July 21, 1998, Part II

So anyway.... I'm just gonna pick up kinda where I left off, so if you haven't already you'd better go back and check out part one... which isn't really part one, it's just "July 21" or if you don't want to even bother looking for the link (because I'm too lazy to put one here) you can just type in "july21.html" where you currently see "july212.html" up on that little address bar.

Okay. So I know Ani hates it when people say things like "my tribute to the goddess" and half of her fans hate it too, saying you have to respect Ani as a person and la de da de da.... I know all that logically, but my feelings have never been logical and I don't think they're supposed to be. So my feelings tend to be more along the lines of "ani the goddess". And why not? I mean, I'm just this little (okay, not so little) 16 year old sitting in the living room of her parents house listening to a bootleg of Ani singing in Cinncinnati a couple of months ago. I'm not doing her any harm... and even in "I'm no Heroine" where she sings about how she doesn't want people looking up to her like that, she sings "I just hope somewhere some woman hears my music and it helps her through her day" and that's what it does. ...when Ani was in Central park, she kinda mentioned it, saying that she'd "invented this really stupid job for myself, where I stand up on platforms and tell people 'this is me, me me me, take it, I don't want it any more' And they take it. And it's their own damn business what they do with it, but..." (I quoted that from memory, so it could be a little off, btw) so she knows, sort of, what I'm trying to say.

See, Ani is this person who's living her live the way I (and apparently a whole lot of other people too) wish I could live my life. She is probably the bravest person who ever came out of Buffalo... and I think that must come naturally to her, because she rarely ever admits that it's not easy to be that brave. Like in Face Up and Sing, she says "some chick says, 'thank you for saying all the things I never do' and I say, 'the thanks I get is to take all the shit for you, it's nice that you listen, it'd be nice if you joined in, as long as you play their game girl you're never gonna win' " And she could have been singing that right to me, because I am not a brave person. Not in that sense, anyway. In the Advocate once, Ani mentioned how things are getting better, but you still can't sing about loving another woman in a bar in Buffalo without getting booed off the stage... or something vaguely like that... and the point is I could never sing about loving another woman in front of anybody, let alone a bar full of people in Buffalo. I get scared so easily sometimes... I mean, I always park my car right next to the light, in the middle of all the other cars. (I get there early, just for this purpose) and I have a whistle on my keychain that hold while I'm walking out to my car... and it usually isn't even that dark.

But see, that's kind of where Ani comes in. She's braver than me, and I can accept that. But she kind of also empowers me, too. See, she's what I want to be, in a lot of ways. And sure, my statements aren't near as big as hers, but when someone walks around my little town wearing shorts and sandals, letting anyone with eyes know that she hasn't shaved in a year, that's a statement too. And I don't think I ever could have made that without Ani. And I can't explain precisely how she made that difference, but she did. And I knew it during that first song. I knew as soon as I heard her sing "fuck you, and your untouchable face, and fuck you, for existing in the first place..." that this was someone who really didn't care what anyone else thought. And that's how I want to be...

I'm not doing a very good job of explaining this, I don't think. Maybe it's because it is now 2:44AM... or maybe it's just that it's beyond explaining. But Ani is so honest. She doesn't apologize and she doesn't explain. ...at least not who she is. And she doesn't compromise her principals. What amazes me the most, I think, is that she has the courage to change. I mean she knew very well when she released Dilate that a whole lot of her hard-core fans were going to be angry that she released an album about loving a man... and they were. And she released it anyway. And then she wrote "people talk about my image like I come in 2 dimentions, like lipstick is a sign of my declining mind, like what I happen to be wearing the day that someone takes a picture is my new statement for all of woman kind" (little plastic castle) That at least is one thing I don't do... I don't care whether or not Ani wears lipstick or gets married. A whole lot of her fans were mad when she got married last month (was it last month already?) but I really didn't. But I think I'm even worse, because I think in my fucked-up little world Ani can do no wrong. And is that worse or better, than thinking she should stick to her 2-dimentionalness. (that's not a word, is it?)

I think the answer... or at least the question... is hidden in the above ramblings... maybe tomorrow when I'm more awake I'll read them and try to find it.

...it just occured to me that I've gotten like three letters which mentioned this journal, and two of them described it as very honest... and now I'm sitting here rapsodizing about how I wish I could be as honest as Ani. So maybe I'm sort of getting there... an an anonymous sorta way. I mean, up there where I mention walking around "in my little town" I don't even mention my little town's name and believe me that's entirely on purpose. If I were just walking through wal-mart someday, and someone who I barely know came up to me and told me they love my journal... well that would be awful, and I would probably come home and curl up in a ball in my bed with my teddy bear. Actually looking at someone and telling them any of these things is impossible. Even my ex-girlfriend ("J.A.") and I used to communicate primarily through notes and journals and e-mail and whatnot. Rarely verbally, and when we did communicate verbally, it was almost always over the phone... or if we were actually together, the majority of the communication was kind of telepathic... resulting from having spent so much time inside each others heads... at least heads as they translate into journals. Of course there's some sort of censoring that goes on between the mind and the fingers when you're writing one of these things... even when I get to the point where it seems like my mind is communicate directly to my fingers and I'm just reading the results, even then, there's some sort of device in there that warns me when something just a little too personal starts to leak out. So it doesn't. I mean, there aren't many things... most of them deal with sex, and the others are usually those memories that I cringe remembering, because they're still so embarassing... and even then a lot of those memories still end up on here.

I am completely off topic. If there ever was a topic, that is. and I think there was.

About how hard it is to be brave... my second favorite singer, at least right now, is Paula Cole, precisely because she admits how really hard it is to be brave. "It's me who is my enemy, me who beats me up, me who makes the monsters, me who strips my confidence..." and I admit to being really posessive about that song.. now that it's on the radio and MTV and all that there are all these people who say they like it, but I feel like I have an entirely different connection to that song that these people can't understand. It's the song that I listen to when I'm curled up in my bed in the dark... I saw Paula Cole sing at one of last years Lilith Fairs, and she was one of the "main stage events" but the ampitheater was almost empty, since a lot of people were outside eating, or hadn't even bothered to arrive yet, since they were only coming for Sarah McLachlan or Tracy Chapman... but there were some people in there... and there I was, at the end of me, this little girl standing up screaming in the back of the theater at the end of both "me" and "tiger" ("and I want to sit with my legs wide open and laugh so loud that the whole damn restaurant will turn and look at me.... and I've left bethlehem and I feel free, I've left the girl I was supposed to be, and someday, I'll be born...")

and she probably couldn't even hear me.

g'night.
~Sarah