December 20, 2009
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

(via msodradek and melanyouth

Iron and Wine/Calexico, Always On My Mind (Willie Nelson cover). NPR’s All Songs Considered, Live on NPR, November 2005.

So this just broke my heart in half.

When I was a kid, my dad bought this Willie Nelson album for my mom. And in those days, we had left Denver for a nothing little town in the frozen north.  And I guessed they were trying to do the best they could - mom working in this minuscule bank, missing cigarettes and downtown lunch breaks.  Missing being young. Dad setting out on occasional long-haul truck driving stints but mostly staying home with my sister and me on this farm we suddenly owned. On the brink of so many dozens of acres of woods in to which he would wander out silently.  All flannel and sorrow.  I didn’t even know you could own forests.

Everything I still don’t understand about relationships I documented in my parents.  I don’t know what level of ebb and flow is reasonable or how you live through so many cold, broken years and stay anyway.  I don’t know the depths they know and I wouldn’t sign up for those sacrifices.  They are still everything I don’t understand.

Sometimes after dinner, they would slow dance to this song in our little wood paneled living room, so oblivious in their own mire we couldn’t decode.  And I would lie on the carpet and think that album was the saddest and most romantic gift in the world.

Years later she would leave, take us with her in the back seat of an old Chevy Caprice Classic.  And a week later, we would come back to promises and tempers mostly tamed. Maybe she planned to all along; I couldn’t tell by looking at her.

These days it’s just them in another house by a smaller woods and I think the dances are not so bittersweet anymore.  Maybe they can move a little more freely without the weight of our misunderstanding.

“

I think about how insane politics has become and lament knowing what I know about life and such.

I read blogs of friends, that I call “friends” because I read their blogs and they read mine (I think) and some make me laugh and one makes me almost cry because I never gave a eulogy I had intended on giving.

I shower in the “beach shower” and laugh about how I’d squirm from the burn that usually accompanied being in this spot a decade or so ago. I don’t squirm much anymore, nor do I get sun burned.

I think a lot about NYC and how one day I’ll go there and stay a while.

I think a lot about the mountains and how one day I’ll go there and stay a while.

thehipsterdiet: So I wake up

I liked this more than a button conveys.

December 19, 2009
Brunch with hilarious friends this morning. I don’t know if I hurt more from laughing at awkward co-worker spooning dreams and excerpts from the forthcoming confessional “How My Catholic School Jumper Made Me Gay” or eating my weight in breakfast delicacies, several times over. Things consumed include: Sausage bread (how can this sound so bad and taste so good?) Homemade peanut butter Spicy Bloody Mary with homemade tomato juice and blood orange infused vodka 1/2 huevos rancheros doused in hot sauce 1/2 lemon riccota pancakes Bite of bison sausage Bite of wild rice porridge My dignity 100 cups of coffee If I die of a ruptured stomach yet today, this was worth it.

Brunch with hilarious friends this morning. I don’t know if I hurt more from laughing at awkward co-worker spooning dreams and excerpts from the forthcoming confessional “How My Catholic School Jumper Made Me Gay” or eating my weight in breakfast delicacies, several times over.

Things consumed include:

  • Sausage bread (how can this sound so bad and taste so good?)
  • Homemade peanut butter
  • Spicy Bloody Mary with homemade tomato juice and blood orange infused vodka
  • 1/2 huevos rancheros doused in hot sauce
  • 1/2 lemon riccota pancakes
  • Bite of bison sausage
  • Bite of wild rice porridge
  • My dignity
  • 100 cups of coffee

If I die of a ruptured stomach yet today, this was worth it.

December 18, 2009
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

“These Days” - Mates of State

I have no words that feel ready to release today.  Perhaps incubation is not a bad thing.  Let’s try a song instead!

“ The Lower East Side will always feel like an inherently sad place to me, like living somewhere you can’t quite get a handle on, can’t quite seem to be happy in despite the charm— like flying kites on a too-windy day or horseback riding or Geometry. You want to get an A in Geometry because you always get As in everything and if other people can why not you? I used to always want to feel like I was having the best experience of a place, the most lived-in version of it, the most interesting story, and it turned out the story of living there was contained mostly in funny moments on park benches on very sad days. I think of walking around on Rivington during the day, listless, pacing on corners talking on the phone, sometimes hopping on the F train for fun, reading and writing there because it was just warm, but I also think of all the crazy idiots who sustained me, when a mom from school asked me why I dyed my hair that color or the kid forgot his homework once again, when all I wanted to do was take a nap or have a drink or meet a boy to distract me, people who called me Snowflake and Goldilocks would offer me sips of their Colt 45 and get down on their knees in the middle of the street to kiss my hand and tell me that if I was with them and got pregnant they would of course let me keep the baby.
Life is hard. Here is someone.
December 17, 2009
“ There is a certain kind of film that, if done well, I am bound to fall for each and every time, that plays to some inner note within my heart that never fails to respond accordingly. I’m not sure precisely what it is that resonates so soundly in these films - and it’s not for lack of thinking about it, I can assure you - but then again, perhaps that’s exactly what perpetuates it; it’s a feeling rather than a word, a perfect moment rather than a summary paragraph.

filmosophy.: Stranger Than Fiction (2006)

So well put, Chad. Nice piece and an interesting choice!

“ The look that passed between them held such awful sadness. If either of the two had painted such a thing, it would have to be torn down from the wall.
“The Lacuna” - Barbara Kingsolver
In which I take Will to IHOP on his Minneapolis layover. Let this be a lesson to you, favorite Tumblrs, if you route all your flights through MSP, I’ll be your airport shuttle and sleepy breakfast companion! Thanks for the pancake extravaganza and the thoughtful analysis, W. You might have a few good points..

In which I take Will to IHOP on his Minneapolis layover. Let this be a lesson to you, favorite Tumblrs, if you route all your flights through MSP, I’ll be your airport shuttle and sleepy breakfast companion!

Thanks for the pancake extravaganza and the thoughtful analysis, W. You might have a few good points..

December 16, 2009

In which I am a Man-Girl


So we have our holiday party tonight and I’m planning to go straight from work. And this morning, like any sensible farmer, here is what I decide:  It seems like a lot of work to completely change clothes beforehand.  Instead, why don’t I wear half of my party outfit to the office and just cover it with daytime clothes?  Brilliant, right?  So on go the tights, on goes the awkwardly heavy makeup, on goes my fancy top.  Over that, come my jeans, my winter boots, my warmest fleece jacket. 

When the witching hour comes, I’ll be a veritable Clark Kent, right?  Just unzip my Northface, step in to my skirt and voila - I’m a girl!  A girl with an irredeemably wrinkled party top and a pair of tights she already ripped attempting to re-layer herself without falling over in the ladies room. I’m like the Homer Simpson of women.

The State of Things in the North:

My bedroom has transformed into a frozen garden these days.  Growing ice vines on the bare windows and preserving me like root vegetables in my bed.  Last night I scavenged the cupboards for an old heating pad and curved it behind my cold back.  Pretended that it was the heat of flesh and blood; Maybe yours.