a tea party!

“Happy Winds-day, Piglet!” + scattered associations

My favorite Winnie the Pooh film is the one about a blustery day. For Piglet, Winds-day is simply a terrible, no-good, very bad day. Too tiny to fight the wind, he’s buffeted along with no say as to travel itinerary or destination.

Today overqualifies for the application of “blustery” as a defining adjective. I know because today’s wind is the only force that can outsqueal the Justin Bieber cd plugs Yahoo! keeps playing when the page refreshes. The only thing louder than the gale is the cawing of angry birds scattered out of V-formation.

In the movie Chocolat: it is the stirrings of the West Wind that cause Vianne’s insurpressible urge to relocate.

This morning: “I Drove All Night” playing in tune to the beat of my headache’s throbbing. A sick joke from my subconscious, starting off Sunday with Celine Dion. I think then I knew it would be a very disorienting day. Moved by things that are too obvious, too easy. Example: a fixation upon the wind. I think wind is so interesting; it is so powerful, so noisy, yet so invisible. The only indication of its presence are the impressions upon other things it leaves behind. Ugh, too easy, a sixth-grade theme.

Haven’t quite sat still all day. Haven’t quite done anything, either. Unless you count consuming half a jar of Nutella with a tablespoon and then washing it down with the obligatory two pieces of bread as doing something. And then when that (obvi) wasn’t quite right, and I devoured everything in the pantry (twice), the three days’ worth of caloric intake still wasn’t enough to overcome the most lethargic restlessness (oxymoron?) I’ve ever dealt with.

At least I fortified against a whole winter’s worth of wind. Quality consumption. No being blown away by any wayward blusters. And now? Left in several states too similar to Pooh’s: a still-raging wind, the chubby bear’s bloated belly, and his empty pantry. Oh bother. Now I’ve really got to get to a grocery mart. And a gym.

a modern day haunting

Yesterday I was at the fruit store in White Plains with my mom. I was staring at packages of cherries, when I hear my mom say: Susan*? I look up and see a woman I can’t place. Her face paralyzes me: it’s waxy, so shiny, almost immobile. Her smile is rigid and hardly stretches. Her eyes are sunken and drawn up at the corners, and she blinks too frequently. She keeps patting down her hair on the sides and biting her top lip under her bottom: nervous, self-conscious tics. I try to regain possession of myself, and smile, and be ready to chime in with my name age school when questioned, assuming this is some lady my mom knows from work. But I can’t compose myself. I keep doing the trying-not-to-stare type of staring in wonder at her unnatural face. My mom asks her about James, and my mind goes: “?” The woman talks for a moment about her James, and then my mom says: have you met my eldest daughter? She’s Don’s age. And my head goes “!”

It’s Don Marin’s mom, Susan. The kind of lady you see about town, or think you see, always engaged in things.  I thought she was so beautiful.

She must have had many plastic surgeries, and I had absolutely no inkling that she was who she is. My mind was whirring and I was paralyzed throughout the whole conversation. I kept internally kicking myself to not betray my shock, but it was so challenging; I’ve never been so thrown off, so confused, so lost. She looks like an entirely different person. Not even a person, exactly. Very alien-like and unreal. For the next hour, almost, I kept repeating “oh my god.”

I just keep thinking about her nose. I thought it had so much character. It was her feature that struck me when I saw her. It was thin and pointed up at the end in a very unique way, and I remember it as something special, something I liked to see, because I thought she was so pretty with her unusual, yet totally fitting, features. Now she has a very short nose, one that looks sort of dropped on to her face - a regular shape of perfect proportion. Which is funny, because it doesn’t seem to fit.

And I felt so many things afterward. So completely awful that my bewildered silence and paralyzed deer-in-headlamps look gave away my shock at her change. So sad that she felt she had to go under so many procedures. And I felt horrified. I hate that feeling of horror, inspired in me by this nice nice nice lady’s face. That’s so sad.

It’s strange that this affects me so much. I’ve met her maybe only once before. I certainly don’t mean this to be a gossipy story-telling of a small town woman’s plastic surgery - a dime a dozen sorta tale. That would be like bastardizing it. But I’m still unable to shake the experience; it’s really sticking with me. James and Don were away all summer, and she’s hardly seen them. I hope she has nice friends. I really want her to feel loved.  

*I’ve gone ahead and altered the names.

auditory uplift through flight-by-paper

Those appendages cemented to either side of my skull? Earring racks! Well, at least, that’s how I treat them…

Poor unappreciated ears - you do so much for me, and thanklessly.

I find myself half-watching America’s Got Talent - Tuesday nights in August are happenin’!! - when a relatively tame act by a sweet epileptic boy comes on. He has some interesting high-flyer kites he gracefully swings about in time to Josh Groban (“You Raise Me Up,” how perfect?) and with each ceiling-approaching twist of the kite, the audience enthusiastically raises its collective cry to fever-pitch. He’s flying, and concentrating, and, now, smiling. The sound is a fabulous thing! At a time when he cannot peel his glassies away from his kite, he can hear the approval, the appreciation, the unabashed exclamations of a whole crowd of people, egging, urging, hoping, him on!

Aided by the icy tentacles of the air conditioner, I try as hard as I can to ward off good feeling and warm spirits, but I’m powerless against the infectious uplift of kites and clapping. And I see, I love this clapping: so much palpable goodwill floating unrestrained through the airwaves.

And it’s like an undeniable force propelling me forward…I couldn’t help but rush off to Tumblr-land, for my first visit in months - oh dear, and, so sorry! - to share my enthusiasm…for enthusiasm.

lazybones’ quick fix

My grammar group must present the ever-stylistic colon, dash, and parenthesis tomorrow morning. Rather than using my neurony-blob to generate novel examples and class exercises, I am tempted to present this delightfully and freakishly long sentence:

In this entre-nous spirit, then, old confidant, before we join the others, the grounded everywhere, including, I’m sure, the middle-aged hot-rodders who insist on zooming us to the moon, the Dharma Bums, the makers of cigarette filters for thinking men, the Beat and the Sloppy and the Petulant, the chosen cultists, all the lofty experts who know so well what we should or shouldn’t do with our poor little sex organs, all the bearded, proud, unlettered young men and unskilled guitarists and Zen-killers and incorporated aesthetic Teddy boys who look down their thoroughly unenlightened noses at this splendid planet where (please don’t shut me up) Kilroy, Christ, and Shakespeare all stopped—before we join these others, I privately say to you, old friend (unto you, really, I’m afraid), please accept from me this unpretentious bouquet of very early-blooming parentheses: (((()))).

                         —Buddy Glass in Seymour - An Introduction

young lady, you must get out of your shell!

Isn’t it funny how the organisms with the thickest shells are the ones most likely to make it into the fossil record?

The fossil record is, says my geology professor, exclusive. Not just any ol’ cyanobacteria or piece of algae can make it on the list. It seems that without a hardy encasing, an organism will simply decompose, and will not leave behind material long enough to make it through the tedious millennia-long process of fossilization.

———

That cuddly creeper-crawler is a trilobite. Him and his kind must’ve been awfully shy, for they boast an usually high rate of success in the sedimentary stratification process!

swirling mass of protoplasm

I dedicate so much time to interpreting interactions. I pass a girl on my way down the path. We exchange a smile. Was hers a stand-in for a greeting? Or was it a manifestation of her judgmental laughter at the ridiculous way I arch my shoulders when I carry my backpack? It seems that the time I spend trying to come to a conclusion (invariably, I wind up at a stalemate; there’s just not enough information) could better be spent thinking about something, I don’t know, worthwhile. But the thing is — I don’t know that I’d much enjoy a world where the simplest action didn’t provoke a potentially unending list of interpretations and/or responses. With one thought I go one way, with another, I go the next. Now I can’t help but think about all the millions of little mes spawned after the trillions of interactions I’ve had over the course of my life. Did the part of me that flushed when I dropped a tomato on the floor wind up somewhere else than the side of me that self-righteously, if not slightly abashedly, picked up the vegetable? This is a physical impossibility. So this must mean that somehow all of these incongruous reactions and responses are somehow synthesized within myself. Little wonder I’m always confused.

Mirror

A white room and a party going on
and I was standing with some friends
under a large gilt-framed mirror
that tilted slightly forward
over the fireplace.
We were drinking whiskey
and some of us, feeling no pain,
were trying to decide
what precise shade of yellow
the setting sun turned our drinks.
I closed my eyes briefly,
then looked up into the mirror:
a woman in a green dress leaned
against the far wall.
She seemed distracted,
the fingers of one hand
fidgeted with her necklace,
and she was staring into the mirror,
not at me, but past me, into a space
that might be filled by someone
yet to arrive, who at that moment
could be starting the journey
which would lead eventually to her.
Then, suddenly, my friends
said it was time to move on.
This was years ago,
and though I have forgotten
where we went and who we all were,
I still recall that moment of looking up
and seeing the woman stare past me
into a place I could only imagine,
and each time it is with a pang,
as if just then I were stepping
from the depths of the mirror
into that white room, breathless and eager,
only to discover too late
that she is not there.

                       —Mark Strand

Last Night I Dreamed of Chickens

Last night I dreamed of chickens,
there were chickens everywhere,
they were standing on my stomach,
they were nesting in my hair,
they were pecking at my pillow,
they were hopping on my head,
they were ruffling up their feathers
as they raced about my bed.

They were on the chairs and tables,
they were on the chandeliers,
they were roosting in the corners,
they were clucking in my ears,
there were chickens, chickens, chickens
for as far as I could see…
when I woke today, I noticed
there were eggs on top of me.

                     —Jack Prelutsky