Seasons Change

I lent this book a few years back to a friend of mine with whom I have now unfortunately lost touch. Perhaps I'll get another copy and read it again, soon.

I read this book about three or four years ago. I liked it, but thought I would appreciate it more deeply when I was older.

I have reached a period where I suspect there are aspects of this novel which would resonate more loudly with me, now than they did a few years ago. The aspects and characters with which and with whom I suspect I would identify now are not the ones I suspected with which I would have identified when I first read this book a few year ago. But that's life, right?

... and all it took was a picture to remind me.

what i like about today

again, borrowing from Clare:

1. spotting a bunny in the garden of my neighbor; the one on the end unit.

2. Damien Rice. his music and finding his videos on YouTube. it never fails to take me to some past life i didn't know i had.

3. popping in on old neighbors on the way home from the library.

No doubt, mourning Annie contributes ...

It occurred to me that part of my emotional instability this weekend - I felt weepy - was not mere homesickness, or rue at my parents' aging, but a little bit of grief for a fallen hero. In any event, below is something I penned on my flight back home, tonight. Miss you, Ann! Thanks for rocking my world when I was a teenaged girl who needed a badass Texas woman to admire. You done good!
Okay, so I'm homesick. What can I say? Here I am 35,000 feet above Missouri or Kentucky maybe, about another 90 to 120 minutes left to go to the east coast and I've just finished browsing this month's copy of Texas Monthly. (I always try to snap a copy when I leave the Great State.) On my i-Pod shuffle, a rare three or four songs by Robert Earl Keen out of the past 5 or 6. One about an illegal immigrant, which I think I had heretofore not known. Robert Earl Keen always makes me miss West Texas. Couple that with the brief article on stargazing in the middle of nowhere where I used to live, and Keen's "Hard Amarillo Highway" (apparently covered by REK) and I sincerely miss West Texas. As my immediate family has moved to the eastern half of the state - as has most of my extended family - I no longer have a "reason" to visit, but I feel a pressing need. I feel the need to to gaze into those inky night skies, to experience the utter dryness again. It's been nearly a decade since I've experienced a dry summer, and a baker's dozen since I've known bone-dry, parched weather. I so long for that isolation right now - the isolation that maddened me as a teenager. It's funny how sometimes you need a million people crushing you and other times you need a million miles to breathe.

This past trip, too, however has made me glad to be where I am at the moment. Though I wish I were geographically closer to my and my hubby's extended family right now, I also really - today - appreciate where I am at the moment. I guess it helps to know we don't want to be here forever. But it also helps to know if we are, the world won't end. Maybe I'm finally heeding my own (self-enforced) prayer: "God, thank you for who I am, when I am, where I am ..." I suspect it's always good to be grateful for the present, becausee that's where we live, but it also helps to assuage anxiety over the future in the long run. Not to mention each day is a day closer to another where I am supposed to be and a nother day when I'll have the opportunity to do good. Each day is a constant becoming.

I seriously miss Texas, but it will always be my home and where my bones and dust will return. I have today - that's all I have - and each today is another opportunity to love and to achieve.

Wow, the thin air up here is awesome!

Niamh, you're spreading the word!

I'm very excited this morning. While in the shower, I pondered what 3 things of beauty I'd share, today. Then, I saw that Clare had left me a comment. Cool! My good friend Niamh must be proseltyzing for me across the pond from his Shropshirean hovel. Thanks, pal. (And thanks Clare for letting me hop onto your idea. I'll add you to my list of bloggies.)

Yesterday was Dad's suprise party, and I got to see some family whom I don't see often enough. As this is Texas, we went out for Mexican food. Mom and I had cabrito for the first time in years. (Huzzah!) And the cake was tres leches. Much like Mom's and very soppy. Mmm. Way better than the tres leches cake I had at the Cuban restaurant in Florida a few months back. I really missed Honey, though. I enjoy time with my family, but I enjoy it so much more when he's with us. It's cool, though. I'll just kiss him even more when I get home, tonight!

I have to get ready for church and for the airport after that, so I'll try to be brief with my three beautiful things.

1. Dad in the restaurant sombrero while the waitstaff serenaded him. He looked like a giant four year old. He blew out his candles well! :)

2. My cousins's daughter. She's so amiable and sweet. And her consonant cluster production at 22 months was really impressive. Likewise, her "r" sound is solid. As a linguistics student, I geek out on these things.

3. My cousin's basset hound. The floppy way she'd run to me when I called her. And the way she'd bray gently when I'd scratch around her ears. What a silly, happy dog!

Mental Dusting

I had just finished writing a long post once again bemoaning the White House and expressing befuddlement at the Middle East. But I felt that would be better for my personal journal, so I placed it there.

So, copying Clare, via JoeinVegas, I decided to list three things I find beautiful. It reminds me of a therapist I had once who had me keep lists of reliable sources of pleasure, so I could go back to those whenever the anxiety got too much. Life really is good, if you just stop and let it be.

1. Finding articles like this; that this guy is out there. If people feel like they need religious permission to enjoy sex with their spouse, then please, preach hot sex! Though I'm sure I'd disagree with his religious understanding a lot, especially seeing as how this guy hangs with the Robertsons and Fallwells and is a homophobic literalist, I have to appreciate his current campaign. It breaks my heart to think that there are people who have guilt during marital sex with their spouse whom presumably they love. Clearly his flock needs some shepherding. Keep it up!

2. Waking up in a bed not my own, but feeling just as safe and comfortable.

3. Knowing that puppagirl is probably sleeping next to Honey in my abscence this weekend.

Then

We tend to talk about it in the historical context in our household. But last night we talked about the more personal effects and memories.

The sunlight on his face in the bus on the ride in. What page he was on in his book. I was foolish enough to think I was going to finish mine - a book that had been confounding me for months - that day. (Of course I didn't know.) The sound of the phone ringing in the apartment building. The fear that the rising smoke, blowing directly toward my office was a threat. What a gorgeous day it was. How every woman who has wailed in confusion and sorrow after a male family member has been in the proximity of a blast flooded my soul - we were all together in one body screaming in different languages. The longest ride home of my life during which we stopped to pick up R's husband: "We don't know if Honey is alive, the least we can do is take care of the one we do know is." The friendliness of the bus driver who drove us in to the station. Where we sat on the bus: right side, a row or two in front of the back doors. The morning light on his face on the ride in. The building we were in front of when he looked up from his book to look at me. What a georgeous day it was. As we parted at the station and I told him, "I love you," and he merely smiled and waved as he walked on: how irritated I was at him. The poster in the train: the xylophonist in bare feet. My thoughts riding in: "Why is it we always wait for a disaster before we do anything?" The yellow blouse-grey skirt combination that I never wore again out of supserstition. How I was going to find a new dentist that morning, after my front desk shift. I hated that my department forced its lackeys to cover the front desk. The confused looks on people's faces in the lobby. I was going to go to an audition that night. How useless my cell phone was. The sound of a second boom. The sight through the rear windshield of black smoke rising in great billows. People driving politely for once. The lady who let us in, so I flashed her a peace sign - she looked very disconcerted; we must have, too. The guy walking down the street wearing a gas mask and no shirt, carrying a brief case. Comic relief. Voices on NPR speculating on who could've done this. The news across the radio of the 4th plane in PA. Were they all going to be falling out of the sky? The awkwardness when I finally got to the apartment and found honey alive - we shouldn't be here, in this universe in this time. Our bodies were in the same space, but our souls were jarred, floating a few feet off center of our bodies. We paced the apartment the remainder of the day, pausing occassionally to hug eachother. I cleaned, vaccumed mostly, like crazy. It was such a beautiful day. Phone calls when they started working. E-mails. The only machines in the sky were military. I cleaned like crazy. I developed a calm: goodness will prevail in the hearts of man. I was even happy. Calling in to the office to tell them I wouldn't return to work for the rest of the day because I felt "sick." (That I felt opressed enough by my employer to fake a sickness on the remainder of that day.) We couldn't eat for the rest of the day. (I vomited what little I had the next morning when it was clear it was not all a dream.) What we needed most from TV was more information. What we needed most from TV was a string of sitcoms.

It was such a gorgeous day.

Corruptibility

In an effort to get back into a daily writing routine, I'm going to jot something out this morning before I leave for work. Evidently, when I get home, I'm too zonked to want to do much more than eat, cruise the net and then sleep. Cruise E-bay: who am I kidding?

Anyway, yesterday I was listening to Marketplace on my drive out to meet my professor. I was only halfway listening, so you'll have to click on this link to find out how accurate what i'm about to tell you is. Here's what caught my ear: some sociologist/economist/somebody or other wanted to know how corrupt members of a generally corrupt society were. How do you measure that? On the micro level people always claim to be more morally upright than their governments. He decided to see how people abuse - or don't - diplomatic immunity. He tracked parking tickets of ambassadors and their staff to the UN. What he found was that over an 8 year period, ambassadors to places like Bangladesh and Chad and other countries that have poor human rights records and whom the international community generally agree are corrupt governments, there were thousands of outstanding parking tickets which went unpaid because of diplomatic immunity. However, in the whole of the Scandinavian countries - countries generally who have good human rights records, etc - he found a mere twelve, over 8 years. And most of those were from the guy from Finland. Damn Fins.

Granted, the biggest problem with that fun little exercise is that those individuals represent the corrupt governments, so we'd have to presume they are in fact corrupt individuals. It still doesn't tell us much about the regular folk on the ground. Though, if I were a betting person, I'd bet that many if not most of the people on the ground live corrupt lives as well, simply because that's what you have to do to stay alive. ... in other news, I heard on the radio yesterday - though not a news station, so I can't account for its accuracy - that 12% of the GDP of Mexico is from bribes. Way to go, my peeps. Keep up the embarassment for your American cousins.

Happy Wednesday

I love Lucy!

Again, I should be doing something productive ... Okay, I already primed the living room so that most of that horrible Robin's Egg Blue is gone, but I mean I should be doing something more productive this instant. Instead, I'm again checking up on my new habit, Lucy over on YouTube.

I found this video made in response to her "Growing Pains" post. Oh, how I wish I knew how to use a camera and cool editing software on my laptop (especially since I work around the damned equipment!), so I could post some cool encouraging post card for her! I would basically tell her what that one guy with the britty accent told her. (And this would go for VirginiaGal, too, since I know she's questioning her decisions and her path right now.) Own your decisions and trust that they are good ones and the ones that need to made right now, and that they will eventually pay off.

Brit guy is very right about "well, med school is right for her, but not for you [Lucy], that's not where your passion is ..." to paraphrase badly. I remember in the year or so after college graduation, many of my friends were going off to either coast to pursue acting full time. I, on the other hand, had moved to Oklahoma to live with my then boyfriend, now husband. After 4 or 5 years of studying acting, I was a little burned out on the craft and wanted a normal life. But I remember feeling guilty about it: I had an acting degree, shouldn't I necessarily be starving in LA or NYC? Everyone else was committing to their careers, shouldn't I be? But one of my cohorts who fled to Chicago to get her career moving helped me put it in perspective: our lives unfold at their own pace and this is where my life is now. Honey is who I want to be with regardless of career and at 24, I had him. We have to grab our opportunities when they're with us. For me, love entered my life before career. I'm 30 and I'm just now getting the whiff of the career path I think I want to pursue. For others - Lucy, for instance - career has presented itself first. Though I often envy people my age (and former classmates) who are further along in their respective careers than I am, I'm ultimately glad about the choice I made. This is my pace. This is my life. It will be good.

I can't help but note the similarity in Lucy's Hollywood life and VirginiaGal's Indian-American life. Both seem to be framed by unrealistic expectations: one determined by unhealthy body image and sexual appeasement by sleazy management types and the other by a community with aging, rigid social prescriptions. Ladies, don't sell out to cheap pressures and unattainable suppositions; you're both far too wonderful to fall prey to others' petty desires. Lucy and VirginiaGal your lives are beautiful and so are you: don't second guess your choices. What you do now, you do because you trust it will make you happier in the long run. I admire you both deeply and am a big fan!

... isn't it adorable how I write this as if someone other than my darling Niamh actually reads this? How goes it in Shropshire, btw, Niamh? How is the box turtle?