Rant and Ramble

steam shoves up through the cracks in the sidewalk / the city is falling, the city's falling down / white birds fly against the sky like a warning / the city is falling, yeah, the city's falling down

always, a million places i'd rather be than here, except that all of them are with you. and you're here, so i can be here too.

quote:

Happy Family. Barbie's friend Midge is pregnant again. You determine the delivery date. Her swollen belly is detachable, and each set comes with a newborn. Midge and her hubby are living the Eddie Bauer lifestyle, with a perfect suburban station wagon. You can even buy a helpful sent of grandparents. (Mattel, Midge and baby $16.99; Volvo $19.99)

unquote.

someone liberally salted a six-inch swath down the center of the sidewalk, effectively turning two feet of snow into four inches of water, held in its slushy place by the unaffected two feet of snow to either side. it has become impossible to leave my house without becoming wet up to your shins. i ought to be in ballet right now. i walked all the way to the gym, realized i didn't have my id and wouldn't be allowed in, and walked back. by the time i got inside, water had creeped inside my shoes and up my pants and i decided that walking back, again, couldn't possibly be worthwhile. instead, i'm snuggy in my dance pants and the sweater my mom mailed me, slippersocked and chocolate-sipping.

that's right. i declare my own snow days.

up to my thighs as i navigate the porch stairs, piled in drifts higher than i am, burying cars, mocking all attempts at shoveling, salting, or pushing aside. the city is silent beneath the snow, still coming down in great puffing veils, slipping down the back of my bundled coat and in between my toes. i pass a man walking a terrified pomeranian, sinking down to just the fluff of a tail with every step, past a woman throwing cinnimon toast crunch to the birds on her driveway, and a man digging out his car with a broom. we each exchange a wry "g'morning" and smiles that say how 'bout this snow, huh?, an instant communal bond over two feet of cold and a weather report that says "blizzard."

i leaned over the stove, lifting the round, red teapot from the hot red coils, and the snow melted out of my hair and fell in little hissing droplets on the burner. the scent of chamomile drifted up and the honey dripped slowly down, and my fingers warmed gratefully on the mug i bought at pantheacon two years ago, a rainy weekend in san francisco. i spent most of an hour there in the ceramics booth, slipping my fingers into the handle of every mug, testing the weight and shape and color, seeking the right one. that night i slept with the echos of drums playing to me, a deep pulsing energy that stayed reverberating in my bones for weeks.

i missed the festival this year; they'll be starting the eris ritual in a few hours, and the fire drumming after that.

i've not been much of a pagan, of late, aside from my wonder at the snow, and the lighting of candles in the dark. i have wandered far from the spirituality with which i once lived, and i wrong what belief i yet have with my unhappiness. the charge rang so true to me, i think that may have been what first led me to claim myself pagan... i don't know that i still believe in the goddesses, as such, nor the gods, but somehow i still believe the words. let my worship be within the heart that rejoiceth, for behold: all acts of love and pleasure are my rituals.

i wore my leather pants today.
he didn't notice.

we whispered together, in the dark, you and i. we didn't need words, just the murmer of our voices, the lilting of joy and the low tones of affection. we spoke with our hands, our fingers mapping out ideas, caressing whole conversations. we spoke rolling hills and gentle valleys, deep cool rivers and birds and earthworms and dandelions, sighed the ocean into being and muttered the drumbeat of redwoods and spotted fawns. then you turned and held my hand, and began to sing. a long, clear note that shone in a spiraling darkness, bright shining gold and white and love, and it spun and curled around itself, your voice and its beauty, and became a tumbling sphere of laughter and light and you handed it to me and we set it carefully into the newlyspoken sky, and the salmon and the mountain lions and the buffalo grass and the hawks stretched themselves awake and became the world.

[inspiration: toasted cheese]

"every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. this world in arms is not spending money alone. it is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. this is not a way of life at all in any true sense. under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron."

-dwight eisenhower, april 16, 1953

the veins of my wrists run startlingly near the surface, my skin suddenly thin and parchemented, and i marvel at the colors of my blood. deep blue and thin violet and aching green, sweet pink and the dull ivory of my skin, all colors of sea and sky and sand.

vagina monologues! grand hall, eight o'clock, monday through wednesday... please come and make all my work worthwhile.

today kept slipping back into morning; i tried to get up but couldn't stay out of bed, snuggling beneath the thick down comforter, skin happily next to skin and flannel sheet. the snow fell all night and into the day, and didn't stop until after we'd showered and even then i wore my pajama pants under my jeans.

there haunts me these days an everpresent fear of failure. or, more accurately perhaps, a fear of negligence; mediocrity. a fear of limbo, of uncertainty, of abstraction. i fear that i will never be truly good at anything. that no passion will ever grip me, that i will never find my siren or my truth. the frenetic whirling of my life spins with anxious fury about a static center. not the eye of the storm; not a peace. a dullness. a death. i don't feel success any more, not really, just the relief of one more thing done. i've lost my joy in learning, and lost my thrill in writing. i keep calling it stress, but there's a fundamental unhappiness that makes me smile at the wrong times, turns my eyes away.
i've never been here before. not really. i'm not sure what to do with this small, empty sadness. i don't know where to put it, or how to set it down.

also: i encourage you to partake of some adriot political, cultural and otherwise vaguely relevant commentary at dave barry's blog.
it's funny, too.

why, exactly, do we americans feel the need to prove our virility and competence by way of exhaustion? i mean, at what point did poor self-maintenence become a source of pride? it's like the i-had-to-walk-to-school-through-eight-feet-of-snow-barefoot stories, except they're i-have-to-juggle-eight-overwhelming-responsibilities-and-i-don't-sleep stories... and we tell them to each other instead of to scoffing children.

by which i mean, i'm far too busy to be writing anything of any quality, and maybe after this play goes up, and after the next one, and after midterms are over, and after i sleep for a week...

i've been playing with the poetry page a bit lately, trying to find my voice again, trying to remember that i can write. let me know what you think.

we slept in late on saturday and ran to shop call, also late, and were suprised to hear the radio on under the buzzing of rotary saws and the sloshing of paint.

oh.

it's hard to stay sensitized in this world. the first shock subsides soon enough, and then all you're left with is the endlessly repeating coverage, the increasingly tangential and sensationalist information, the flat voice of NASA's spokesperson who, really, couldn't have been more emotional without being unprofessional as well. the conflicting accounts and obvious ignorance beneath an everthinning veil of impartial speculation. the president.

i want to mourn for those lost, because they died in service of a cause and an ideal far more worthy, in my opinion, than that of any of our petty, horrific wars. i want to be shattered, or angry, or something... but mostly i just feel quiet, and numb.