in brief

It's hard to figure out right now where my recent encounter with food poisoning begins and where an even more recent move to vegetarianism coupled with not enough sleep begins in terms of how my tummy and head have been feeling the past couple weeks. At least I haven't gone full vegan, like M., and can still eat yogurt. That usually sorts me out. Or maybe I'm fighting a bug. I don't know. It's all very irritating. Anyway, I want it to go away because the weather is beautiful and I want to be out in it. All weekend I was out in it with a friend's dog and M.'s backpacking pack. Glorious. For a minute there, on the beach, after a climb up a sand dune, I was sweating. Sweat! I can't even remember the last time that happened outside of a sauna. I can't remember the last time that happened OUTSIDE.

#255: there's many a man has more hair than wit

I was a banged child and I hated it. Childhood is only nice and pleasant and tender for a brief time and then it tends to turn oily, pimpled and full of despair. One minute you're a raging, jubilant five year old tearing around the yard and pretending you're God, or something, then you hit 12 and if you're a girl life starts to go horribly wrong. It doesn't always begin with the monthly cycle. At least not for me. There was a point where I became aware of myself as inhabiting a distinct body and instead of this realization carrying wonder and joy (as it should have), it brought only confusion, discontent and fear. Bangs -- and a weird cow-lick that flipped these bangs up and out at an awkward angle -- didn't help.

I very distinctly remember an afternoon at church camp, my dad looking down at me and my face likely a picture of anguish. It was a scene straight from "A Christmas Story" when the boy comes downstairs wearing pink rabbit pajamas his aunt made for him and which his mother has commanded him to try on.

"Do you like having bangs?" my dad asked slowly.

I shook my head.

"Do you want to pull your bangs back and grow them out?"

I nodded emphatically, not daring to look my mom in the eyes. She was the one who cut the bangs after all and I didn't know where her loyalties might fall.

I don't remember any other details of that day or why my dad even noticed my bangs, but I do know that not until I cut them myself several years later did I ever have to have bangs again.

This is all to say that two days ago, I cut some bangs. Mistake. My hair is curlier now and if bangs didn't work when I was a child, why should they work now? I look like Cher from "Moonstruck" but without the cheekbones and the big eyes -- squinty Wilson/Blake eyes forever! Fortunately, I'm mature now and don't care about my looks or compare myself with other, better-looking women. Right? Right.

coffee, that evil desert berry

Oh coffee coffee, you good friend to me. I'm going to make resolutions for the year this week. Giving up coffee or lessening my intake of coffee will not be on that list and reading an NPR article about coffee which was reposted by the lovely Tiffany S. has bolstered me up in my decision. After all, coffee makes me happy, makes me write, makes me sit still then spring into action (rubber-band style). Coffee quickens my senses and shortens the amount of breathing I need to do between talking. Coffee makes me think about all the good things about Communism.

That's right.

You can't deny it: Communism brought people together -- yes, a lot of bloodthirsty, over-thinking, hyperbole-dealing young geeks, but still, people. Doris Lessing!

So anyway. The coffee article quotes Stewart Allen, author of The Devil's Cup: Coffee, the Driving Force in History, and talks about how coffee has, historically, been trouble, been banned, and been at the center of political action. The dark little coffee shop seething with intellectuals? Not made up.

Saith the article:

"According to one story, an Ottoman Grand Vizier secretly visited a coffeehouse in Istanbul.

'He observed that the people drinking alcohol would just get drunk and sing and be jolly, whereas the people drinking coffee remained sober and plotted against the government,' says Allen."

Yay for thinkers and talkers and the young revolutionaries. Later we can boo them when they destroy countries and wipe out people groups. But, as I drink an Americano and observe a small child walking through the door wearing animal print feetie pajamas with brown cowboy boots, I will toast those who are not yet stagnant, who will not suffer corruption, injustice or stupidity to remain. So maybe not Communism, but you get what I'm saying, right? Maybe? Mostly, I just want more people to read the coffee article.

snow day

This happened today. It also happened last year. Kind of. There was less snow then. Same amount of cold, though. Actually this didn't happen at all last year. This is ridiculous and beautiful and unique to 2012.

day at the beach

A stranger has come
to share my room in the house not right in the head,
a girl as mad as birds

Bolting the night of the door with her arm her plume.
Strait in the mazed bed
she deludes the heaven-proof house with entering clouds

Yet she deludes with walking the nightmarish room,
at large as the dead,
or rides the imagined oceans of the male wards.

She has come possessed
who admits the delusive light through the bouncing walls,
possessed by the skies

She sleeps in the narrow trough yet she walks the dust
yet raves at her will
on the madhouse boards worn thin by my walking tears

And taken by the light in her arms at long and dear last
I may without fail
suffer the first vision that set fire to the stars

- Dylan Thomas

On a walk last night under an impossibly dark sky (the kind you would be tempted to call velvet) and with an impossibly bright moon, and a lacework of clouds, thin and flying on a high, fast wind, I thought how we are built on histories and poets that will disappear. Herodotus still means something to us, also Edna St. Vincent Millay, but give them another handful of hundred years, and who will read them? They'll be such ancient history, they'll be lucky for a one-line mention. Once a foundation, now so far below the earth. Everyday more people are writing books and telling stories based on a line of thinking whose beginning is dead even in academic memory.

home-hunting

So far so good:

Drove M. to work and thus was awake to see the sunrise -- scarlet, marbled with purple clouds. Those sailors better take warning. Then I bought newspapers (goat sacrifices may be making a comeback), stopped by the coffee shop, grabbed my paycheck and finally (FINALLY) got a copy of the shop key. Now a moment to read my brother's blog. He's amazing. Next up, house-hunting with Marta so we can be sisters forever (at least through the summer), pay less in rent and have Olivia The Dog and Bruno The Cat with us too. We have grand visions of making coffee together every morning and sending each other off to work with a kiss on the cheek and a "Have a good day, honey," then coming home at night and, I don't know, knitting.

In the meantime, no, Dad, I don't have Hodgkin's Lymphoma nor do I have, as M. suggested, an explosive cyst or as Mel wondered, heart disease. (Good to know everyone's staying positive, though). It was just a super sore throat and swollen lymph node and it's going away as of yesterday afternoon. I think my body was fighting something and it won.

Super easy week (I hope) ahead of me but probably not. I think this every week after all.