisa Chun is an exceedingly good kisser. The fact that this was entirely to be expected given her reputation somehow had not occurred to me, and the revelation carried for me the kind of narrative satisfaction that a nice twist ending gives (The Usual Suspects, say, or the season finale of Veronica Mars). It was perfect.
But it brings us back to an individual person having such iconic status that even in the fleshy flesh, the glamor is not dispelled, and the human being, with worries and interests and insecurities and neuroses and quirky habits and habitual blind spots and overused phrases and occasional intestinal gurgles and favorite television programs, is not revealed. How can that be? I suppose that in this case, it's not really so inexplicable. There I was, back at the scene of my postadolescent awkwardnesses and struggles, with those self-same people, and there was Lisa Chun, in her element, in a relatively controllable situation that played to her strengths.
But it undermines my sense of myself as someone who sees people as people, someone who is uncowed by status or other external trappings. My mother, after all, years ago when she was still a very junior employee, used to call her company's vice presidents "Cherry Pie," and I'm my mother's daughter. I sweetly ask the tough-guy gang-banger types on the bus to scoot over so I can sit down. I cheerfully and easily said good morning to the president of the hospital where I worked, and nonplussed the CEO of the last company where I temped by utterly failing to quake when he bellowed at me. So it bugs me that I'm not impervious, that Lisa Chun (or anyone) can strike me dumb (in both senses of the word), can scatter my thoughts and make me stammer and make me forget that people are always just people.
At the same time, though, I feel a little nostalgia for that feeling. It's exhilarating to be subject to the force of a charismatic presence. (My mom and her best friend have a word for that not-necessarily-good-for-you kind of infatuation: cocaine. It seems very apt--a white-hot, ice-cold rush that clears out your sinuses and makes your heart race, and ultimately just makes you crave more.) It's also reassuring, I suspect, to believe in the existence of inaccessible realms, to crave acceptance into a club that would not have us as a member. "Man's reach must exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for." How drab and dreary if this is all there is. And how crushing the responsibility if the we are all the world has to see it through. How much nicer if there are enchanted and superior creatures out there we can defer to, look to, pretend we aspire to but never really expect to attain kinship with.
And so if we don't have a Lisa Chung or her equivalent in our immediate environment, we can turn to movie stars and rock musicians, famous writers and nationally known politicians, for our fix. Could I keep my head in a room with Barack Obama or Laurie Anderson or Nicole Kidman or David Sedaris? Almost surely not. Celebrity provides that same exciting and deliciously disempowering sensation if you encounter it.
It's actually one of the things I like best about nursing that it pulls in just about exactly the opposite direction. The commonality of people, not just as people, but even more prosaically and concretely as biological entities, is essential to nursing practice. The wretched, homely realities of daily existence as mammals on planet Earth--belching, farting, salivating, peeing, eating, shitting, coughing, breathing, sleeping--which in social interactions we either strenuously domesticate or out-and-out deny, are accepted and seen with the utmost in matter-of-fact interest by working nurses. Assessing those very things is a straightforward and un-charged part of the job. People are people, and we're all in this mess of a life together. I'm glad to be part of a profession where that's how I get to spend most of my time. Even if I can't help but remain susceptible in small spots to wicked glamor.
Almost nothing. The one side-effect that seems to be sticking around is this thing that it does to my dreams. I hesitate to say that it makes them more vivid, though that might in fact be accurate, because to me somehow the connotations of "vivid dreams" include garish colors and, I don't know, talking circus sea slugs or something. And what I'm getting instead is just night after night of these busy, detailed, absorbing alternate worlds. No electric blue singing molluscs, just a lot of the usual reality-based dream fare (heavy on high school and college graduations and reunions lately) but somehow kicked up a notch, and with a sensation, on awakening, of simply trading realities, that one for this.
As usual, my college friend Nora and my high school boyfriend figure fairly prominently in the cast of characters (whatever they represent to my psyche, it's clearly pretty central--they're always showing up in my head during REM). And then there are other friends and family members showing up here and there, occasional guest appearances by random famous people (most recently, the actor Jon Cryer), and lots of fully developed characters with faces and personalities and palpable essences but whom I've never met or seen in waking life.
A few nights ago, my dreams featured a starring role for a college classmate, the famous Lisa Chun. Well, she was famous in our class, anyway, and I daresay in years just above and just behind us. My senior-year girlfriend and her housemate used to roll their eyes and call her "the Wayne Newton of [our college's name here] lesbians," but I am here to tell you she was really the Elvis of [our college's name here] lesbians--you could argue that maybe she was a little sleazy, but her charisma was undeniably real. My little circle of friends were definitely outside the highest status clique (we called them the Cool Smoking Lesbians), but you know, it just wasn't that big a school, so we went to the same parties. Besides which, a cat may look at a king. I am not embarrassed to tell you (okay, maybe I'm a little embarrassed) that Lisa Chun made my knees weak. I suppose that it was a kind of cheeky acknowledgement of Lisa Chun's legend-in-her-own-time status that my friends and I had a whole repertoire of songs (show tunes, Christmas carols, jazz standards) reworded to include her name. Our "Some Enchanted Evening" was probably the most fun to sing, but I find that it's our "Let It Snow" that's been playing in my head a lot recently.
Anyway, the dream itself wasn't all that interesting. It involved some prank or otherwise slightly illicit mission, and we were climbing up gray metal ladders through a multi-story empty warehouse. There was something about various cans of colored paint up on the gravelly roof. I suppose if you were really intent on finding repressed sexuality in there, you could do it, but I'm a little dubious about the Freudian reading. Or maybe I just don't want to believe it, since by the end, Lisa Chun had more or less morphed into Angelina Jolie, who just plain gives me the willies. Be that as it may, since having the dream about Lisa Chun (and especially in the day or two afterwards, when I had that strange feeling of actually having seen her recently--you know how dreams can conjure so completely the feeling of someone, the smell of their personality?), I've been thinking about the phenomenon of bigger-than-life-ness.
The last time I actually did see Lisa Chun was at our 10th year college reunion. I had a weird twin reaction to her. Her lofty stature had to be diminished--she'd gained quite a bit of weight and therefore couldn't help but look kind of cushiony and motherly rather than just effortlessly cool-butch, and she was working in some desperately unglamorous place, like an insurance company or an HMO, while a lot of our classmates were truly in the thick of the fabulous careers we were all supposed to have. But at the same time, the feeling was stubbornly the same. I still couldn't really see her as an actual person. I still did an abominable job of making small talk with her, although I'd been happily and volubly catching up with everybody else, including a friend of hers and fellow-Cool-Smoking-Lesbian (who'd gone to nursing school and become a nurse practitioner, so we had a lot to talk about). I truly could barely be civil, I got so flustered and tongue-tied. I mean, it was really ridiculous. And the excruciating thing was (and is), I know she could tell. She seemed to find it a little bit entertaining. But then the dancing started, and I wasn't really having much of a conversation with anyone, because I'm most basically a dancing fool, and the awkwardness goes away because I'm just so happy to be dancing.
It was toward the end of the party, then, and just a few more songs before we were all going to head off into the night, and there was a bit of dead air as somebody changed the tape on the boom-box. Then, as the music was starting again, Lisa Chun herself came up to me and took my hand and wordlessly led me out onto the floor. And so this was my brush with greatness--a slow dance with the Elvis of [unnamed college] lesbians. I wish I could tell you what it was like, or how I felt, or even what song was playing, but it's frustratingly blank in my memory. I suppose it wasn't really so eventful, when it comes right down to it. But then, at the end of the dance, she stepped back slightly and, confidently and deliberately, kissed me.
Lisa Chun is an exceedingly good kisser. The fact that this was entirely to be expected given her reputation somehow had not occurred to me, and the revelation carried for me the kind of narrative satisfaction that a nice twist ending gives (The Usual Suspects, say, or the season finale of Veronica Mars). It was perfect.
But it brings us back to an individual person having such iconic status that even in the fleshy flesh, the glamor is not dispelled, and the human being, with worries and interests and insecurities and neuroses and quirky habits and habitual blind spots and overused phrases and occasional intestinal gurgles and favorite television programs, is not revealed. How can that be? I suppose that in this case, it's not really so inexplicable. There I was, back at the scene of my postadolescent awkwardnesses and struggles, with those self-same people, and there was Lisa Chun, in her element, in a relatively controllable situation that played to her strengths.
But it undermines my sense of myself as someone who sees people as people, someone who is uncowed by status or other external trappings. My mother, after all, years ago when she was still a very junior employee, used to call her company's vice presidents "Cherry Pie," and I'm my mother's daughter. I sweetly ask the tough-guy gang-banger types on the bus to scoot over so I can sit down. I cheerfully and easily said good morning to the president of the hospital where I worked, and nonplussed the CEO of the last company where I temped by utterly failing to quake when he bellowed at me. So it bugs me that I'm not impervious, that Lisa Chun (or anyone) can strike me dumb (in both senses of the word), can scatter my thoughts and make me stammer and make me forget that people are always just people.
At the same time, though, I feel a little nostalgia for that feeling. It's exhilarating to be subject to the force of a charismatic presence. (My mom and her best friend have a word for that not-necessarily-good-for-you kind of infatuation: cocaine. It seems very apt--a white-hot, ice-cold rush that clears out your sinuses and makes your heart race, and ultimately just makes you crave more.) It's also reassuring, I suspect, to believe in the existence of inaccessible realms, to crave acceptance into a club that would not have us as a member. "Man's reach must exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for." How drab and dreary if this is all there is. And how crushing the responsibility if the we are all the world has to see it through. How much nicer if there are enchanted and superior creatures out there we can defer to, look to, pretend we aspire to but never really expect to attain kinship with.
And so if we don't have a Lisa Chung or her equivalent in our immediate environment, we can turn to movie stars and rock musicians, famous writers and nationally known politicians, for our fix. Could I keep my head in a room with Barack Obama or Laurie Anderson or Nicole Kidman or David Sedaris? Almost surely not. Celebrity provides that same exciting and deliciously disempowering sensation if you encounter it.
It's actually one of the things I like best about nursing that it pulls in just about exactly the opposite direction. The commonality of people, not just as people, but even more prosaically and concretely as biological entities, is essential to nursing practice. The wretched, homely realities of daily existence as mammals on planet Earth--belching, farting, salivating, peeing, eating, shitting, coughing, breathing, sleeping--which in social interactions we either strenuously domesticate or out-and-out deny, are accepted and seen with the utmost in matter-of-fact interest by working nurses. Assessing those very things is a straightforward and un-charged part of the job. People are people, and we're all in this mess of a life together. I'm glad to be part of a profession where that's how I get to spend most of my time. Even if I can't help but remain susceptible in small spots to wicked glamor.
posted by Rosie Bonner at 1:28 PM
1 Comments:
Oh! And there was the JC Superstar song: "Hey Lisee, Lisee, won't you smile at me, Lisa hey, Lisa Cho, Superstar!"
But Some Enchanted Evening was my very favorite too. I still sing it to MG sometime. If we ever meet the Famous Lisa at a reunion or something, I'm going to have some explaining to do.
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