Something I Whipped Up

Kacie Krist couldn’t understand why the airline wouldn’t follow her demands. How could those flight attendants value a bag of peanuts more than her life? Did they want her to die? The main flight attendant, Geri, just stood there smiling at her explaining some stupid policy about serving peanuts on the airplane. “You can’t just come onto an airplane and demand something be changed,” Geri said. “Passengers have an expectation that when they sit down on a grueling four hour flight they will receive a complimentary bag of peanuts.”

Kacie stamped her feet on the ground at this point and began to cry. Her thick eyeliner ran down her face. How could they do this to her? She had to get on this flight. Why wouldn’t they just do what she asked? The very smell of peanut dust made her throat sore and her nose swell up like a potato. She could die from prolonged exposure to the deadly snack. She had evidence of this from her doctor. Her allergy bracelet, purchased from Tiffany’s from daddy, had the severity of her allergy clearly spelled out.

Chloe, Kacie’s friend, stood up in a very motherly fashion and demanded the flight attendants not serve that bag of peanuts. “No one will miss them,” she howled. “I will personally pay for each bag of peanuts if I must.” The cost and importance of the peanuts was no longer the issue. Geri explained that, even if they did not serve peanuts, how could they guarantee that no one on the plane had brought on a bag of their own? If someone opened his or her own bag, what if Kacie died? It would then be the responsibility of the airline. Kacie was told that she would simply have to get off of the plane and wait for a peanut free flight.
“Next time, please inform the airline sooner,” said Geri. “Then there will not be a scene on the plane and the passengers will not be disturbed.”

Kacie Krist was not done with this. She got off of the plane with Chloe and Marcus, a boy who had been pursuing Kacie throughout the whole Study Abroad trip to France, but only now figured out a surefire way to show her how much he cared. Together, those three students would have entire peanut crops destroyed and nearly render the legume extinct.
It was Marcus and Kacie Krist’s father who really got things rolling. Marcus started the YouthSpot page on the Internet titled “Pea-Nuts: Tell the Airlines to Value Human Life.” The description of the page was very persuasive, enticing over 300,000 young people to join.
“The time to make a difference is now. The airlines are practicing discrimination of the purest form. They did not judge this young woman based on the content of her character, but by the intolerance in her immune system. Is this the America Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed about? Like Rosa Parks, Kacie Krist will not give up her seat on an airplane. It is time to show the airlines that we will not travel if peanuts are on board. These salted and/or honey-roasted killers must be kept out of planes, bars, or any public place. If cigarette smoking is such a problem, why not peanuts? The revolution starts here!”

The movement quickly picked up speed. Reggie Krist, Kacie’s father, quickly took the airlines to court where they settled for over a million dollars for psychological damages done to Kacie. She quickly went on Larry King Live and The O’Reilly Factor to explain her position. She was soon cast to perform on Dancing With the Stars. She attended the Emmys. A sex tape was released featuring Kacie, a midget dressed as a Viking, and Hector Sinclair, the most recent American Idol winner.

But Marcus didn’t care. He was going to win Kacie’s heart. He was sure of it. When Kacie’s spotlight slowly began to fade, it was Marcus who reignited the issue by demanding a boycott of peanut butter. Soon the peanut butter companies failed. Lip Smackers Jelly followed close behind. Marcus stood with Kacie, her entourage, and the press as fields of peanuts were torched. Jimmy Carter tried to appeal to the public on television, but was shouted down by cable personalities.

Marcus still didn’t perform coitus with Kacie, so he continued the crusade. There were virtually no peanuts in the United States, but what about other countries? Many, like France and Canada, quickly gave in to the demands. China, however, proved a challenge. “Much of our food is cooked with peanut oil,” said the Prime Minister. “How could we ask our people to fundamentally change the way they live?” Marcus quickly dubbed China a hostile state, valuing food over human life. Relations between the two countries became troubled.

China said they could come to a compromise. If the United States paid China all the debt they owed, China would work to remove peanuts entirely from the planet. The United States said this was impractical and stupid. China should simply use some other oil for cooking. China just said no. The United States prepared to launch bombs.

Marcus held Kacie’s hand as they watched fighter jets flying across the Pacific Ocean. She couldn’t say no to him now. He softly kissed her neck. She looked at him through her Dolce and Gabbana sunglasses. She looked at the paparazzi behind her. Then she looked at the Tiffany’s allergy bracelet on her wrist. She got what she wanted. The world would no longer discriminate against people with her allergy. But she now realized she was surrounded by nuts.

yes, the point is to both share and comment, Sir Brentinator.

And HAHAHA, I had totally forgotten about that character sketch! wow.

(oh yeah, it's 7:06 in the morning and i have to go to work after a long night at 80's night. YEEK)

Unfinished Fragments

The bus is a body. It is a living, breathing mass. We climb on and we climb off, the bus stops and releases, consumes, moves forward, stops and releases, consumes us.

On Tuesdays I ride the bus thirty minutes out to Trumansburg to Dr. Schneeble’s office to talk about my week and also the last week’s CT scans and blood samples, which I then repeat fifty minutes later in the lab downstairs. It is a repetition I’ve grown accustomed to, a clear and consistent practice. The bus as a large organism, an active and humming machine. On the bus I am processing various movements. I am collecting some serious data.

Aboard the 24A we are all together a system, a radius of action. Here are the students and the nine-to-five-ers (the difference is between the shininess of their messenger bags, and the direction of the slant of their hips), the young mothers with their ear-pierced and diesel-jeaned newborns, staring outwards with blank eyes. Here are the elderly making faces at them, puffing up their cheeks with air and popping them with their fingers. Here are the middle-aged hippies, the tie-dyed, Birkenstock-wearing free-lovers, the construction workers, the lunch ladies.

Dr. Schneeble’s office is in a large and rectangular sand-colored building just before the interstate, its appearance and space so flat and ordinary that it’s virtually unrecognizable. Its parking lot is beneath the structure, giving off a stark look of abandonment. Upon driving up you sense an absence so powerful, but yet so subtle that it seems to linger in your bones for days.

They are searching my body for signs.

____________________________

In the entrance to T.H. Hall there’s a video projector running 24/7 of a montage of close-ups of body parts. There’s a clavicle, an arm, a leg bent at the knee – all of the images cropped so close that at times they pass before you can distinguish or place them – an undulating backbone, fingers muddled together, a clitoris, a heel. A displaced map of the body. The color is sepia.

When film was first developed people did not understand how to look at a piece of the whole. There was a sense of innate fear, a disbarring, a castration. A forearm without an elbow without a tricep without a shoulder. An eye without a face. A smile without the cat. You get the picture. They didn’t get the slightest bit how to. It was something like seeing death. An upset in the plotting.

The installation has been on display for over a month. It is part of my twin brother’s thesis project that he’s been working on for the past year. After our mom got sick right after we finished undergrad, we both decided to stay in Ithaca and get our MFA’s in art at Ithaca-U, where we also went to undergrad, because we could go for free, because of dad. We had already moved out of the house in Sewickley, about half an hour from campus (where we had moved to when we were thirteen when dad got the job as Dean of the relatively new anthro-archaological research program in a super sweet building designed by Rem Koolhaas himself – a

which Caleb and I used to play hide and seek in

Some of the bodies in the video are corpses. It is almost impossible to tell which parts are alive and which are dead, unless they are moving, but sometimes it’s the camera panning and you’re not sure if it’s your eye or the screen or the image on the screen. Half the people who walk by it or glance at it or even stare at it for a period of time are not aware of the corpses.

Our dad has connections with the anthro-archaeology lab on campus. As head of the anthro-archaeology department for the past twelve years, he basically is the connection. He’s always been pretty receptive towards experimentation with art, especially after marrying our mother, who was a performance artist back in the 60’s along with Yoko Ono and Valie Export in the women’s rights movements. I know for a fact my mom had a pair of Valie’s Action Pants but I don’t even want to think about where and when she wore them.

Ever since they took her away he’s been pretty easy to convince about anything. Especially now since Caleb’s moved back home with him, Caleb pretty much has full access to anything and everything.

It’s been eight months, three weeks, and two days since she’s been gone, and already it feels like it was always this way. I mean, for the last two years it wasn’t really her that was around, anyway.

What I can Handle Right Now

1. Mid-afternoon naps
2. Inhalations
3. Exhalations
4. Humming a tune while I muck out my horses stalls
5. Yelling obscenities at the 20 year old pool pump as water comes gushing out of it.
6. Unpacking (I barely tolerate it, but I CAN handle it)
7. Letting myself get dirty
8. Noticing how the sunset looks different here than it does in Pittsburgh
9. Exhalations, lots of exhalations
10. Walking down the street to buy blueberries from my Amish neighbor
11. Waiting for the fan to turn toward me again.
12. Listening to the wall clock tick
13. Deciding to view myself as getting old
14. Deciding to never get old and be old
15. Giving my horse a massage
16. Ignoring my mother
17. Washing my clothes
18. Wondering if I'm making the right decisions
19. Wondering if there is a right decision
20. Getting frustrated about right decisions
21. Thinking there's no use in getting frustrated about "right" decisions
22. Ignoring my mother
23. Wishing my parents pool pump wasn't so damn old
24. Wishing my dad taught me a little more about the pool pump before he left for the hospital
25. Wondering what the heck algae is
26. Wondering how they make energy out of algae... bizarre

After our last class of senior seminar...

The First Blog I've Ever Made

Hello dear members of the Fruit on a Pancake Collective (or as Brent would call it, "Fruit on a Pancake: a Collective") - I have made you all a present! Instead of emailing and facebook messaging back and forth and back and forth, we can post our writing on this blog! (Though unfortunately for Christine, she probably won't have the opportunity to write about sparkly silver spandex leggings unless Ms. Alpha decides to put them on as a tease for what's his face who sells the weed in Eerie...)

I say we begin with Brent's really neat writing exercise that he sent to me on facebook! If ya'll didn't read it, here it is again:

Try writing from perspective of a surgeon during an operation. It doesn't need to be a normal operation; the surgeon can be dissecting a show on ESPN, or War and Peace, the corpse of Roger Ebert, or a beachball. But do this and have a laugh and plumb the depths of whatever/whoever the surgeon is operating on. Run and gun with it, letting loose your corniest if you have to.

Let's all try and get a little somethin somethin posted by next weekend!

As I write this I'm getting more and more excited, and also really nostalgic and miss you all already, except for Christine, who I pre-miss, since she is leaving in, what, three weeks? Gah! Brent, come up to pgh for a reunion soon? Or we could all meet somewhere one weekend? But until then, we have this blog! Feel free to post whatever, whenever! I will send all of you the password, since I don't know if you can post without it.

Love you all,

Rachel