saturday, august 11
babysitting for children who are belligerent (no you may not squirt your brother with the plant food; yes you must change into your pajamas because wet bathing suits are not suitable for sleeping in; no I will not let you put whipped cream in my hair) and sniffling (2 tablespoons of triaminic x 2 doses in eight hours x 2 children = 13 sticky orange puddles) makes me think I remember why I think I will never be a parent myself, and makes me question my conviction that I like every child I've ever met, but then there are the moments...we played connect four and forehead poker and mancala and life and chinese checkers; we read clifford and madeline and when I was six and the magic schoolbus and the story of paul bunyan; we got ice cream and pizza and put together four different floor puzzles and still it was only 8:30. so I said no tv but it would be okay to be quiet and watch half an hour of the sound of music (already in the vcr), and we did and turned it off just after the captain interrupted ("when the dog bites..."), when it was dark and bedtime and suddenly still in spite of the pounding bassline from the turned-all-the-way-up--stereo in the car on the street and the people yelling in the park outside the open window. bed! I told them but they wanted me to sing first.
I am no julie andrews or even fraulein maria, but I have been singing to these children for almost seven years now, so I started with their favorite about the calf and the swallow and the wagon, and soon I felt them going limp and heavy against my lap; I kept singing about skeeters in the honeysuckle and jeremiah was a bullfrog, and even after they were sleep-breathing gently across my knees I sang until I had run out of lullabyes and folksongs and my fifth-grade spring concert solos (the sun is only a star / around that star we spin / but there are many other stars / where do we fit in?) and I was making up words, any words, and letting them spill into the darkness like honey into milk. what do you do when your life turns into a movie? I always feel that I am supposed to sit back and watch, but it is so much nicer to step fully inside and sing, even without the promise of a swelling orchestra to help you keep time with illusion...
lately I haven't wanted to end any of my sentences with periods; how do you end a song, really? the pendulum on my red bear-clock, my ninth-birthday present which now perpetually thinks it is six-thirty because the screws holding the hands on are stripped, but still has a perfectly functioning battery that makes the pendulum go swingswingswingswing completely silently, and since the pendulum is really the bear's shiny-black--shoed feet (it is a dancing red bear with a yellow bowtie and a striped cane, all cut out of wood) it looks like it is soft-shoeing its way across the wall and still getting nowhere; repeated patter-bang as insects fly against the windowscreen in a futile attempt to find the light, moths with velvet wings, flies like specks, smattered six-legged punctuation; my bird's dry curled little tongue going flick-flick against my earlobe and his sharp little toe-claws pricking into my shoulder again and again and again, his feathers rustling as he moves his head up and down, dusting the corner of my vision with green-red-peach-red-green blurring through shared space, and again nibblenibblenibble on my ear; the broken buzzing of the emergency alert system flowing into console beeping and chirping into wartime phaserfire on latenight star trek behind me, sparks popping and flying and sizzling as the ship takes a direct hit, and always the ubiquitous electronics-noise in the background pretending to live in the spaces between flying fingers and backlit control panels; my heartbeat throbbing in my swollen lips, fingertips, along my neck, against my ribcage, thump, thump, thump, thump, and on pulling me into the future; because some things exist even though I don't believe in them. also, I've been looking at my 404 reports and I must say I am highly amused at some of the things you guys have been looking for. no, there are not any hidden directories, although this is making me want to have one. one thing that always turns up, though, and has been consistently for the last five months, is http://www.wockerjabby.com/robots.txt. I have never had a robots.txt file. I don't plan on having one. why do people insist on looking for it? is it part of a scavenger hunt? a holy grail? what? I don't understand! three things I see: three things I hear: three things I smell: three things I feel: three things I taste: go on, you know you want to! one of my nerves got speared with a novocaine needle, and still the right half of my tongue is simultaneously tingly and numb, perpetually half-asleep, incapable of tasting anything quite properly; the swelling in my cheeks seems to have set off a systemic inflammation response, so my lungs refuse to fill all the way and my vision is blurred; I've slept only in two hour shifts, not long enough for proper cycles, only for stickyhot near-dreams, and my mind is cloudy with their remnants and its own lethargy; and still none of this is unpleasant, only fuzzy and less-dimensional than I expect, so I am unwhole, kept from living in the world by a birdcage with silver-invisible bars; and did you know that I love the word imperfect almost as much as I love the concept? If you're a Chocolate Chip lover, you're a creative force to be reckoned with (this also applies to lovers of Cookie Dough, Mint Chip, Rocky Road and other "chunky" ice creams). You've got a competitive streak a mile wide, but it brings out the best in you by forcing you to live up to your own demanding standards. You can be rather unforgiving at times with those who don't share your vision and drive, but friends value your magnetism, charm and originality. it's true about my competitive streak, although I go back and forth on whether I like having it there. too often I think it manifests itself in unpleasant ways, and I find myself caught up needing not to be prettier or smarter than anyone else, but more deserving of sympathy, which is ridiculous and makes me feel curdled when I think about it. but I also like to win rugby games, and that's a good thing. my "demanding standards" tend to apply more to my participation in teamwork than in schoolwork, though, and that's not always a good thing. and I'm much better at making goals for myself than I am at actually meeting them. so not too innaccurate, but I prefer my chocolate chips straight up and dairy-free. :) [link via zalary] so, for those of you who pay excessive attention to the web and stuff, you've probably caught me being catty (well, I tried) over at puppetmaster. you should check out the websites of all the contestants, but I have to point out three in particular: ashley's site is almost as pretty as she is, shea is a trip, and philo tells fantastic stories. faith mentioned fresh made, which aside from the evil grammar is intriguing. I don't think I would want to use someone else's design on my own site for more than a day, but I'd love to see how you guys envision it. peter made a comment the other day about how this design was more reflective of the actual content than my old one was, or something like that, and while I'm not big on the whole separate-style-from-content thing, obviously there's no way a design made on one day or even over the course of a week can be expected to fit with the things I write several months later. and I can't say I've ever though much about how the two go together, other than letting both the pictures and the words be some reflection of how my relationship with the universe is going... sometimes they match, sometimes not. laura came back somewhere when I was not paying attention, but now I am. alison never really left, but she is also back. I am hot, and also a fish. or something like that. so I made it through the whole thing completely nitrous-free, but I still managed to hallucinate, black out, and go pulseless on just the novacaine. I think that must make me at least a little special. while I was still in my half-fuzzy state, I wished they hadn't hooked me up on oxygen, because without it I had been dancing with the talking heads in a low-gravity version of tijuana, but it's probably not so good to go for too long without a detectable heartbeat... when I came back out, he was halfway finished, and the posterboard was crowded with letters that looked as if they wanted to be pretty but didn't know how: red capitals, retraced again and again, edged with uneven black outlines bleeding into each other at the corners. homeless veteren disabled any help aprec ... I'm sure it now continues on to say "sober, clean and proud," like all the other signs, and I imagine he is proud of that sign, because I would have been, if I had made it. I wanted to sit down and color with him, but I felt that would be wrong and pretentious somehow, so I came to work instead. ten blocks later I saw a woman on the sidewalk carrying a red shoulderbag that was stained dark with liquid around one corner. it dripped pale yellow into the air; I wanted to tell her but she had crossed the street before my light changed, taking her leak with her. things fall apart in so many ways. the suv was barely dented. I hope everyone survived. for those of you who like these things, here is another test! are you as big a geek as I am? scoring: maybe I call her my best friend only because of history and not because I have any concept of "best" when it comes to my friends anymore (thank you, college), but in the final analysis I don't think it matters especially what I call her. she came. we went to chinatown (I burned my mouth on a vietnamese bean cake; we shared chow foon with bean sprouts and lemon-spicy tofu that she informed me tasted like chicken; I couldn't remember how chicken tastes), the common (I recited orsino's opening monologue from twelth night; we waded in the frog pond next to the jazz band; spike green fruit went squish under my sandal), the public garden (coed housing debate; honeylocust tree label), the river (we sat on the bank and watched the end of the sunset through purple flowers and cityhaze). home again for chocolate cake (frosting fingerlicked off the sides) and photos (my rugby lineouts and subway graffiti; her summer apartment and voluntary blackouts) and politics. the details make things real but they are only parentheticals, because I love my friends and sometimes that is the essence of simplicity.
21:34
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it's all about the rhythms:
02:23
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as I was telling my mother in the car today, I have realized some things about my mouth:
the slightly more sobering realization is that, when you come right down to it, I think I regret at least fifty percent of the things I put in my mouth, sometimes in retrospect, but sometimes in advance... thank goodness I don't smoke.
01:03
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friday, august 10
barbra sings on disney's snow white deluxe edition dvd. thursday, august 9
this is called the let's see if we can start a meme game!
1. my good luck troll pencil, which would be like any normal number two pencil (yellow paint, dented with teethmarks) except that instead of an eraser, it has a little plastic troll on the end. it has bright fuschia hair and is otherwise completely naked.
2. three little screws sitting in a small silver pile on my bookshelf. they belong to my old computer, which I never bothered to reassemble after I took it apart to rip some of the hardware out.
3. a box of wooden matches from the indian restaurant we went to on my birthday: it is mostly yellow, with a mask in the background and a feathery purple peacock printed next to the name. my brother filled his pockets with them; we used one box for lighting the candles on my cake.
1. track eleven (weirdest home videos) of the american beauty score, which I now associate in equal parts with the first night at the telescope in chile (I was trying to figure out how to process double-chip images) and with the movie itself (I want to die like that).
2. my little brother in the back hall, yelling down the basement stairs for my father to come to the phone. someone is always yelling to someone about a phonecall, it seems. I miss college, the land of phone calls that are only for me. I am so self-centered!
3. the slightly buzzy whisper of my little clip-on fan, which does a remarkably good job at keeping the air moving for something so small, but which is really not making a dent in the ninety-plus degrees.
1. warm electronics, working hard, smelling artificially-clean the way hospitals and nursing homes do, with sterilized surfaces hiding illness and bodies on the verge of breaking down.
2. brita-filtered refrigerator water, still cold but rapidly becoming not so, while the condensation running down the outside of the glass turns my desk into a pond.
3. my next-door-neighbor's cameroon-kitchen, which always seems to be at its most potent in the middle of the night, spicy and grainy and orange-brown.
1. the slimy squishy icepack tucked between my chin and my shoulder, dampening my t-shirt collar, numbing my cheek, and completely failing to make my mouth any less swollen. it feels nice anyway.
2. the line of sweat forming around the twice-rolled-back elastic waistband of my red cotton boxer shorts. it seems wrong that something that is actually a part of my body leaving itself behind should make me feel so very corporeal, but there it is and I lack the impetus to argue.
3. the keyboard under my fingers, still remarkably clean after several weeks of use, but having lost the faint-brailleish-feeling of the letter-printing on the home row, where the keys are now all warm and smooth inside the little finger-shaped grooves.
1. my lips: a mixture of minty fresh sensitive-gum toothpaste, brushed carefully over the front of my two front teeth; raspberry lipgloss, sweet and a little bit melty; dried blood crusted around the corners, salty.
2. penicillin, which won't go away no matter how much water I attempt to drink! somehow it manages to taste like burned sulfur and sweaty feet at the same time. yum yum.
3. a single green grape, which I have been kneading with my tongue for the last several minutes. it has lost most of its refrigerated coolness, but it is still light and sweet and a tiny bit tangy.
22:22
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somehow my dulled senses turn me into a shadow incapable of fully inhabiting the world, rather than reducing the world to something less vibrant than it usually is, or less full than I know it to be.
15:49
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if I were ice cream, I would be chocolate chip.
01:58
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bloglogging cominatcha.
01:09
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wednesday, august 8
I meant to write a big post about webidentity and stuff, because the universe seems to have been steering me towards that for the past two weeks, but I'm feeling uninspired so I'll just say this: maybe things will change around here and maybe they won't, but I have a new toy. if you care, you'll find it. if not, don't worry about it. and I do appreciate every single person who reads this. thanks. :)
21:40
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a warning: I'm in the process of transferring/renewing my domain registration. if anything weird happens, that'll be why. no worries.
14:46
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tuesday, august 7
this seems like an awful lot of blood for such a small part of my body. perhaps it's because I still can't feel my jaw at all, so I am surprised every time I go to the mirror and see red oozing between my teeth; the last time I opened my mouth to take out the gauze I found myself suddenly drooling vampire-style into the sink.
16:46
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on my way to work this morning I stopped at the drugstore to drop off a roll of film for developing. there was a man sitting on the curb, wearing a pow*mia shirt and a matching one-size-fits-all foam baseball cap, carefully unwrapping a new sheet of posterboard and two permanent markers. he was moving so deliberately that I almost couldn't believe he was sitting with his feet in the gutter instead of under a corporate desk. I locked up my bike and watched him out of the corner of my eye while he snapped the cover off a red marker and bent over his glossy clean sheet.
12:55
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monday, august 6
I watched a car accident this evening. things that happen so fast should not be so inevitable; it shakes my confidence in physics and kismet. little blue two-door versus shiny green suv: more futures written in stone for all the world to see in the terrible splitseconds that must turn forward, because there is no time for revision. the blue car crumpled like a compressed accordion, but instead of moaning that tired wheezy sound it crunched and cracked as if the air itself had shattered. green-rimmed glass shards snapped against the pavement under my tires as I rode out against the tide of newly-summoned emergency sirens.
21:37
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so, the star trek personality test says that I'm like deanna troi and jake sisko, two of the biggest weenies in star trek. after some wrangling, I got it to tell me that if it had measured my personality the way every other test does, I would be like kes and garak or like worf. I am thrilled to see that I am not in any way human...
answer each question either true or false.
1. you thought question one in section four was stupid.
2. you went back and systematically clicked through all the different permutations of over/under ten responses so that you could read all the possible results.
3. you think worf is the worst example of an intp ever.
4. you are indignant that bareil was included but uhura wasn't.
5. you're pretty sure that you could write a more accurate test (meaning one that is actually based on meyers-briggs instead of just pretending to be).
all true -- yes! you are a big rabi-like geek!
all false -- you don't even watch star trek, do you.
in between -- congratulations. revel in your ungeekiness.
in between, but you were inspired to turn some of your falses true -- gah! run, run away!
11:55
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sunday, august 5
[birthday traditions, part 3.]
23:49
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