25 Things Even My Best Friends Didn’t Know Until Now

by Yoko Ono

From the Bottom Up:

1. I like to wiggle my toes when I’m waiting for something – like in the waiting room of my dentist. It makes me less nervous.
2. I like to be barefoot as much as possible. Places I’m definitely barefoot are: a) at home b) in bed c) in the shower. What’s wrong? You guessed that much? Well, you never know, do you!
3. In fact I love to put my feet up at the end of the day, and watch them looking kinda good. I say in my mind to them: “Thank you for taking me around for so many years to so many places and still doing so – with happy steps. You’re the best!”
4. I have rather short legs to match my short height. I love that. The fact that they’re short makes them easier to go around with. Can you imagine if I had long legs? They might go in different directions from each other, or something. Then what would I do? Short legs work very well for me.
5. Okay, I must confess. I love wearing high heel shoes. I love wearing silk stockings. I love wearing hot pants. When I arm myself with those three, I feel like a tough girl from the 1930′s. If I didn’t look at myself in the mirror, I might just mistake myself for Rita Heyworth, or Marlene Dietrich. How great is that?!
6. Oh, I forgot to tell you about my ankles, calves and thighs. Well, later.
7. I must go back and tell you about my flats. When I wore flats at my college campus in the 50′s, I had these great flats which made one of my toes stick out. I thought that it was so creative. Wherever I went, the girls at campus looked at the toe, looked at me, and expressed disapproval with their eyes. I loved it. But they were nowhere as special as high heeled shoes. They did not make my heart beat fast.
8. So now we go to gloves. I love gloves. I have leather ones, lace ones, satin ones. Long, medium, short. All great looking. But I hate wearing them. It’s too bad. Because I could wear them and look really sharp. But I don’t like them on – my hands cannot breathe properly. My hands love to feel the air, the breeze, the wind, the sun. So I put on really great ones that match my outfit, go out, and take them off right away. It’s really too bad. My hands are knobbly and tiny. Not a good combo. So I would love it if I could show off the gloves instead of my hands. But…that’s life.
9. I love rings. But for some reason, just like the gloves, I like to take them off right away, as soon as I am alone. I go to an opening wearing a nice ring. I come out of it, get in the car, and the first thing I do is to take off the ring and put it in my purse. I don’t like that feeling of something restricting my finger.
10. Speaking of stuff that bothers me: I hate putting things on my face. They say it’s better to put some cream on your face if you don’t want to shrivel up like an old potato one day. So I got all the latest cream I read in the ads. But once I had put one of them on, it made me feel so sticky that I had to immediately wipe it off with a very hot towel. I couldn’t help it. My whole face rebelled against the stickiness. Speaking of sticky: Once I put on some green mud on my face and got pimples for a week. That was not good.
11. Now hats! I think everybody has a vague idea that maybe I love hats, since I am always wearing one. In case you might think that maybe I’m trying to hide a bald spot or something, I occasionally take it off to expose my bushy hair. But soon enough, I put it on again. The reason is so complex that I’d have to go to a shrink for a year, and probably still wouldn’t find out what’s making me do this. I don’t go to any shrink, so I will probably never know. Maybe I just like hats. Or maybe I think I will look taller if I wore one. Or maybe I think people’s focus will go to my hat and not my face. Of course, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with my face, honey. A girl does not have to hide under a hat, ever. If there were a few wrinkles and shades, they just make you look more interesting…. So they say.
12. All my life my mother told me that I had strong jaws like a guy. It was not womanly. Well, I got them from my father, I think. So yes, I won’t say I am particularly feminine. So what? I used to hide my jaws with my long hair. John used to say “Show me your face!” and took my hair out of my face. “Look, you’re beautiful. I don’t know why you are hiding with your hair.” I kept myself hidden.
13. I also kept my hands in my pockets as much as possible. My mother didn’t have to point out to me that my hands were stringy. But they were.
14. My head was unusually large for my small bod. So John called me a “Martian”.
15. I look at the sky and feel like my home is somewhere far away – so I thought I might really be a Martian – a result of cross-breeding thousands of years ago.
16. I used to love wandering aimlessly. I used to walk about 7 miles in the city aimlessly, but with the speed of the wind! I can’t do that now. If I did it now it would be unfair to the security guard.
17. But I’ve got tons of great things to do at home. Most people think “what?” Because they want a name for what I do. What is the name for it? I just like pottering around my flat, fixing the crooked frames, looking over the park and day dreaming.
18. It’s so nice to see the sky through a small opening of an old fashioned window from my apartment!
19. I think of the days we were gods and goddesses, playing ball with planets. We were larger than dinosaurs. But now we sit like good girls and boys and watch the small tennis ball going left and right, forgetting the days when we use to play with bigger balls. What happens when we shrink even further, and become the size of cockroaches? Will we be still playing with something that echoes the time when we were larger?
20. When the war started, I thought it would be more economical to drop 10 thousand dollar bags from the sky to the people of the country. It’s cheaper, and what they need. But now we don’t even have enough money to do that.
21. When I daydream, I go all the way to the end of the Earth, and come back. It’s a nice exercise.
22. Well actually, not always. Sometimes I just go to the city I love. Once I was flying low in Geneva, and I saw a friend of mine walking. The interesting thing was that friend was somebody who died over ten years ago. He did not have any strong reason to be in Geneva. I just wanted to share this with you because it seems that we just wander where we like, and when we want. Not for any reason. I loved that.
23. Now that you know so much about me, I should not go all the way to 25, or should I? For number 23, Let’s say, I am a person who needs a lot of time to myself. If I don’t have the time, I will be making it, anyway. My mother use to wave her hand in front of me and say “Yoko are you there?” Well, if I were always there, I would not be me, would I?
24. John and I felt that we were like people in an H.G. Wells story. Two people who are walking so fast that nobody else can see them. Well, that creates a problem, too. Sometimes you want to have a good chat with friends.
25. In a day, sometimes I feel so much love for the world, I think my heart is bursting. Sometimes, I feel so scared, I want to shrink myself even further. I think that’s what happened to us gods and goddesses. Like the dinosaurs, we realized that it’s too dangerous to be so large. So we kept shrinking ourselves to what we are now. We might get even smaller. I see the sign in the engineers making smaller gadgets, smaller and smaller. Pretty soon, our fingers will be too large to operate them. So what are we doing? I trust in the human wisdom. We are incredibly intelligent beings. So we might know something without thinking that we know…. Well, even my best friend didn’t know until now that I was thinking of crazy things like this.

Have a good day!

yoko ono
New York City
Feb. 2009

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