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| “Teach me thy ways, O Lord” is, like all prayers, a rash one, and one I cannot but recommend. I don't know how to put sadness into words right now. How do I take apart this feeling that has sunk down and settled into the pit of my stomach and describe its elements? Honestly and truly, it felt like nothing would come of the scan, because surely I've gained my way back to the land of the normal at this point, after all these years?! If doubt existed, it was at the back of my mind with other minutiae, like do I need to buy more floss? And then the phone call comes and it instantly feels like I knew all along what she'd have to say. It's to the stage of osteopenia. The teenage me grumbled as she listed off milligrams of vitamins to take...the nuisance of it all, back to the life of the pill box all laid out in neat rows? And the current me sat down on the front steps and cried. Poor, pitiful me. Yes, I'll tell myself, and allow others to tell me that things could be so much worse, that so many people live with so much more pain and heartache. And it comforts to feel fortunate. But sometimes, the loss needs to be mourned. This body I have been lent is already old and worn. "There is Julie Norwich. Julie Norwich is salted with fire. She is preserved like a salted fillet from all evil, baptized at birth into time and now into eternity, into the bladelike arms of God. For who will love her now, without a face, when women with faces abound, and people are so?" | | |
| "Even with the rest belated, everything is antiquated
Are you writing from the heart? Are you writing from the heart?
Even in his heart the Devil has to know the water level
Are you writing from the heart? Are you writing from the heart?" Leaving for Chicago in t-minus six hours and I haven't even thought of packing yet. I'm getting to be really bad about this. Maybe I need to hire someone to do it for me. And I'm checking the bag. Heaven forbid we waste ten minutes of family vacation fun at baggage claim, but I refuse to stress over 3 ounce bottles of liquid right now. And I apparently cannot spell "ounce" to save my life. I don't know why I noticed or why I even care, but they changed the "Dead End" sign on our street to a "No Outlet" sign. It's just so very...politically correct of the city? "Dead End" has a negative connotation to it, so let's spend money on a new sign...and change the entire outlook of the street. Really, this is what I have to complain about?! Well, I have a right to not be open to change every once in awhile... The thought came to me while I was driving to work this morning, with pages of medical history filled out and riding in the passenger seat next to me, that when this millennium started, it brought a whole new life for me with it. "The turn of the century" came and everything is different forever. It's so familiar, yet still a strange thought. Looks like I'm waking up at 4:30 a.m. to pack. I wonder what 4:30 me will be in the mood to wear this weekend... "And I cried...myself....to sleep....last night
For the Earth, and materials, they may sound just right to me." | | |
| "Above me, wind does its best
to blow leaves off
the aspen tree a month too soon.
No use wind. All you succeed
in doing is making music, the noise
of failure growing beautiful." What a wonderful weekend. So many things I need to write down, but as I have to wake up for work in a few short hours, that's not possible quite yet. And shouldn't have checked the work email just now as I'm slightly stressed about what tomorrow holds already. I'm like these silly fireflies now, only flying straight toward a spiderweb I can see in broad daylight, helpless to stop my forward movement. Shit. "It helps to resign as the controller of your fate. All that energy we expend to keep things running right is not what’s keeping things running right." | | |
| "Stop getting everything you want
and get a piece..of what you need." I pointed to the small, vague spot on the ceiling; not brown really, but the color of a marshmallow beginning to smolder over a fire. He didn't remember how it had gotten there. How we had thrown the pop-pops at the ceiling and how the gritty, exploded innards had rained down on us as we laughed. It brought a smile to my face to see his incredulity. We did that? Of course we did that. Oh. Death and destruction outside my window. My eyes are averted now, but they keep darting back against my will. A firefly is newly trapped in a web, can't have been more than a minute now, and is being decimated by a spider. The flashing drew my attention, and now my gaze is almost transfixed. It makes me cringe every time I glance up, physically painful almost, but I keep checking to see if the light still flashes. In a weird, related way, I stumbled upon a poem I had wanted to find in a completely unrelated book tonight. The author seems to have thrown it in because it's powerful and interesting and therefore makes her own writing seem more interesting by association. Well, thanks to her, anyway. After looking up more poems online, Sharon Olds' poetry has an honesty about it to the point of being painful to read, but I can't stop reading. I may need to just shut the blinds, though . . . I Go Back to May 1937 - Sharon Olds
I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the
wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its
sword-tips black in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don't do it--she's the wrong woman,
he's the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty blank face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don't do it. I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips like chips of flint as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it. | | |
| "Funny business, a woman's career -- the things you drop on your way up the ladder so you can move faster. You forget you'll need them again when you get back to being a woman. That's one career all females have in common, whether we like it or not: being a woman. Sooner or later, we've got to work at it, no matter how many other careers we've had or wanted. And in the last analysis, nothing's any good unless you can look up just before dinner or turn around in bed, and there he is. Without that, you're not a woman. You're something with a French provincial office or a book full of clippings, but you're not a woman." Out of three movies watched today, two out of three ain't bad. The "classic" movie-watching continues and I finished All About Eve and Annie Hall. Funny that Kung Fu Panda was actually one of the great two. I'm sure that just about everyone else who's seen it could give me countless reasons why I'm wrong to feel the way I do about Annie Hall, but...eh. Sure it has its bits that work, but as a cohesive whole, it means nothing...to me. The twenty-something personification of Woody Allen at my work would be incredulous at such a sentiment, but what do you take from the movie other than that Woody Allen is Woody Allen? I chuckled, but Kung Fu Panda had me laughing out loud. I'm sure that says something about my taste level. Maybe admiration for All About Eve makes up for it? "Everybody has a heart - except some people." "Don't cry. Just score it as an incomplete forward pass." "She loves me like a father. Also, she's loaded." | | |
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