Risa

Risa is one of the few people I know who seems to genuinely recognize the importance of staying connected. It can not be overstated how much I appreciate this about her. Being in touch with old friends that you no longer live near can be difficult, but Risa is an expert in making it happen.

I met Risa on April 27th, 1996, a day that has proven to be a major turning point in my life (for many reasons, some of which I’ve written about in earlier blogs and have no bearing here). An all-day music festival was held on my university’s campus, and my friends’ band was one of the first groups performing. I went with the usual suspects and some of their friends who were visiting from Iowa City. After watching Soothing Syrup, I played hacky-sack all day while being introduced to other local groups such as Measure (sorta like Janis! These guys would become good friends) and House of Large Sizes (uh, does there have to be a contrived cesura in every song?). The headline band was Fishbone, and although I’d never heard of them, I decided to make the most of the experience and get right in with the moshing crowd. A particular group of girls in the crowd seemed really into the band, even knowing the lyrics well enough to crowd on stage and yell them into the singer’s microphone. Afterward, we went back to Brad’s dorm room, and somehow that group of girls appeared there. By the early hours of the morning, they had passed out or were giggling incoherently and Brad and I were hazily discussing where the hell these girls had come from and how we were going to get them off his bed. Risa was one of these girls.

We all separated to our hometowns for the summer, and when we returned the girls were back. They lived on the eighth floor and we were on the ninth. While I delved into an exploration of my own beliefs, the crew I had hung out with the semester before and these girls’ crews combined in an all-out exploration of chemical debauchery. (Ha! That’s probably the funniest two-word propaganda-laden rhetoric I’ve ever written, but that’s how I felt about it at the time. And it’s appropriately vague enough to avoid any implications of illegal activity.) Missing the late night verbal pinings we had engaged in that spring, I felt like these girls and their friends had infiltrated my crew (by which I really mean Brad’s crew) and taken away my friends. This analysis was not fair or accurate, and ironically Risa was a major participant in the poetry club I started solely to counter the perceived invasion.

I don’t know which Risa likes more: socializing with friends or recording the event for posterity. Countless gatherings consisted of watching the videos Risa had made of the gathering the night or two prior. Frankly, I found this ridiculous, as I was highly motivated to stay in and experience the moment (you know, Carpe diem) and have always been more interested in learning from the past than dwelling on or reliving it. Besides, I’ve never been comfortable in front of a camera. Now, however, I realize Risa was simply documenting that which is most important in life. While I sit here alone and write reminisces of times together, I can imagine Risa watching those times she preserved.

Soon, I was bored both with my own barren room and whichever smoke-filled room the gang was wasting away in. I found numerous places to be by myself but not really, including the puffy pink chair in the library and the Dancer Laundromat. Risa and her roommate Angie never locked their dormroom door. They were also rarely home. Without asking, I began sitting alone in their room for hours on end and listening through their CD collection, which was a combination of hippie bands and funk. My main motivation for this was the fact that the most impressive thing I found about Risa and Angie was that they knew the lyrics to all kinds of early hip-hop songs. Granted, the lyrics were over-the-top stupid, but I have never been able to remember song lyrics at all. I sat on their couch, cringed at the rainbow décor of the room, and alphabetized the pile of haphazard CDs while being educated by their unfamiliar content. Honestly, I didn’t like most of it, but I “borrowed” a few CDs so I could learn or transcribe a drum part or vamp.

Fast-forward a year, and Brad, Risa and a couple other “eighth floor girls” lived together in a house a couple blocks from where I worked. The door to this house was never locked either, and I occasionally stopped by, if only to sleep on their couch after working third shift. Fast-forward three more years, and Risa had moved to Eugene, Oregon to be with one of my former co-workers from that job a few months before I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. Honestly, I never expected to see or hear from her again.

Fortunately, Risa did somehow get in touch, and we began organizing a yearly group campout of former Iowans at various west coast locales. Lacking a video camera in the woods, Risa invented the notorious “Camping Journal” to record these events. She also put into operation a newsletter that had been a whimsical idea by a somewhat ad-hoc group of Iowans as a means to keep in touch. I was invited to join the newsletter club and instantly began sabotaging it by writing the most ludicrously random and personal things I could think of. I found this to be a lot of fun, but the newsletter only happens about four times a year. Eager to write more, I started this blog.

I received the latest newsletter yesterday. Even though I wish Risa and Chant hadn’t moved back to Iowa, it seems to be working out. Who could’ve predicted they’d be such a great match? It didn’t even matter, and I almost didn’t notice, she neglected to include one of my submissions.