what would i do without 600 mg of ibuprofen
i logged onto twitter last night for my every-two-months check-in, saw that lit twitter is still subtweeting one another (yawn, stop it! you’re ruining words!) but then gleefully saw a thread where people were fangirling over the legendary, GOATed performance of harold perrineau as mercutio in baz luhrman’s 1996 romeo + juliet.
and all i have to say is FINALLY!
when i say i think about his performance as mercutio daily that is not an internet exaggeration. he IS that movie. he MAKES that movie. i have seen the first half of the movie so many times more than the second half because once they kill him off i lose interest. i once had a journal (i’m sure i still have it somewhere) dedicated solely to copying mercutio’s queen mab speech over and over in an attempt to memorize it, and this was ALL BECAUSE of harold perrineau’s portrayal of mercutio!
can you GET BETTER THAN THIS?:
mercutio’s queen mab speech delivered in drag while trying to get emo friend romeo to stop bitching about girls and give into the nihilistic ecstasy (pun) of life before spinning yourself up into a doom spiral that ends with fireworks and you ready to crash a party and throw hands? get the fuck out. shakespeare has been twerking in his grave ever since this portrayal i stg. anyway
DID YOU KNOW parchment is made of animal skin? specifically cow and sheep skin. they would skin the animal, put the skin in a de-hairing solution of rotted apples and lime (the chemical, not the citrus) and stir it for several days, then stretch the skin out, shave off any lingering bristles, and let it dry? and that’s what all the books and manuscripts were written on between papyrus and paper? (i’m sure there were other materials used but i don’t know them and for sure parchment was far and away the most common.)
parchment was refined into vellum, which is the same thing but made from the skins of CALVES and LAMBS, aka the veal of writing material, and because the parchment was made from BABY ANIMAL SKINS it was softer, smoother, more sought-after.
i learned this because i was reading about the fire in the library of thomas cotton, which devastated his collection of manuscripts in 1731. he had already been long dead but his library and estate was being maintained by his grandson. tommy the third (i don’t remember his actual name) had his in-laws over for a visit and put them up in the guest rooms directly underneath his grandpa’s library. he lit great fires for them in their guest rooms so they’d stay warm in the drafty estate, and then they woke up in the middle of the night hacking up ash with the library aflame above them. over 100 of the 600 manuscripts were damaged beyond repair. a few days later, the estate began the careful reconstruction and repair of the burned books, and that project continues to this day. three hundred years later, they are still trying to restore some of the burned texts. wild, right?
well, so how i got learning about parchment itself was because i was reading about how parchment burns. it doesn’t burn like paper. it violently shrinks and becomes brittle, like bacon. if a manuscript made of parchment is on fire and you throw water on it, you’re equally fucked, because the water makes all of the collagen in the parchment glue up and it becomes a shrunken brick you can’t unstick to itself.
the other day i found the first boxcar children in a little free library and read it cover to cover. i had begun to make an erasure of it and still want to but then got caught up in the story and the funny proper little sentences featured in early-mid 20th century children’s books. this is the kind of language that has me foaming at the mouth— simple little sentences that bely this rich elegance of language. it’s the same effect of a meticulously applied red lip on a face devoid of any other makeup, just well scrubbed first with soap, you know?
yesterday i sat on the toilet seat as my boyfriend took my jewelry pliers and cut my rook earring out of my ear. i don’t know how it got infected, but it did, and it had to get out. afterwards i felt so funny. i don’t, or at least, i didn’t think, have any love lost for this specific piercing, but getting it cut out and dooming it to surely close up affected me more than i thought it would. i got my rook pierced in 2019, when i was a few months out from my rape, and understanding it as a rape, and piercing my rook was some way of being like “see? I choose when i feel pain in this body because it’s mine!” and i have had it ever since until yesterday.
i started to write about the night of the assault since it’s been on my mind a lot recently but then halfway thru i got this overwhelming desire to listen to THE SMALLEST MAN WHO EVER LIVED by taylor swift so i’ve been listening to that on repeat:
I do dislike how much this man and the ways he hurt me has followed me around in the years since i last heard from him. it’s like an extra organ that got stitched to me that i have to lug around even though it’s dragging on the ground and getting covered in fuzz and shmutz. since he sent me a cowardly apology email in 2018 and then never looked me in the face again, i have fallen in love three times, had a nervous breakdown, got sober, learned a new language, started a podcast, stopped a podcast, made zines, moved to knoxville, moved to dubuque, moved to california, lost a dog, got a puppy, nannied four babies, got a job. i have to write out all the things i’ve done and accomplished and experienced since him sometimes, because otherwise i forget, and think i’ve stalled out and done nothing. for instance, after him, i wrote poems but for several years, i felt like they were all fragments and there couldn’t be more than a half dozen, until maybe a year ago i collected them all and realized i had written a whole book’s worth. i’ve still been out here, making stuff, learning myself, learning new things and facts, listening to music and watching movies that delight me, cutting my hair in my bathroom and being loved by my friends and family. but i am angry that i couldn’t breathe at the jimmy eat world show because i was convinced i saw him, even though i was there with my current partner. i am angry that he still uses a picture i took of him as his author picture when he gets published. i am angry i find myself looking, occasionally, to see if he’s been published. i am angry that every time i process a big chunk of what happened the water clears but then more mud is revealed beneath it, and i still have to go through this process again and again even though it’s been years.
my friend johari and i used to write each other letters and voicemails and we would end each one with the imperative “STAY ANGRY!”
as i grow and learn about myself, i am trying to be the kind of person who can acknowledge my part of bad situations, the kind of person who can look squarely at a Bad Time and say “well here’s how i shot myself in the foot” or “here’s the ways in which this person who damaged me was himself damaged.” and i think that’s important work, because at the end of the day, i would like to live, and in order for me to live i must attain some sort of peace around bad things. but understanding that i cannot swim around in the swampy fury does not mean that i don’t want to sometimes, that i don’t feel entitled to. understanding that all good things and all bad things are things that made me who i am and i make up a tiny corner of a giant cosmic web is all well and good but sometimes i really do just want to burn it all down.
tl;dr: the most rare and fancy variant of vellum was called uterine vellum which is parchment derived not from baby animals but from animals that were stillborn. you cannot get softer than being born already dead.