January I did, in fact, go to bed with a book on New Years eve. At midnight when I heard the fireworks and the hootin and hollerin I whispered Rabbit Rabbit.
The first day of the year and I was out of sorts. Sleepy. Achy. It was raining on and off. Mostly on. I did eat the curry and it was GOOD. I still have rice and green beans and curry so I'll be eating it again. I did not drink the champagne. It's a wee spilt of Laurent-Perrier. Too good to drink when you aren't really in the mood.
I usually draw a card on the first day of the year. I tried a few times but I kept getting cards that felt problamatic. There aren't really bad cards. But there are cards that reflect difficulty and I am just not in the mood for that much more difficulty. I think I've had enough. Every time I pulled a card I just thought - NO. Which seems like a good response.
Oviously difficulty is part of life. And my life is pretty cush in many ways. I just want to ... oh ... I dunno. Be more engaged. Work more. Write more. Read more. Be more open. I've been kinda shut down.
Amber did a reading for me in which the High Priestess was central. I think I'm going to use that as my card for the year. For me it's about taking what you want from the things you've learned and coming up with your own ideas. There is a sort of magic in the card. But it's the magic of paying attention. And nature. So I think I need to use what I've learned. Some how. And that's part of the message of the card. I don't need to know how. I just need to pay attention and create. Which would be what a writer does.
Funny how hard it is to call myself a writer. I wonder what it will take.
This morning I feel better than I did yesterday. I'm having a slow Sunday. But slow is OK on Sunday. Two or three times now I've heard people say, "There's nothing we can do." when asked about the loss of life in the tsunami. Once was when a news guy stopped a women here in SF on her way into a new years eve party. She was dressed to the nines and had on quite a bit of make up, which is not something I am critical about in and of it self but something about her tone and her look lent a sort of let-them-eat-cake quality to her declaration.
I heard the exact same sentence from a very dear friend last night. Someone I hadn't heard from in awhile and who was calling to deliver a message and not have a long political conversation. But, it startled me. It seemed like a way to establish distance. Not between he and I but between us and the disaster.
The news is full of stories. One of which was a young boy, maybe eight or nine, who had been given five hundred dollars for Christmas and had donated it. One of which was a pediatrician who was on her way to help. For most of us money is all we have to offer. Some have neither money nor skill. And there is little we can do. Maybe there is nothing.
I have a tense relationship with ideas of what can be done. Too often I feel like people use action as a way to avoid feeling. Sometimes all you can do is hold the emotion. I think holding the emotion takes some of the pressure off. In the same way we feel better when we talk to a friend about a problem and they hold the emotion with us, we can hold some of the loss for all these ravaged people. Of course, it is possible to become immobilized by the emotion. I'm never sure I have the balance on all that quite right. I could do more. Generally speaking.
I've been doing a better job of having some balance the last few days. I am aware of the loss. I am trying to stay informed about it all. And I am trying to anchor myself in the things I need to do to move forward in my own life. Maybe because the question of what to do has been such a hammer in my world lately, maybe that's why the expression of helplessness hits a nerve. Adrienne sent me this perfect icon to sooth my worked up soul.
Why am I worked up? Oh. I'm not going to write about it yet. Something came up that is either really, really good or really, really bad, or maybe neither extreme but I'm in a spinning what-if place internally.
So I took one look at this face of wisdom and sweetness and the spinning slowed. For awhile. I'm still at the age where 5 minutes is a long time, and a year is not. -MonkIt seems like once a year I write about cleaning up the little back room in the back of my apartment. I should write about it more often. Because I should do it more often.
There is a desk that I made by putting a piece of thin wood on top of two file cabinets. And there are built-in shelves on both sides reaching up to the ceiling. One side is filled with cook books and cooking magazines. I used to spend more time sitting back there reading them. The other side has things like my waffle iron, ice cream maker, empty flower pots, vases, baskets. It's a room where the ephemera of my life piles up. Cleaning it up means realizing that I still have the stack of Christmas cards from last year. Not 2004. 2003. I never want to throw them away. I always think I will but not just yet. And not-just-yet becomes a year.
I still have the 2001 Earthshaking Women date book put out by the War Resisters League that Jeane gave me. Every time I try to throw it away I end up reading one of the biographical pages about Mary Church Terrell or Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit and I can't throw it away. Plus it has the added benefit of making me think about Jeane. Which is always good.
And then there are the stacks of writing by classmates from my MFA program. If we went to their homes I wonder if they would still have copies of what I wrote?
In the middle of all the sorting I got quite cranky and picked up a stack of unread magazines and read for awhile. Those don't get thrown away. They just get moved to the piles on the bottom shelves of all my book shelves. But it is one less stack.
I might have gotten cranky because I was listening to CSPAN and the first day of the new congress. First topic being the ethics of changing rules. And I was listening to last episode of the board in which Matt was the pres. Not that there was anything in that to make me cranky. It was a bit of a love fest. As it should have been. It might have been cool if the mayor had stopped by.
So there is a big bag full of stuff to haul down to the trash. The piles are neater. There is one more that I want to go through but I can see the top of the desk. Or at least I can see the middle of the top. The middle which is surrounded by stacks and photos and little cards with snappy sayings and coffee mugs full of pencils and pens and rocks and little plastic toys. It is a room in which the edges are full and they are always trying to encroach on the middle. Once a year I push it all back.
It doesn't really seem like I accomplished much. I did throw away the 2003 Christmas cards but replaced it with the stack of 2004 cards. Someday, someone will come here and find me buried under piles of books and papers and little plastic toys. That someone will pick up a Christmas card and wonder why I didn't throw it away.
Sigh.
Go say Happy Birthday to Dru. The big political new in SF is that Gavin and Kimberly have called it quits. Why is it political news? I can't for the life of me imagine but the local news led with it last night and spent a good deal of time interviewing people on the street about it. This on the same night that the governor gave his odious state of the state. One might imagine there were other things to talk about.
The Newsoms were called the "new Kennedy's", which always made me wonder if people remembered that Jackie didn't really like being a first lady and John cheated on her. I was one of those kids who sat in front of a black and white television and swooned over JFK. Those were different times. I was also the only kids on my class who had divorced parents. It was quite the mark of shame.
Much of the discussion about the Newsom divorce mentioned his support of same sex marriage. What does his divorce have to do with same sex marriage? I can't for the life of me imagine.
I don't like Newsom. I didn't vote for him. I don't trust him. His mean spirited policy on the poor is as frustrating as Clinton's welfare reform. But I was grateful that he did the same sex weddings and he has put women and minorities in positions of leadership and he did support the hotel workers. In a town like SF he isn't the most progressive guy around but I do realize that he's done some stuff. And I feel sad that his marriage didn't work out.
A Joni Mitchell lyric ran through my head while I listened to the news. "We don't need no piece of paper from the city hall keeping us tied and true." This from a woman who was married twice and in a number of other serious and committed relationships. Marriage. What is it? Is it about being tied and true?
My support for same sex marriage is unwavering but my support for marriage in general is not so strong. I like commitment. I like people who understand themselves to be doing the work and having the fun of a live shared. I like ritual and ceremony. But what is marriage? I'd like to see marriage be something people do in their spiritual lives and I'd like the state to stay out of all of it. But the privileged rarely concede a right.
Unless they live too far away from each other and the pressures of their jobs become overwhelming to their relationship.
Oh I don't mean to be snide. But I do feel a bit snide.
West Wing took on same sex marriage last night. There was a lot to how they did it but I was most impressed by the character of CJ who was being rumored to be gay and was trying to decide whether to make a public statement about being straight. In the scene in which she is directly asked the question by the press she gives this great comment about how being thought to be gay changed the way she was treated and the way she felt. She said "no one should be treated like this." And she refused to answer the question.
I guess it's not that big a deal that people want to know about the personal lives of people in leadership. But it is a big deal when it becomes the central focus. I think it's the kind of news that should have taken about a minute to announce and then maybe we could have talked about Barbara Boxer pushing for the country to pay attention to what may have gone wrong in Ohio. Or the Gonzalez confirmation hearing, which I am listening to right now and may be why I'm feeling so snide. The war has used up words:they have weakened, they have deteriorated like motor car tires; they have, like millions of other things, been more overstrained and knocked about and voided of the happy semblance during the last six months than in all the ages before, and we are now confronted with a depreciation of all our terms, or, otherwise speaking with a loss of expression through increase of limpness, that may well make us wonder what ghosts will be left to walk. - Henry James 3/21/1915 The problem with reading "a memoir in books" is that it adds to your books to be read list. And right now I am jumping from French feminist literary theory to the story of a woman reading the classics in Tehran to mi corazon. This last reading brought on by a sudden overwhelming crush (never mind that he is now dead and was then gay) and the most overwhelming generosity of a dear friend. Of course she is increasingly reading early American literature (as is Nafisi in the book ) and I'm in a spin trying to fill in the blanks of my knowledge. I need to read James and Dreiser and Wharton. Oh my. It's a pretty great problem to have.
And then Amber tells me she's sending me her extra copy of Madam Bovary, which I did read when I was in my teens but I was looking for stuff about sex since I'd been led to believe it was a scandalous book and I don't really remember much of it. And I know I confuse it with Lady Chatterly. So I am grateful and excited and waiting for it as if reading four books at once and a stack of magazines and the Internet were just not enough. But I feel like she's sending me a memory that I need to restore. And all of it makes me feel as if I can't read enough. As if there is more to read and reread than I will ever live long enough to do. Books clamoring for my attention.
I am close to the end of memoir in books and I finished the first of the Pentagonia. But I slow down toward the end and pick up something else. As if I can't bear to finish.
In some ways I find Nafisi's writing tedious. But not so much that I am put off the book. In the beginning she writes about color. And we know I have issues with writing about color. One of Nafisi's students talks about color.
And Nafisi tells her:
She goes on to talk about the colors of a painting and the pool outside of house. Later in the book she writes a long descriptive paragraph about her first meeting with a man who became a dear friend and mentor at the end of which she says:
And I want to say, NO! No it does not matter. Not to me. Tell me what he said. But the facts are I am touched by the sentence. Because this is a world where women are draped in black and a man and women who aren't married or related but just connected by a deep love of learning, books and culture are sitting together alone in a room. And even these simple clothes with their not particularly outrageous colors would be judged seditious to the revolution. Tedious may be the wrong word. In some ways it's like listening to a friend tell a story and sometimes there are repeated details but you just ignore the repeating because you're interested in the friend's story.
All the while a voice with a French accent is whispering in my ear about women and genius and words and a voice with a Cuban accent is saying, "Oye. Tengo mas que contar." And I need to read Nabokov now.
When I was young my grandmother would tell me to get my nose out of "that book" and go outside and I would go out side but I would take the book with me.
It's raining and raining. I am inside. Flitting from one country to the next. From one time to another. In a paradise of thought and expression the color of which changes every few moments. I invite other writers to consider the fact that by accepting the prizes and approval of these vague institutions we are admitting their authority, publicly confirming them of the final stages of literary excellence, and I inquire whether any prize is worth that subservience. - Sinclair Lewis, 'Letter to the Pulitzer Prize Committee.' (From my made by Amber bookmark. ) This week the door buzzer kept buzzing. And every time it did something good happened. Mom sent cookies. Kristina sent books. Yesterday it rang twice.
The first ring was Renee. The good news was that I was going to get the whole day with her. The bad news was that she was leaving to go back to school the next day. We shopped for stuff to cook a meal. I made lamb chops and chard. She made mashed sweet and white potatoes. We ate triple cream and salami while we waited for the potatoes to cook. It was a great time together. Just too short.
While she was here the buzzer buzzed again. Amber sent a box of yarn and the copy of Madame Bovary with a book mark that she made and a very cool glass button that I will wear as a necklace. The amount of yarn is overwhelming. I keep looking at it. Touching it and arranging it in rows of color. My desire to learn to knit is rekindled in a BIG way. But I might crochet something first. Just to feel the yarn slipping through my fingers. The first thing I did this morning was stare at yarn.
I'm a very lucky grrrl. It rained like Armageddon yesterday. Banging against the window. I remember one other year in SF when it rained this much but even then it didn't seem like it rained as hard.
I watched Tiptoes, wondering how it had ended up in my Netflix Queue. I think it was because I enjoyed Peter Dinklage in The Station Agent and looked for other films in which he acted. I didn't like Tiptoes. I've been trying to figure out why. There are a few too many characters. And there is this way in which the intersection of the average sized and the little people felt contrived. It just didn't quite work and I still can't exactly say why. It may be that some of the stereotypes of little people culture were perpetuated. And, may have some truth. But I think it was trying to both challenge ideas and entertain. Somewhere between those two goals the movie drifts and neither is quite accomplished. The Station Agent is one of my favorite movies of all time.
And I worked on a hat for Jan. Read for while. Went to bed too wound up. Slept badly. Woke up tired. Ah well.
When I began to type I thought I had something to say. Now I think I was wrong. Sometimes I'm just phoning it in.
But it seems like there is something that wants to be said. I just can't quite put words to it. Yet. Or maybe ever. We'll see. In my dream Michael Moore gave me a Gourmet magazine to cheer me up. He was very sweet.
I've been having trouble sleeping for a week, or so. It could be about hormones. At my age it's likely that much is about hormones. I'm not that good at sleeping anyway. Generally I go bed around midnight and maybe wake up once and then wake up around seven. And, generally,it seems like enough. This week I've had trouble getting to sleep, woken up at least twice and had trouble getting back to sleep, woken up at six, felt un-rested, gone back to sleep till eight. Something about that makes me feel bad. Gets my day off to a fussy start. A couple days of it is one thing. A week of it has me pretty fussy. Yesterday I was so fussy that I hid in my game for most of the day. I love it when I react to feeling like I can't get things done by doing nothing. It's just so backwards. But the game makes me laugh. And laughing is good.
Sara left me a comment.
I read it last night and thought about it for much of the time I wasn't sleeping last night. Although, to be clear, these are the thoughts that fill up most of my day and night. Not new.
I do not have a job. I need a job. More to the point I need work. And I need a paycheck. The difference between work and a job, for me, is that work is something you do with a certain amount of passion and commitment. In the restaurant industry I had both jobs and work. Some times I worked for the paycheck. Sometimes I worked for the love of serving good food, the craft of cooking, the people who I worked with and for. Working is so much better when your heart is involved. Restaurant work is hard. Exhausting. But also fun.
So I always think people know this story but I left a pretty lucrative job and went to college. While I was getting my BA I ran a small coffee cart at the school. I sold that cart to the school and went on to get an MFA. For the last year I've been living on the generosity of family, friends and a really unseemly amount of debt. It Is not a pleasant or sustainable way to live. I came out of six years of school feeling less employable than ever.
And there have been a series of Perils of Pauline type events in my life. Nothing horrible. Just a series of things that made me feel tripped up. I came out of 2003 having had pleurisy and a taxing visit with M & K. I felt worn out. And then my dad died. And then in the middle of the year I gave my heart to someone who filed it under to-be-ignored leaving me with the project of building a new heart. I've had to do this often enough that you would think I'd be really good at it. But I keep trying build a heart that doesn't fly out of my chest and I seem to build a more rattlely one each time.
And then there has been the world/political stuff. Much of which hits me in that rattlely heart.
Sara's question comes from her own desire to write and her feeling that she doesn't have the time and energy to do it when she also has a job. I understand that. On the other hand, I did the most writing when I was getting my BA and working seven days a week running my little coffee cart. I did a lot of writing in the MFA program. It was a truly privileged time in which writing was the substance of my day.
Am I a writer? Is that my work? I don't think having the ability to write makes you a writer. I think writing makes you a writer. Do I write? Well. I write this blog. I have written a couple of articles. But. It would seem like I could do more. Not having a job doesn't make it easier to write. I may have time. But I lack will and inspiration. And there is a business to being a writer. Sending stuff out. Looking for an agent. I did some of that last year. Not enough.
Having an on-line journal is a funny business. This post seems like a defense of my life. At least it does to me. Sometimes I wonder if writing a personal life is inherently troubled. What is too much information? Who is it OK to write about? Are we really connecting emotionally? Intellectually? How much of each? What makes my personal narrative worth reading? Some of the blog writing I love the most is the blog writing about daily life and personal quandary. And sometimes I feel pulled into an intimacy that I may not want.
When I was processing the heart break I felt like I wanted a witness. Or maybe a mediator. I knew that I was seeing things from my perspective and I wanted to have other perspectives. At the same time I didn't want to name names. It can all be very delicate and tenuous and fraught. Now I feel like it was much ado about nothing. Me believing things that were not true. Things that were promised but not fulfilled. Things I wanted to believe. It's the stuff of romance. My blog writing became oblique. Indirect. I felt like no one wanted to hear about it any more. I didn't want to hear about it any more.
I ended the 2004 trying to walk. Slowly. Everything seems slow to me. It takes me so long to write a post sometimes. I feel slower mentally, emotionally, intellectually. And keep telling myself that slow isn't wrong. But I feel like I'm not getting things done. And more than feeling it, I can say with certainty that I am not getting things done.
It's a funny business. Someone can leave an innocent comment and all your denial, defense and self-loathing gets stirred up. How am I gonna pay the bills? And it's three o'clock in the morning and you are staring at the wee spider's home in the corner of the room and you're thinking that you need to get the vacuum out but the day comes and you don't. It gets added to the list of things you didn't get done.
But. Then you remember. Hormones. Life. Rain. Sleep loss. Illness. Death. Heartache. It's all just grist. The wheel will turn. No. I have not found the perfect way to pay the bills and find the time and energy to write. We'll see how today goes. Perhaps. Possibly. Maybe. I haven't been writing much about fat politics because of the general struggle in my life. For me that struggle has everything to do with the shift I made when I left restaurants and went to college and wrote a book. This blog spans that time period. It's a time of shifting identity. Something many of my friends of any age experience. And friends in their fifties seem to experience in a specific way. It manifests differently for different people. I like having grey hair. I don't want to look younger. Whatever that means. I do want to have the time and space for the reading and writing that I love. I want my work life to shape itself around those loves. But I'm not sure it makes me a good spokesperson for the revolution. I may not be shiny and positive and successful. And the revolution may need its leadership to be more socially acceptable. Possibly. Perhaps.
Over the holidays I had the better part of a post written about the annoying constant reminders that people were likely to gain weight if they celebrated with too much abandon. In my own life the holidays were a time to eat the fancy cheese that I love but can't always afford and don't digest quite as well as I once did. After a certain amount of indulgence I'd had enough. Did I gain weight? Maybe? Who cares? I deleted the post when I felt like I was writing in circles.
I always feel like I'm playing both sides of a very complicated chess game when I write about food and fat politics. There certainly are people in the fat community who suffer compulsive eating. I've had heart wrenching conversations with people who feel they eat too much and who eat crap food. Many of them have successful careers, strong, loving relationships and generally happy lives. But, for a variety of reasons, they eat in way that makes them feel bad about themselves. For some of them it isn't about being fat. They are. They may always be. That's not the issue. The issue is the manic and compulsive way they eat. I never want to suggest that this isn't an issue. When I say I ate fancy cheese over the holiday and that was enough there is a way in which I suggest that it should be that way for everyone. And it just isn't. The holidays found some people hiding in a corner hastily eating a plate of cookies and hoping no one would see them. And then they spiral into self loathing. And who would hand a diabetic a plate of cookies and say, "It's the holidays. Indulge." There are very real heath concerns that warrant vigilance in terms of food and weight gain.
Having said that, most of the warnings about weight gain over the holidays were really about the fear of getting fat. Fat, in and of itself, being the basket in which so many health concerns are now tossed.
And now it's January and people are making resolutions and we have new guidelines for how to eat and how much to exercise and it's all written with the same fat fearing/hating tone. Tommy Thompson thinks people look better when they are thin. He's entitled to his opinion. But I don't agree.
I don't have any argument with eating more fruit and vegetables. I don't have any argument with people getting exercise, if they WANT to. I'm not sure people are gonna go for the new 60 to 90 minutes a day recommendation. Some may. I used to work out in a gym for 60 minutes five days a week. I was still fat. Close all the fast food joints and get rid of all the soda machines. And after all of that there will still be fat people.
Paul blogged about all this with a link to a fellow who thinks Big Fat Blog folks haven't taken an honest look at their "situation." By situation I'm assuming he means that everyone who reads the blog is fat. I'm not going to link directly to him because he is one of those people who seems only to be able to make his argument by suggestion that he knows a truth far superior to the truth other people hold. What ever. People like that made me feel mean. And there I am. In the mud pit with them. Gearing up to sling. Backing away from the screen seems wiser.
But. I will say. The size of my ass is NOT a "situation".
I have backed pretty far away from the screen this week. Sometimes you hafta do that. I listen to crazy stuff when I do yoga. Last week I was listening to This American Life. Episode 280 to be exact. They were talking to soldiers in Iraq. Put a whole different feel to the warrior pose. Today I was listening to Laura Nyro. When she started singing Dancing In the Streets I had to come out of tree pose and move into the swim, the hitchhiker and the frug. Remember the frug? Perhaps I should listen to my breath, or some kind of zone music. But zone music makes me cranky.
The day began with an e-mail from a friend that had me crying one minute and spitting mad the next. There are people who are going to hang with you no matter what you're going through. And there are people who aren't. I don't expect the same level of intimacy in all my relationships. Even with my dearest friends I make an effort to not belabour my difficulties. I tend to isolate when I'm feeling too many difficult things. Sometimes I write about my emotional life here and sometimes I have regretted doing so. All this new age self help obedience training we live with gives us new language. Such nice ways to say fuck you.
So I cried and I got pissed off and I felt ill perceived and I worried and I responded to the e-mail. Then I did the tree pose until Laura made me feel like shaking my butt. I'll probably do a few more cycles of all that until time moves me to a new place. Meanwhile I'm making applesauce and dusting. Oh it's a full and rewarding life.
Heh.
Ahhhhh.
Ya know. I like to be fair. I like to allow for other people's experience. I really do. I spend more time mulling over IT ALL than I should. I take great care with the way I say things. And. Right now. I've just had enough. Today is Laurie's birthday. Laurie, it would seem, is taking a blog break. Her last post, talking about how busy she was and writing about the complexity of her personal life in that great wry and open hearted way in which she always wrote, is like a marker on a road. She's gone off somewhere and I keep returning to that marker to see if she's stopped by.
Oh the blogging world. We meet each other through links and trackbacks and stats. We love each other for the words we weave, the pictures we take, the pointing to stuff that we might not have found on our own. These don't feel like disembodied relationships. I feel these relationships in my skin.
Jill wrote a great post the other day.
I think that's one of the best articulations of the blog relationship I've ever read. And, like Jill, I've broken that pact. It seems like once a month I write a post about not feeling able to blog. Read or write. Is it time for a break?
And where is Artichoke Heart? People take breaks. It's OK. People need to take breaks.
Oh.
Remember when James Brown would pretend to fall down in the middle of a song and then someone would pretend to help him off the stage and then he would toss off the cape and come back and finish the song? That's me. Fallen to my knees. I just can't go on.
Heh.
I'll probably start posting twice a day now. Kristina put me onto the revolution being televised. I watched until Robespierre decided that the death penalty might not be such a bad idea. It's really all down hill from there.
Like so many revolutions born in the inspired thinking of philosophers and carried by the rage of the starving third estate, power changes things. Why, I continue to wonder, is it like that? Maybe it's that the high ideals that provide the spark become rigid. Maybe the passion and commitment that drives the will of social change become a force in itself. A force that loses any self reflective capacity.
History TV is still TV. The images of the royal are sharp and full of color and detail. The images of the poor are fuzzy and in black and white. All the images are in a tape loop. Historians in book filled rooms talk about Marat like he was just cranky. Louis is just a hapless boy. And some of that is true.
It's just so disappointing to me that revolutions so often become ideologically rigid and then rigidity is bathed in blood. The language of the time has resonance today. The terror. Keep the people afraid and obedient for their own good.
"And the worst are full of passion without mercy."
I wonder what Robespierre would argue for in California today, as we begin the dreary countdown to state sponsored murder. It's not just the ideologues and the state who think a death will put an end to death.
Some part of me understands Charlotte Corday. Some part of me just wants to make certain people go away. But then Charlotte ends up, neck under the blade. Marat, having called for so much blood dies in a pool of his own. Robespierre, having decided that terror might be a good method of social control feels the blade himself. And it goes on and on. Blood and more blood.
I want our institutions to be smarter than we are individually. I want us to agree that our humanity can lead us to believe that an eye for an eye will do something more than cause blindness. I want us to build the collected wisdom of so much history into our definitions of justice. I want revolutions that expand. See. Twice a day. Maybe even more.
KPFA messes me up. Today they are broadcasting the Rice confirmation hearings. I get so caught up in it all. Even when the hearing takes a break Larry Bensky begins his commentary and I am really stuck. I managed to break away and get a shower. And you just haven't done the tree pose till you've done it with the sound of Barbara Boxer getting tuff. So I keep taking breaks but then I hafta check back in. It's just so ...
Ms Rice wasn't too responsive to Boxer's grilling. The response was pretty much a pouty don't make me feel bad about myself response. Oh. OK. And there was this moment when Rice said that the tsunami had been a great opportunity for America to win hearts and minds but to be fair she was responding to a question and I'm sure doesn't thing of that level of tragedy as an opportunity. I'm sure she doesn't. (cough)
I mean ya know, there is a reflex thing in the way we think. There is a way in which everything has to be about making us feel good about ourselves. If we are uncomfortable in any way then someone better fix it, or we better get away from what makes us feel that way.
Anyway. It's cold. Cold cold cold. It's bumming me out. I keep trying to make stew and ending up with soup. Good soup. But still. I want that thick gravy and all my best efforts aren't getting it done. Still. Soup. A glass of wine. A blanket and a book. Cut the bummed outness into bits.
I feel lucky. Lucky to have my apartment. Lucky to have good food. Lucky to have books to read and yarn to play with and music to listen to and lucky to have Barbara Boxer as my Senator.
This litany is just me trying to keep myself grounded. So. A few days ago I posted about a man who wrote a post about |
