Raquel D'Apice (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} theuglyvolvo) wrote,@ 2008-02-26 06:04:00 |
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This is between you and me and everyone in the world with internet access.
Written for the Inner Monologues essay reading. Topic: Deep dark secrets.
Deep Dark Secrets
I looked around for my deepest, darkest secret hoping that I would re-encounter some scandalous thing I had since forgotten. (Oh, it completely slipped my mind, but I’m only sexually aroused by Fig Newtons and Office Supply catalogs. Perfect!) Living, however, in the time and place I do, the things I share and the things I keep secret have been somewhat altered. It is not terribly taboo, in the East Village, to be sexually aroused by Fig Newtons and Office Supply Catalogs and I have several friends who will openly tell me about an orgy involving 8 neighbors, Nabisco, and an order form from Staples. It no longer strikes me as terribly secretive. What I have become more secretive about, however, are the things that set me aside as perversely, definitively less cool than the people who are willfully humping boxes of binder clips.
“The village is so quiet at this time of the morning,” a friend noted, as the two of us walked down First avenue in the early morning hours.
“It’s like quaint, almost. Like everyone’s about to start waking up and doing things. Sort of like…” she smiles. “You remember that scene in the beginning of Beauty and the Beast where Belle’s walking down the street, where she’s like, “Little Tooooown, it’s a quiet village.”
I smile and egg her on. She is clasping her hands together dramatically as she sings.
“Every daaay, like the one before.” She continues smiling good-naturedly but begins to sing-talk the remainder of the verse. “Little town full of something something…”
“Little people,” I say.
“Little peopllllle. I can’t remember the rest of it,” she says.
“Waking uuuuup to say,” I sing it as if prompting her, hoping that she will join me for the next verse. She leans in but says nothing, smiling. “Waking uuup to saaaay…” I realize that she doesn’t know the remainder of the words and so I proceed without her, talking through the song with all the musical inflection of Peter Jennings, desperately hoping that I will seem less enthusiastic.
“Bonjour! Bonjour! Bonjour Bonjour Bonjour!”
“There goes the baker with his tray like always, the same old bread and rolls to sell! Every morning just the same since the morning that we came to this poor provincial town. (Good morning Belle!) Morning Monsieur! (Where are you off to?) The bookshop! I just finished the most wonderful story about a beanstalk and an ogre and a… (Marie! The baguettes! Hurry up!) Look there she goes that girl is strange, no question…
“Wow,” my friend says. “You know like the whole thing.”
“I don’t,” I say. “Just that first part and I don’t even know why I know it.”
This is not true, I think to myself, staring into the innocent eyes of my friend. Unless by “just the first part” I meant “every lyric to every Disney song from the mid eighties through present day,” and if by “I don’t even know why I know it,” I meant, “because I listened to these songs like I was an obsessed madwoman.”
Hi, my name is Raquel and I am addicted to memorizing the lyrics of Disney songs. It has been 22 months since I have last danced through the streets to the Aladdin Sountrack.
“Hi Raquel, welcome,” say the members, clapping enthusiastically. They are wearing chambray shirts with pictures of Lady and the Tramp or The Aristocats stenciled onto the backs of them. They can tell you that David Ogden Stiers was the voice of both Cogsworth the clock and a Conquistador opposite Mel Gibson’s “John Smith.” All of them have at one point owned mouse ears. They are not the types of people with whom I care to be associated.
* * *
The Disney aspect of it probably developed between the ages of 1 and 13, during which I was allowed to see only rated G movies. It was at this point that I developed an obsession with walking around singing, hoping that adorable woodland animals would follow the sound of my voice. And while we don’t have a history of song-lyric memorizing in my family, there is a strong genetic predisposition to play the same song over and over again, which I recognized early on and which became problematic the year we acquired a car with a CD player.
“Just his the back arrow for me, Ross. Just one more time.” My mother gestured toward the car stereo with her chin. My father, carefully peering at the CD player, poked awkwardly at the button with his index finger.
“I love this song,” my mother said. She was already nodding her head to the early instrumental notes.
“We’ve spent the past 30 minutes listening to “The Sound of Silence” by Simon and Garfunkel,” I said calmly. “Why don’t we listen to another song on the CD? Or another CD?” I suggested, since we had previously listened to 30 minutes of “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” and a 45 minute blast of “I am a rock, I am an island,” which is nothing, if not an effective way to boost the morale of three children stuck in a Volvo. It was not particularly unusual to spend a 4 and a half hour trip listening to five songs, and I remember one specific instance in which we drove the entire way from New City to Utica listening to nothing but “Have you Ever Really Loved a Woman,” by Bryan Adams.
And yet my own affliction persists.
“Wow,” said yet another unsuspecting friend as we perused the shelves of an antique store upstate. “Will you look at this stuff.”
Leaping on her turn of phrase I grabbed a pewter candlestick and a crystal martini glass, holding them enthusiastically up in the air.
“Look at this stuff. Isn’t it neat? Wouldn’t you think my collection’s complete! Wouldn’t you think I’m the girl…the girl who has…everything!
“I would think that,” my friend says.
Look at this trove, treasure untold, how many wonders can one cavern hold?! Looking around you you think, “Sure. She’s got everything!”
“Oh—where’s that from?” my friend asks. “I remember that song!”
“I’ve got gadgets and gizmos a plenty. I’ve got whosits and whatsits galore.”
“Little Mermaid. It’s Little Mermaid. I knew I knew it.”
“You want thingamabobs? I’ve got 20. But who caaaares.”
“You’re making a scene. You’re making a scene and you look retarded.”
“No big deeeeeeal.”
“People are starting to look at us.”
“I want moooooore.”
“Please stop this.”
“I want to be…where the people are. I want to see…want to see them dancing…walking around on those…what do you call it? Oh…feet.”
“We’re leaving,” she said. “We’re actually leaving right now and if you sing another word of that song you will no longer be allowed to be “where the people are.”
* * *
The first step is admitting you have a problem. After a bad day I would often find myself curled up on the cold tile of my bathroom, getting one last hit of “Hakuna Matata.” Over time you became less discerning and I would sometimes find myself listening to not-even-particularly-great Disney soundtracks. I couldn’t quite swing another round of “Whole New World,” from Aladdin, and would find myself in a dank supply closet, my headphones blasting “a guy like you” from the Hunchback of Notre Dame” or “Just Around the Riverbend,” from Pocahontas, a movie which, despite the absence of both critical acclaim and a definitive nose on the main character (she just sort of had nostrils, unless she was in profile) I memorized the lines to in just under two weeks.
And it wasn’t until it began affecting the ones I love that I realized it had become a problem. While cleaning my room, humming the opening montage to “Hercules,” (a greek epic set to Gospel music) I found my little sister singing along as well.
“You…you know this?” I asked, caught by surprise. “I thought you weren’t into this stuff?”
“I wasn’t,” she said. “But when you have a bedroom adjascent to someone to plays the same songs non-stop for a month at a time, you learn them.
“Oh, Karen. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry,” she said. “I love this stuff. It’s great.”
And I looked on, conflicted, like someone who is technically responsible for their sibling’s drug problem—it was my fault and now I had dragged her into my horrific underworld of embarrassment. She was so young. She had so much ahead of her.
I hung my head in shame.
* * *
And while yes, this is it, this is my revelatory deep dark secret, it’s embarrassing but it’s certainly not awful. Recovery has been a long hard road, which I have walked down whistling, followed by whimsical woodland creatures. While I haven’t forgotten any of the lyrics I’ve learned over the years, I’ve long since left my Disney CD’s at home. And it is only through my sister that it remains alive at all. I received a mixed CD from her a while back which contained the normal things one would expect from my college age sister—Dashboard Confessional, followed by The Shins, followed by Rilo Kiley, followed by…
“Hey,” my friend asked, peering at our car CD player on the way back down to the city. “Isn’t this from the Jungle Book?”
“It is,” I told her calmly, smiling. “And if you don’t mind hitting that back arrow on the stereo for me, I’d like to hear it again.”
Written for the Inner Monologues essay reading. Topic: Deep dark secrets.
Deep Dark Secrets
I looked around for my deepest, darkest secret hoping that I would re-encounter some scandalous thing I had since forgotten. (Oh, it completely slipped my mind, but I’m only sexually aroused by Fig Newtons and Office Supply catalogs. Perfect!) Living, however, in the time and place I do, the things I share and the things I keep secret have been somewhat altered. It is not terribly taboo, in the East Village, to be sexually aroused by Fig Newtons and Office Supply Catalogs and I have several friends who will openly tell me about an orgy involving 8 neighbors, Nabisco, and an order form from Staples. It no longer strikes me as terribly secretive. What I have become more secretive about, however, are the things that set me aside as perversely, definitively less cool than the people who are willfully humping boxes of binder clips.
“The village is so quiet at this time of the morning,” a friend noted, as the two of us walked down First avenue in the early morning hours.
“It’s like quaint, almost. Like everyone’s about to start waking up and doing things. Sort of like…” she smiles. “You remember that scene in the beginning of Beauty and the Beast where Belle’s walking down the street, where she’s like, “Little Tooooown, it’s a quiet village.”
I smile and egg her on. She is clasping her hands together dramatically as she sings.
“Every daaay, like the one before.” She continues smiling good-naturedly but begins to sing-talk the remainder of the verse. “Little town full of something something…”
“Little people,” I say.
“Little peopllllle. I can’t remember the rest of it,” she says.
“Waking uuuuup to say,” I sing it as if prompting her, hoping that she will join me for the next verse. She leans in but says nothing, smiling. “Waking uuup to saaaay…” I realize that she doesn’t know the remainder of the words and so I proceed without her, talking through the song with all the musical inflection of Peter Jennings, desperately hoping that I will seem less enthusiastic.
“Bonjour! Bonjour! Bonjour Bonjour Bonjour!”
“There goes the baker with his tray like always, the same old bread and rolls to sell! Every morning just the same since the morning that we came to this poor provincial town. (Good morning Belle!) Morning Monsieur! (Where are you off to?) The bookshop! I just finished the most wonderful story about a beanstalk and an ogre and a… (Marie! The baguettes! Hurry up!) Look there she goes that girl is strange, no question…
“Wow,” my friend says. “You know like the whole thing.”
“I don’t,” I say. “Just that first part and I don’t even know why I know it.”
This is not true, I think to myself, staring into the innocent eyes of my friend. Unless by “just the first part” I meant “every lyric to every Disney song from the mid eighties through present day,” and if by “I don’t even know why I know it,” I meant, “because I listened to these songs like I was an obsessed madwoman.”
Hi, my name is Raquel and I am addicted to memorizing the lyrics of Disney songs. It has been 22 months since I have last danced through the streets to the Aladdin Sountrack.
“Hi Raquel, welcome,” say the members, clapping enthusiastically. They are wearing chambray shirts with pictures of Lady and the Tramp or The Aristocats stenciled onto the backs of them. They can tell you that David Ogden Stiers was the voice of both Cogsworth the clock and a Conquistador opposite Mel Gibson’s “John Smith.” All of them have at one point owned mouse ears. They are not the types of people with whom I care to be associated.
* * *
The Disney aspect of it probably developed between the ages of 1 and 13, during which I was allowed to see only rated G movies. It was at this point that I developed an obsession with walking around singing, hoping that adorable woodland animals would follow the sound of my voice. And while we don’t have a history of song-lyric memorizing in my family, there is a strong genetic predisposition to play the same song over and over again, which I recognized early on and which became problematic the year we acquired a car with a CD player.
“Just his the back arrow for me, Ross. Just one more time.” My mother gestured toward the car stereo with her chin. My father, carefully peering at the CD player, poked awkwardly at the button with his index finger.
“I love this song,” my mother said. She was already nodding her head to the early instrumental notes.
“We’ve spent the past 30 minutes listening to “The Sound of Silence” by Simon and Garfunkel,” I said calmly. “Why don’t we listen to another song on the CD? Or another CD?” I suggested, since we had previously listened to 30 minutes of “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” and a 45 minute blast of “I am a rock, I am an island,” which is nothing, if not an effective way to boost the morale of three children stuck in a Volvo. It was not particularly unusual to spend a 4 and a half hour trip listening to five songs, and I remember one specific instance in which we drove the entire way from New City to Utica listening to nothing but “Have you Ever Really Loved a Woman,” by Bryan Adams.
And yet my own affliction persists.
“Wow,” said yet another unsuspecting friend as we perused the shelves of an antique store upstate. “Will you look at this stuff.”
Leaping on her turn of phrase I grabbed a pewter candlestick and a crystal martini glass, holding them enthusiastically up in the air.
“Look at this stuff. Isn’t it neat? Wouldn’t you think my collection’s complete! Wouldn’t you think I’m the girl…the girl who has…everything!
“I would think that,” my friend says.
Look at this trove, treasure untold, how many wonders can one cavern hold?! Looking around you you think, “Sure. She’s got everything!”
“Oh—where’s that from?” my friend asks. “I remember that song!”
“I’ve got gadgets and gizmos a plenty. I’ve got whosits and whatsits galore.”
“Little Mermaid. It’s Little Mermaid. I knew I knew it.”
“You want thingamabobs? I’ve got 20. But who caaaares.”
“You’re making a scene. You’re making a scene and you look retarded.”
“No big deeeeeeal.”
“People are starting to look at us.”
“I want moooooore.”
“Please stop this.”
“I want to be…where the people are. I want to see…want to see them dancing…walking around on those…what do you call it? Oh…feet.”
“We’re leaving,” she said. “We’re actually leaving right now and if you sing another word of that song you will no longer be allowed to be “where the people are.”
* * *
The first step is admitting you have a problem. After a bad day I would often find myself curled up on the cold tile of my bathroom, getting one last hit of “Hakuna Matata.” Over time you became less discerning and I would sometimes find myself listening to not-even-particularly-great Disney soundtracks. I couldn’t quite swing another round of “Whole New World,” from Aladdin, and would find myself in a dank supply closet, my headphones blasting “a guy like you” from the Hunchback of Notre Dame” or “Just Around the Riverbend,” from Pocahontas, a movie which, despite the absence of both critical acclaim and a definitive nose on the main character (she just sort of had nostrils, unless she was in profile) I memorized the lines to in just under two weeks.
And it wasn’t until it began affecting the ones I love that I realized it had become a problem. While cleaning my room, humming the opening montage to “Hercules,” (a greek epic set to Gospel music) I found my little sister singing along as well.
“You…you know this?” I asked, caught by surprise. “I thought you weren’t into this stuff?”
“I wasn’t,” she said. “But when you have a bedroom adjascent to someone to plays the same songs non-stop for a month at a time, you learn them.
“Oh, Karen. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry,” she said. “I love this stuff. It’s great.”
And I looked on, conflicted, like someone who is technically responsible for their sibling’s drug problem—it was my fault and now I had dragged her into my horrific underworld of embarrassment. She was so young. She had so much ahead of her.
I hung my head in shame.
* * *
And while yes, this is it, this is my revelatory deep dark secret, it’s embarrassing but it’s certainly not awful. Recovery has been a long hard road, which I have walked down whistling, followed by whimsical woodland creatures. While I haven’t forgotten any of the lyrics I’ve learned over the years, I’ve long since left my Disney CD’s at home. And it is only through my sister that it remains alive at all. I received a mixed CD from her a while back which contained the normal things one would expect from my college age sister—Dashboard Confessional, followed by The Shins, followed by Rilo Kiley, followed by…
“Hey,” my friend asked, peering at our car CD player on the way back down to the city. “Isn’t this from the Jungle Book?”
“It is,” I told her calmly, smiling. “And if you don’t mind hitting that back arrow on the stereo for me, I’d like to hear it again.”
