November 6, 2009
“Kerala is a state located in southwestern India, famous for its sprawling backwaters and lush green vegetation. Kerala is generally referred to as a tropical paradise of waving palms and wide sandy beaches. It boasts of a higher Human Development Index than most other states in India. The state is bordered by Arabian Sea towards the west.  Kerala has a 91 percent literacy rate, the highest in India. A survey conducted in 2005 by Transparency International ranked Kerala as the least corrupt state in the country.” In those spare little moments hidden in this terrific work chaos, I start to dream about next destinations.  January is looking good for travel but my compass needle is still spinning. India? Nepal? Burma? Ideas?  Let’s go! courtesy of

“Kerala is a state located in southwestern India, famous for its sprawling backwaters and lush green vegetation. Kerala is generally referred to as a tropical paradise of waving palms and wide sandy beaches. It boasts of a higher Human Development Index than most other states in India. The state is bordered by Arabian Sea towards the west.  Kerala has a 91 percent literacy rate, the highest in India. A survey conducted in 2005 by Transparency International ranked Kerala as the least corrupt state in the country.”

In those spare little moments hidden in this terrific work chaos, I start to dream about next destinations.  January is looking good for travel but my compass needle is still spinning. India? Nepal? Burma? Ideas?  Let’s go!

courtesy of

November 5, 2009
“ They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing - these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight. They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice barely restrained, the instinct to run or freeze or hide, and in many respects this was the heaviest burden of all, for it could never be put down, it required perfect balance and perfect posture. They carried their reputations. They carried the soldier’s greatest fear, which
was the fear of blushing. Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to. It was what brought them to the war in the first place, nothing positive, no dreams of glory or honor, just to avoid the blush of dishonor. They died so as not to die of embarrassment.
Tim O’Brien - “The Things They Carried”
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

scout:

magnetic fields - i don’t believe you

so you quote-love-unquote me. well, stranger things have come to be, but let’s agree to disagree, because i don’t believe you. … so you’re brilliant, gorgeous, and ampersand after ampersand. you think i just don’t understand, but i don’t believe you.

La-La-Love!

November 4, 2009
hotwheels: Take the money and run. Perhaps we should get to know each other a little better.

hotwheels:

Take the money and run.

Perhaps we should get to know each other a little better.

“ Lee Strunk carried tanning lotion. Some things they carried in common. Taking turns, they carried the big PRC-77 scrambler radio, which weighed thirty pounds with its battery. They shared the weight of memory. They took up what others could no longer bear. Often, they carried each other, the wounded or weak. They carried infections. They carried chess sets, basketballs, Vietnamese-English dictionaries, insignia of rank, Bronze Stars and Purple Hearts, plastic cards imprinted with the Code of Conduct. They carried diseases, among them malaria and dysentery. They carried lice and ringworm and leeches and paddy algae and various rots and molds. They carried the land itself - Vietnam, the place, the soil - a powdery orange-red dust that covered their boots and fatigues and faces. They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity.

Tim O’Brien - “The Things They Carried”

These past five or six years, I’ve been very drawn to war stories. To books that force you thick in to the middle of those places we work not to think about.  One winter I read All Quiet on the Western Front and Slaughterhouse Five back to back and those two together will almost certainly break a heart.  We have friends back from Iraq and those fresh from Afghanistan and I see the way they walk heavier now. How much harder it is to conjure enthusiasm for anything, really. I see the weight on their face of everything we don’t understand.  Stony gaps where ease and tenderness used to spread, a harder eye, a slower mouth. It kind of kills me that I can’t understand this metamorphosis for them.

This seems the least we can do, maybe, this fictional reading, this visit to a world like theirs.  For a few days even, I want to know what they carried, the heft of all that and the unbearable lightness of what they left back home. I want to understand why they carried it when I chose not to and what it cost them to do so.

November 2, 2009
beautifulordinaire: (photo via pforu) “This is the color of her hair as it blew around her face whipping her cheeks and sticking to her lips and forcing her to squint her eyes as she spoke.  My hair is brown, the same brown that you find in a crayon box with a name that is five letters long.  Her hair is every color of yellow and gold and honey and sugar that money can buy.  We stood in the center of the field with the wind coming at us from every direction and she raised her left hand to her waist and held it open with her palm facing the sky and she said, “you know, I guess I realized that you only have yourself” and my heart fell on the ground from the sadness in her voice.  I closed my eyes hoping to find the right words and when I opened them I was looking down and saw that our feet were positioned at the same angle.  I raised my hand to my waist, opened to the gray sky that was moving fast, so fast, but I stopped before I spoke.  I thought of all the times I hadn’t been there for her because either I couldn’t or I wouldn’t and the times that she had done the same; neither meaning any harm, but simply doing all that we could. “

beautifulordinaire:

(photo via pforu)

“This is the color of her hair as it blew around her face whipping her cheeks and sticking to her lips and forcing her to squint her eyes as she spoke.  My hair is brown, the same brown that you find in a crayon box with a name that is five letters long.  Her hair is every color of yellow and gold and honey and sugar that money can buy.  We stood in the center of the field with the wind coming at us from every direction and she raised her left hand to her waist and held it open with her palm facing the sky and she said, “you know, I guess I realized that you only have yourself” and my heart fell on the ground from the sadness in her voice.  I closed my eyes hoping to find the right words and when I opened them I was looking down and saw that our feet were positioned at the same angle.  I raised my hand to my waist, opened to the gray sky that was moving fast, so fast, but I stopped before I spoke.  I thought of all the times I hadn’t been there for her because either I couldn’t or I wouldn’t and the times that she had done the same; neither meaning any harm, but simply doing all that we could. “

So we went to the Ben Folds concert Saturday night at Orchestra Hall and he was even better than the very first time I heard him, which has got to have been a decade ago.  After two hours, he sent the Orchestra home and divided up the audience to serve as horns and harmony and it was magical. Early on, I judged it as more of an Orchestra Hall crowd, but suddenly, every person in that sea was grinning up to the lights of the stage and singing their hearts out for him.  I’ve never seen a crowd cheer and chant so adamantly, at such length for a third encore. And of course, he acquiesced and seemed so happy to do so - which is exactly why he’s so good live. Because he still seems to love it so much, because he tells you stories about being deliriously sick in Berlin and making songs up on stage and insulting the radio stations that sponsored him and getting his song pulled.  By the end of the night, you’re his best friend.  By the end, it was the kind of concert that makes you all run out in to the cold city night still singing “ba da da, buh duh dum duh” together, united and grinning. Photo courtesy of the man himself

So we went to the Ben Folds concert Saturday night at Orchestra Hall and he was even better than the very first time I heard him, which has got to have been a decade ago.  After two hours, he sent the Orchestra home and divided up the audience to serve as horns and harmony and it was magical. Early on, I judged it as more of an Orchestra Hall crowd, but suddenly, every person in that sea was grinning up to the lights of the stage and singing their hearts out for him.  I’ve never seen a crowd cheer and chant so adamantly, at such length for a third encore. And of course, he acquiesced and seemed so happy to do so - which is exactly why he’s so good live. Because he still seems to love it so much, because he tells you stories about being deliriously sick in Berlin and making songs up on stage and insulting the radio stations that sponsored him and getting his song pulled.  By the end of the night, you’re his best friend.  By the end, it was the kind of concert that makes you all run out in to the cold city night still singing “ba da da, buh duh dum duh” together, united and grinning.


Photo courtesy of the man himself

November 1, 2009
“ I DUNNO, YOU SEEMED FUNNY AND SELF-AWARE IN A WAY FEW PEOPLE ARE THESE DAYS OKAY I MEAN EVERYBODY IS THESE DAYS THAT’S PRETTY MUCH A THING NOW ISN’T IT, “THIS IS ME, HERE IS MY BULLSHIT, ENJOY,” IS THAT NOW HOW EVERYONE OPERATES LATELY- IDEALIZING NEUROTICISM TO SUCH A DEGREE THAT WE FALL IN LOVE WITH OUR VERY INABILITY TO LET EACH OTHER IN, BECOMING COMPASSIONATE TO A FAULT, FAMILIARIZING TO A FAULT, WRITING LATE-NIGHT MISSIVES TO NO ONE IN PARTICULAR BUT EVERYONE IN GENERAL, WINDING THROUGH CLEVER TURNS OF PHRASE TO OBFUSCATE THE VERY THING THAT WILL SAVE US, THE VERY THING WE REFUSE TO SEE, REFUSE TO WRITE ABOUT, TO SAY TO EACH OTHER, TO BLOG, THAT WE WERE WRONG, THAT WE WERE BAD FOR EACH OTHER, THAT WE SHOULD HAVE GIVEN UP A REALLY LONG TIME AGO.
Life is hard. Here is someone.:
Woke up indulgently this morning, without the alarm, without the safe guard of any alarm around the corner. Decided to designate the twelve hours ahead as a slow down stretch, a day to not speak unnecessary words. So how do you know the difference between content and numb if you never stop to consider it? All these days we run and work and play and produce and consume and I am happy – filled up. But let me tell you that in my bed, watching the afternoon light orbit the room and trying to catch that nap I will crave all week, I am….merely even. I am just here. Thinking about the speed of life versus the distance. Where are we even going? And how far have we come? I think about the show last night and where everything is compared to the last time we saw them play. Remember that road trip? Out of the city and down to a little college town in the hills of the river valley. And we met my brother’s old girlfriend whom no one liked and I sang his songs up in to the rafters of that little auditorium and it seemed like life had never been sweeter. Even if I ignored the fact that you didn’t sing along. Did you really want to be there? It’s hard to tell in a dark car ride home. These are the almost melancholy hours; Which are not lamentable if you acknowledge them for what they are and for the small span they cover, if you don’t allow them to speak for the rest of the hours. No, these are not bad days, but they are so deliberately quiet. And that is when the past speaks, isn’t it? And that is when you reread last night’s texts and in the slow daylight think, “Was that kind of a dick thing to say?” So you sit at your kitchen table and work and smile in to your tea and feel like a mom. You issue ultimatums for yourself and think about men who are or aren’t worth your time and start a new book and listen to the father across the street call for his son, just a little too nervously. The thing about these hours is that there is room in them and your job becomes sifting and selecting, letting what ought to drift by. Your job is choosing to be home and still for one day so you can sort and clear out. Pinning down truths: I am not ok because one is here, Not unbalanced because one is gone, Not actually determined by any of them. Your job is remembering what is enough.

Woke up indulgently this morning, without the alarm, without the safe guard of any alarm around the corner. Decided to designate the twelve hours ahead as a slow down stretch, a day to not speak unnecessary words.

So how do you know the difference between content and numb if you never stop to consider it? All these days we run and work and play and produce and consume and I am happy – filled up. But let me tell you that in my bed, watching the afternoon light orbit the room and trying to catch that nap I will crave all week, I am….merely even. I am just here. Thinking about the speed of life versus the distance. Where are we even going? And how far have we come?

I think about the show last night and where everything is compared to the last time we saw them play. Remember that road trip? Out of the city and down to a little college town in the hills of the river valley. And we met my brother’s old girlfriend whom no one liked and I sang his songs up in to the rafters of that little auditorium and it seemed like life had never been sweeter. Even if I ignored the fact that you didn’t sing along. Did you really want to be there? It’s hard to tell in a dark car ride home.

These are the almost melancholy hours; Which are not lamentable if you acknowledge them for what they are and for the small span they cover, if you don’t allow them to speak for the rest of the hours.

No, these are not bad days, but they are so deliberately quiet. And that is when the past speaks, isn’t it? And that is when you reread last night’s texts and in the slow daylight think, “Was that kind of a dick thing to say?” So you sit at your kitchen table and work and smile in to your tea and feel like a mom. You issue ultimatums for yourself and think about men who are or aren’t worth your time and start a new book and listen to the father across the street call for his son, just a little too nervously.

The thing about these hours is that there is room in them and your job becomes sifting and selecting, letting what ought to drift by. Your job is choosing to be home and still for one day so you can sort and clear out. Pinning down truths: I am not ok because one is here, Not unbalanced because one is gone, Not actually determined by any of them. Your job is remembering what is enough.

October 31, 2009

Standing in line at a wine sale

Really? It’s come to this?

Standing in an endless line, half-heartedly loathing myself and this pretentious crowd. Unable to rally full anger or shame because they are plying us into complacency with samples every five minutes. Sigh.