The naïveté of a rising first grader

You have a boy’s name.

I don’t need to ask you if I’ve ever told you that

because I know you know I know.

And you thought it too.

You used to complain about it to me when we were seven,

telling me that you wished your parents had named you

Alexandra, as they had originally planned.

You bitched about it

all the way up until we were maybe fourteen

when you started playing guitar,

stopped showering,

(not totally, but seriously)

started hating the world,

and, for once…

loving yourself.

That was when you decided it was okay

to be a chick with a guy’s name.

Maybe it was even cool.

For the official record,

and by official, I mean in my opinion:

Of course it was cool.

Anyway, your boy name,

back in the day,

led me to think that you were,

in fact, a boy.

No, you didn’t look like one.

Not in the least.

But, you were a new student

starting summer school

the year before we both entered the first grade,

and you were absent the first two days of class.

Nobody knew who the hell you were,

so excuse my six-year-old naïveté

for assuming that the empty desk beside me

belonged to a grimy boy that ate his boogers for fun

and saved the remaining snot for glue.

I knew too many of this type,

and, quite frankly, had had enough of them.

As far as I was concerned,

you were some boy I didn’t want to know,

and just like that,

I flippantly wrote you off.

Imagine my astonishment

when you finally decided

to show up for the third day of class

with a summer scarf tied around your neck

to match the flowered dress

that was undoubtedly a sample garment from

your Dad’s clothing company.

Your mom had curled your hair

for your first day

and as Mrs. Phillips

introduced you to us,

“Everyone, this is Taylor.

She is a new student,”

you smiled meekly.

I stared at you.

Oh my gosh, it exists.

And, it’s a girl.

I was beside myself.

Nonetheless, you sat beside me.

**Disclaimer: Any suggestions that the above may make toward fact should be considered largely coincidental. I may or may not have a friend named Taylor. However, for her own protection, whether fictionalized or real, I am writing this disclaimer. Please also consider poetic license, errr, more plainly stated in a French accent, "zeh bending of zeh truze."

Turn Off the Lights

I somehow always choose the best ones when I turn off all the lights and pick blindly. I wonder if the world is trying to tell me something...

...or maybe I'm just reading too much into it.

It wouldn't be the first time.

I’ve never seen what my brain looked like on crack

I can only guess what it looks like on poetry.

If crocodiles mated with white cockatoos

and then vomited their offspring

in a fresh glaze of sulfuric slime

that writhed on the floor

gasping for air as a means of grappling

with its newfound reality here on Earth—

That’s how I imagine my brain on poetry.

A distorted mass of neurons,

all reactions,

that tries to cope with

the inevitable realities that the written word

prescribes—

even when the word lies.

For what is written as falsehood

may shed some light

on what is known as fact

and escaping reality

may be just as trying

as facing it.

My precious little bundle of wriggling neurons

is now thoughtless—

hopeless, in fact.

So dear friends,

it looks like I have a crack problem.

En serio, a veces no puedo dejar de pensar de qué coñazo es la vida.

Being Reflective. It's the New Year, right?

With my step father, DK as I call him, being a surgeon, I hear medical stories all the time. In fact, some of the cases he performs end up becoming our dinner table conversation. Here are some examples for your orientation.

"So today I did a radical prostatectomy on a prisoner who was airlifted to the hospital..."

"Today I removed fishing wire from the penis of an 11 -year-old."

"William is now and will be forevermore known as one-ball Billy."

My mom and I have heard so many stories over the years that one would think by now we would be somewhat desensitized to the medical terminology and able to overlook the realities that such an inflated vocabulary might entail... But, this is not the case of course.

These past few days have been kind of sad. The medical stories I have been hearing have not been about the routine blasting of kidney stones or the normal prodding of the bladder. They have been more serious and more personal. For instance, the husband of DK's nurse had a stroke on Christmas Eve and has been in the hospital since. Then, today he had a second stroke rendering him blind. DK said his nurse looks thin and ravaged...with reason.

A little bit later this evening, DK got a call from the O.R. telling him that one of his patients, who they thought was on the road to recovery, was experiencing unstoppable internal bleeding. DK's phone call with the hospital was as follows:

"Oh my God. What? We sent him into recovery after having checked that he was dry of blood."

DK then hung up the phone and stared at the wall, "Shit."

It's so unnerving to hear these things. You're probably thinking, "Well duh, Jackie." But really, the life of a surgeon is not necessarily what you might see in an episode of E.R. That is, there are more patients that survive than die, and the atmosphere of the operating room is not frantic. The doctors, nurses, and techs KNOW what they're doing. They listen to Dave Matthews and cut away at body organs, carrying out what is for them a completely routine operation. So, when you witness how the routine suddenly morphs into something atypical and you see the alarmed eyes of a trained physician as he swears under his breath, it can be quite unsettling.

Aside from the events at the hospital, I logged onto Facebook a few hours ago to find out that one of the professors I had in Barcelona died on Jan. 5, 2011. We all find out from time to time that someone we knew has died. Maybe we knew them well and maybe we didn't. I can't say that I knew Professor Cardona very well on a personal level, but I have nice memories of him, his wife, and his 10am Spanish Contemporary History class. After seeing that he died, I found myself a bit teary-eyed. He was so nice! I remember talking with him after class one day and telling him that I had planned a trip to Paris for Christmas. He then grabbed out of my hands the graded essay exam that I had written for his class and found a blank spot on the paper where he began scribbling down his favorite places in Paris. In the midst of doing so, Professor Cardona paused and looked up at me, insisting that I make friends with a French boy for all of 5 minutes (anymore time than that was simply unnecessary) so that we could take a romantic picture together overlooking the Siene River. He handed me back the paper and said, "Ya verás, París es increíble."

Professor Cardona was also the first and only professor in my entire college career to give me a B. It irritated me at the time to think that one B+ would tarnish my perfect record of A's. I remember talking to him about it afterward--not about the grade, but about my essays. My overall grade didn't change, and I was of course disgruntled about the inevitable drop in my GPA, but I knew that my professor really cared about whether I actually understood what he was trying to convey. That made it okay for me. It's certainly valuable when you find that rare professor who is more interested in talking with you instead of over you.

Anyway, as I was mentally considering the sad news I had heard about DK's nurse's husband, DK's patient, and the recent death of my professor, I began to think about how Facebook, despite being a representational facade of what goes on in real life, is still (at least loosely) based upon what is going on in actual time. Maybe we should deem Facebook to be a work of fiction that is "based on a true story" because really, you shouldn't believe everything you see on Facebook!

Maybe Professor Cardona really isn't dead...

But even so, questioning the verisimilitude of Facebook entirely would be admitting that at least part of what it has to offer us is truth. It's a paradox similar to the one that Hemingway states in A Moveable Feast, "If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact." Remembering this quote, I stared blankly at my Facebook mini-feed mentally sorting through my sad news and all these random thoughts, "Weird that such sad events have occurred so sequentially... how much of the truth is actually captured through Facebook? " Then, my Facebook news-feed automatically refreshed itself to show a new update...

One of my high school teachers just gave birth to a baby girl.

Look! I'm alive!

Hello reader! How art thou?

Long time no post. It's been a solid four months since I've posted anything at all. I don't like to think that I've neglected my beloved blog, and you probably thought Loca's Thang was a thang of the past, no? I can't blame you.

Though these past four months have been quite eventful, I can't say they've been particularly interesting. But hey, stuff has happened, and the new year has arrived. Hello 2011! Sorry I'm five days late in greeting you. Then again, I could be four months late or in complete denial that you've arrived at all. I must mention the fact that I have a nifty birthday this year. I'll be 22 on 1/11/11! And 11(2) = 22. Two twos is double eleven. Wow, see how well I can add?! I got an A in the math course I took this past semester. I think this darn well proves that it was a much deserved grade.

Hmm, I have so much I could say right now that I really don't know what I should say. I'll just make a list of random events/frivolities/photos that have emerged into being within the last four months.

1. Okay, now what?

2. I'll do this later.

Maybe I'll post again in a few minutes when inspiration dawns on me.