Roxy's Reflection

She’s a star made of cleavage, curls, and sparkles. Roxy deserves for you to be her number one fan. Roxy sets the whole world as her stage and performs her best scene on it. Roxy wears no red makeup, though if she did, she would make her lip print on her mirror like she left one on my heart.

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When I dance, I think about Roxy. I know Roxy thinks about herself when she dances. Because I was just a thin ballet apprentice when I first Roxy, walking awkwardly in a body that didn’t fit into a showgirl dressing room unless shoved in a corner. They all judged me from bleeding toes to inexperienced fingers.

I was left alone and tried to melt into the only corner of darkness the fluorescent vanity lights didn’t touch. I was a girl dancer, I still am. These woman dancers intimidated me.

Roxy walked up to me. I didn’t know she was Roxy at the time until she signed her name on the mirror with sparkling black eyeliner.

“Hey, what’s your name?” she demanded out of pure interest in satiating her curiosity, not in making me comfortable.

“Charmmaine.”

Roxy nodded and seemed to try to digest my name like a disgusting French food she was tasting for the first time. She decided it was too prestigious, but swallowed it politely.

“Well Charmmaine, look at yourself.”

I hesitantly turned to the mirror behind me. I didn’t look at myself, I looked at Roxy’s reflection. Tight brown and blond curls framed a perfectly cut case, a short silver dress contrasted tan skin and hugged perfect curves. She was everything a woman should be. I was scared.

She caught me looking at her and looked at me without amusement. I couldn’t stand looking at myself after looking at something as perfect as Roxy, but I did anyways. Everything was thin and straight, like a boring board in my studio. Tonight, I was just a piece of the night sky when around these stars.

“Do you love yourself?”

"Ummm…”

There was very little that amused Roxy. She looked at me sideways.

“Don’t expect people to love you just because you can dance. You have to love yourself”

She pressed her body to the mirror, pouted her lips in an irresistible way I wish I could emulate and kissed herself on the lips. She seemed to love herself. If her reflection had a tongue, she would’ve licked it with her own.

She signed her name on the mirror. Roxy, with a long tail at the end of her “y”. And walked away to leave me and my reflection to a moment that needed more privacy than her own showy moment.

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I’ll kiss many mirrors after that, but that’s all they are to me. When Roxy kisses mirrors, she kisses herself. When I kiss mirrors, I kiss strangers that don’t love me.

Sometimes I pretend I’m Roxy and really love myself. I can look in the mirror and pretend I have more than I was given. I pout and sulk in the sexiest ways. I wink and raise my eyebrows. I dance without worry. Then I remember I’m not Roxy.

Someday I'll learn to love Charmmaine.

Why Natalie's Rap Empowers Me

The Lonely Island is popular for its comedic songs “I’m On a Boat” and “Like a Boss”. While those are great songs and all, my favorite song on their recent album Incredibad has to be “Natalie’s Rap” from a 2006 SNL skit which turns sweet little Natalie Portman (of indie and sci-fi fame) and turns her into a “bad ass bitch”.

Sometimes, I like to call this song “Jenny’s Rap” because if you take out the face-shitting part and add in a baby joke, I would say pretty much everything in this song.

Because deep down inside, I’m an angry white girl with penis envy.

Go ahead, ask me; “What you want Jenny?”
TO DRINK AND FIGHT!
Ask me; “What you need Jenny?
TO FUCK ALL NIGHT!

Natalie’s Rap is actually an empowering song. Every time I hear it, I just want to run outside and fuck shit up—smash a chair into the window of a car, walk down the street in high heeled boots and a hoodie and threaten people, kill something… you know, normal destructive things. And sometimes in life, you just have to say “You shut the fuck up and suck my dick!” even if you don’t have a dick. Especially if you don’t have a dick, because people will be too scared and confused by your mental state to do anything about it. And let’s face it, penis’s are power.

Next time you’re doing something you shouldn’t, and a little old voice pleads to you inside your head to “think about the children!” you just have to think “All the kids looking up to me can suck my dick!” Life is too short to think about the children.

And despite the penis envy, it’s actually a great song for empowering women. Natalie doesn’t let men play with her—she uses and abuses them and kicks them out when she gets what she wants if she doesn’t beat them up first. And with lines such as “Fuck your man, it’s my name that he’s screaming!” she knows they all want her and that she can get away with it. With so many girls bowing at men’s feet now a days because they give them the one and only thing girls want—attention—Natalie is one of the few women out there who can practice self-love, and get the physical part done by a man that she doesn’t really need.

I so admire her.

Other than that, in this song you have elements of drunk driving, drug use, bitch slapping, and killing dogs for fun, which just wraps all the other empowering lyrics like caramel in a bowl of the most bad ass vanilla ice cream you’ve ever tasted.

Interpretate! Week 2: Polar Bear Hair

I think...
That if I were a Polar Bear

I would be happy.

If I were a Polar Bear with amazing hair

I would be happier

But I guess that you can't be too happy

When your home is melting.

That's one thing amazing hair can't fix.

A/N: Well, it's not like Jordan gave me much to work with this week, and it's not like I know how to write extensively about polar bears, unless it's a kid's story, which I don't have the capacity for. And let's face it, this polar bear's hair is rockin'.

My Reaction to Kerouac's On The Road

"I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight and everybody goes "Aww!"

I just finished Kerouac’s On The Road. Before I read it, I read reviews by artists claiming that it changed their lives and sent them on a soul searching journey across the United States. It didn’t change my life, but it definitely inspired me to explore other parts of life.

Kerouac’s writing is by no means poetic and beautiful. In fact, I hated Kerouac the first time I read him (“And The Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks”—a collaborative novel written with William S. Burroughs, published in 2008). But once I got past the stream of consciousness style of writing and stopped waiting for a climax that would never come, I began to really appreciate Kerouac. When you read Kerouac, you need to look at the type of people and the lifestyle and form your own pictures, rather than look for the story and let him draw pictures for you.

His writing represents a movement hidden by its era. The Beats flourished in the 50s, a time portrayed in the media as a perfect, clean cut time, built on family values and American pride. This era has always represented perfection and structure. But the beats rejected these ideas. They were the first and they were the real rebels.

The Beats represented freedom, hedonism, and spontaneous creative thought. They were careless and crazy. They worried about little and cherished and acted upon every thought that came into their minds. They lived for today and lived for their kicks. They were constantly in search for the next wonderful.

Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarity inspired me to bring this into my daily life. They taught me to try to do it all, love it all, and quickly move on to the next thing. And oh to think like a Beat! Never rejecting a single thought or action! I’m so blown away by the absolute freedom they lived in.

It’s exactly the place I am in my own life. Being disillusioned, and in another country, I want to take advantage of every second of my life. I no longer want to think about my future, though it will always be in the back of my mind. I have the perfect opportunity to do this here. I want to be a Beat and take every second of my life and transform it into a spontaneous thought and think on it, or into an action and live on it. If you look to the future all the time, you’ll miss today, and I don’t want to miss any more today’s. I want to get up and move, I want to feed my soul everything it craves, to get out and live, to be in an ever constant search for my kicks and to dig everything.

“On The Road” opened this up as an option to me. I’ve always had a lust for life, but I never pursued it in the way that Sal and Dean did. I never knew you could do that.

Unfortunately, the Beats are dead [in my opinion, the Hippies killed them, but that’s another point] and they can never be brought back. There is too much security, too many rules, and not enough time for endless road trips. Nobody has the motivation to do it anymore. All their kicks are right there on their computer screen. We’re all too attached to our comforts to leave them and pursue creativity and experiences. I’ll admit, I’m slightly one of these people, but at least I know that I can take some of the Beat movement and put it into my everyday life.

So while “On The Road” didn’t change my life, it inspired me to be out, to enjoy everything I see and touch, to dig it all, and always search for that thing that even Kerouac himself couldn’t name.