VD again

Hey, what a surprise! I don’t care for Valentine’s Day. In that vein, I would rather eat a bowl of dirty fingernails than wear red on Valentine’s Day. But, as I said to my pal Deborah today when she asked me why I’m not wearing all black, wearing all black is such a cliché, so I compromised and wore a black shirt, my beloved knee-high black platform boots, and a brightly-colored patchwork skirt I bought during my last trip to London. Wearing this skirt on this day was a very deliberate move on my part, because London was my first true love, and I’m all about the symbolism. Oh, and I’m also wearing my dangly razor blade earrings, because again: symbolism. Love will slice you to ribbons, dont’cha know.

Deborah’s happily married, and thus today isn’t a horrorshow for her, but she was still eager to go with me to Red Robin so I could drown my Valentine sorrows in a chocolate milkshake and huge veggie burger. And the waiter totally thought we were on a date.

I’m not a complete asshole about love; I do still believe in it. So I thought I’d share some of my favorite love/sex quotes and poems from my quotations collection (not all are fully cited; I’ve been trying to track down full citations for yonks, often to no avail). Here we go:

My religion is well known to those who know me. I believe in bodies, arms entangling and untangling. I believe, and I know it to be so, that there are so many curves and hollows in a single body that none of us can come to know them all within a single lifetime. I believe in one to one and one on one. No wine or magic, no hand-me-down Bible can improve on that. I believe in spring, but only if I’m rolled up in a pillow or holding some well-loved face in my hands... More often I’m a spectator, meaning I’ve no reason to believe in anything save what I see. But I do. –Rod McKuen, Alone

…here was a boundless sensual freedom, theirs for the taking, even blessed by the vicar—with my body I thee worship—a dirty, joyous, bare-limbed freedom, which rose in his imagination like a vast airy cathedral, ruined perhaps, roofless, fan-vaulted to the skies, where they would weightlessly drift upward in a powerful embrace and have each other, drown each other in waves of breathless, mindless ecstasy. –Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach

And when you appear
all the rivers sound
in my body, bells
shake the sky,
and a hymn fills the world.
Only you and I,
only you and I, my love,
listen to it.
–Pablo Neruda, “The Queen”

…you and I together have gone down a single river
with linked mouths filled with salt and blood…
–Pablo Neruda, “Furies and Sorrows”

I have gone marking the atlas of your body
with crosses of fire.
My mouth went across: a spider, trying to hide.
In you, behind you, timid, driven by thirst.
–Pablo Neruda, “Twenty Love Poems: XIII”

I want
to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.
–Pablo Neruda, “Twenty Love Poems: XIV”

And those who come together in the nights and are entwined in rocking delight perform a solemn task and gather sweetness, depth, and strength for the song of some future poet, who will appear in order to say ecstasies that are unsayable. –Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, letter #4

He takes my heart and sets its pulse. Everything else is easy. –Alla Nazimova (as quoted in Margaret Wettlin’s Fifty Russian Winters)

We could have grown roots, we stood there so long. We could have grown wings and risen like angels up through the tunnel of the stump and out into the sky, still talking in that mute language we suddenly discovered we shared, the fluent and precise language of tongues. –Jean Hegland, Into the Forest

All these words are just a front. What I would really like to do is chain you to my body, then sing for days and days and days. –Hafiz

We who were loved will never
Unlive that crippling fever.
–Adrienne Rich, “After a Sentence in ‘Malte Laurids Brigge’”

I loved her body and I could never have enough of regarding it as a world in which I could wander and wander without fear. –Christer Kihlman, The Blue Mother

There was no engine on earth whose power compared with the want of one body for another. –Barbara Kingsolver, Prodigal Summer

The sexual embrace can only be compared with music and with prayer. –Henry Havelock Ellis

At the heart of sex is something intrinsically spiritual, the desire for a union so primal it can be called divine. –Sam Keen

The wakened lover speaks directly to the beloved,
“You are the sky my spirit circles in,
the love inside love, the resurrection-place.”
–Rumi, “I Have Five Things to Say”

…when I was apart from you,
this world did not exist,
nor any other.
–ditto

In love there are two things: bodies and words. –Joyce Carol Oates

Your name is a golden bell hung in my heart. I would break my body to pieces to call you once by your name. –Butterfly, in The Last Unicorn

I love one man, and you know it; I love him while awake; while sleeping; living; dead; love him. And if I can’t have him then God doesn’t exist, Reverend Sigurður; and you, the archpriest, don’t exist, nor does the bishop, nor my father, nor Jesus Christ; nothing—except for evil. –Halldór Laxness, Iceland’s Bell

As long as we are sitting here together we have everything. –ditto

I don’t just want
your heart
I want your flesh,
your skin
and blood and bones,
your voice, your thoughts
your pulse
and most of all your
fingerprints,
everywhere.
–Isobel Thrilling, “Lover”

We are each the love of someone’s life. –Andrew Sean Greer, The Confessions of Max Tivoli

Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same… –Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

So much of the language of love was like that: you devoured someone with your eyes, you drank in the sight of him, you swallowed him whole. Love was sustenance, broken down and beating through your bloodstream. –Jodi Picoult, Nineteen Minutes

Love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking together in the same direction. –Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand, and Stars

Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread; re-made all the time, made new. –Ursula Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

Where there is great love there are always miracles. –Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop

…later, she would tell him that there had been a crackling magic in the air and he would tell her that his desire at that moment was so intense that his groin ached.
When she finally felt that desire, she was surprised above everything else. She did not know that a man’s thrusts could suspend memory, that it was possible to be poised in a place where she could not think or remember but only feel. –Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun

This was love: a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles. –ditto

…then I did the simplest thing in the world. I leaned down…and kissed him. And the world cracked open. –Agnes de Mille

Being kissed on the back of the knee is a moth at the windowscreen… –Anne Sexton, “Knee Song”

A mouth that is kissed loses no flavor, but, like the moon, is renewed. –Giovanni Bocaccio, The Decameron

You will remember: it was you who kissed me that evening in the parlor. I tasted that last coil of smoke held in your mouth; it tasted like a word, like a yes. –Andrew Sean Greer, The Confessions of Max Tivoli

As the adjective is lost in the sentence, so I am lost in your eyes, ears, nose, and throat—you have enchanted me with a single kiss which can never be undone until the destruction of language. –Kenneth Koch

In the depths of our hearts we are together,
in the cane field of the heart we cross through
a summer of tigers,
watching over a meter of cold flesh,
watching over a bouquet of inaccessible skin,
with our mouths sniffing sweat and green veins
we find ourselves in the moist shadow that drops kisses.
–Pablo Neruda, “Furies and Sorrows”

Half-sleeping,
my body pulls toward yours—
desire a long oar dipping
again and again
in this night’s dark rain.
–Jane Hirshfield, “Half-sleeping...”

You and I
Have so much love,
That it
Burns like a fire,
In which we bake a lump of clay
Molded into a figure of you
And a figure of me.
Then we take both of them,
And break them into pieces,
And mix the pieces with water,
And mold again a figure of you,
And a figure of me.
I am in your clay.
You are in my clay.
In life we share a single quilt.
In death we will share one coffin.
–Kuan Tao Shêng, “Married Love”

We leave the bed where your fingers
are a wide surprise, where your tongue
tells me slow stories. I watch you,
in the daylight, bring your hand
to your face, to your mouth. I tuck
pieces of myself behind
in the tangle of our bodies.
–Kim Ports, “Desire”

How is it that our two bodies
made only of flesh and bone
ignite with this fire
yet do not burn?
–Terra Hunter, “Wanting You”

A million light years and a million more would not give time enough to store that small second of eternity when I took you in my arms and you took me in yours. –Jacques Prevert

My body was a lovely bonfire burning night and day on that tropical coast. –Pablo Neruda

You began to be irreplaceable for me long before I had ever heard of you. –Roger Sale

What sex is, we don’t know, but it must be some sort of fire. For it always communicates a sense of warmth, of glow. And when the glow becomes a pure shine, then we feel the sense of beauty. –DH Lawrence

I love you not only for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you. I love you not only for what you have made of yourself, but for you are making of me. I love you for the part of me that you bring out. –Elizabeth Barrett Browning

In my hands your
body is a hymnal
open to the familiar
page of praise. I
sing you in the ancient
rhythm that brought
us all here to make
what we will of
this world, I sing
you in tongues and
in silent awe of our
loving, certain only
of imminent separation.
–Anne K. Smith, “Praise”

And you will always be with me.
I shall never cease to be filled with newness,
Having you near me.
–DH Lawrence, “Wedlock”

Desire is relentless. No matter what science says, it appears not to need our digits, or our gonads, to persist. What does this say about sex? That it is so much more than the hormones which sustain it? That, like life, sex has a soul beyond the body in which it’s housed? That, like God, it is invisible, indefinable? Should we pray to sex? Can we be saved by sex? One thing’s for sure, you cannot kill sex. Carve out the clitoris, cut off the testicles, bind the feet until they are putrid with pain, and still the urge keeps coming, we keep coming; alive. –Lauren Slater

Desire confounds us, Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, Jew, atheist, pantheist, agnostic…desire confounds us. Our vocabulary of the erotic spirit is often impoverished. –Sam Hamill, preface to The Erotic Spirit: An Anthology of Poems of Sensuality, Love, and Longing

Erotic love is one of the highest forms of contemplation. –Kenneth Rexroth

…I don’t believe that in order to be interesting or meaningful, a relationship has to work out—in fiction or in real life. In fact, I consider a forced happy ending in a book almost as bad as a real couple who get married even though their friends know they shouldn’t. … Now, believe me, I love swelling music and kisses at sunset as much as the next woman; when I was growing up, my family crowded around the TV to watch The Love Boat. But as I’ve gotten older, I realized that when it comes to love, it’s the journey that matters as much as the destination. And the messiness is part of what makes romance so fascinating in the first place. Movies and books lead us to believe that if a relationship doesn’t end in marriage, it didn’t count, but that’s absurd. Even unrequited crushes can provide hard-won insights into ourselves and our lives. –Curtis Sittenfeld

Whether you’ve been in a relationship for ten years or ten weeks, you know how crazy love can make you. On any given day you’re insanely happy, maniacally miserable, kooky with contentment, or bonkers with boredom—and that’s in a good relationship. Why do you think we call it being “madly” in love? You have to be a little nuts to commit yourself, body and soul, to one other person—one wonderful, goofy, fallible person—in the hope that happily-ever-after really does exist.
And yet we can’t help ourselves. We throw ourselves into love time and again, even though we know real-life love is no fairy tale. We trade in our sexy glass slippers for soccer-mom sneakers, or pretend we didn’t hear (or smell) that gastric emission Prince Charming made in his sleep. We stress out and make up and do it all over again—and why? Because nothing makes us feel more alive than the exhilaration and exasperation of everyday love. –Mary D. Esselman and Elizabeth Ash Vélez, Love Poems for Real Life

No matter how long you’ve been together or how well you think you know each other, you still need to romance your partner, especially in stability. Don’t run off and get an extreme makeover or buy into the whole red-roses-and-champagne bit. Instead, try being kind, receptive, and respectful, practicing what Henry V would call “plain and uncoined constancy.” You simply need to show your partner, often and in whatever tender, goofy way you both understand, that his or her heart is your home and that you plan to be there permanently. –ditto

Real love can whirl you from the glory of ecstasy from the hell of misery and back again, but that’s just how it goes in real life, and aren’t we lucky to be part of that dance? –ditto

Good God, what a night that was,
The bed was so soft, and how we clung,
Burning together, lying this way and that,
Our uncontrollable passions
Flowing through our mouths.
If I only could die that way,
I’d say goodbye to the business of living.
–Petronius Arbiter, “Good God, What a Night That Was”

…and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes
and then he asked me would I yes…
and first I put my arms around him yes
and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes
and his heart was going like mad
and yes I said yes I will Yes.
–James Joyce, Ulysses

We touch Heaven as we lay our hand on a human body. –Friedrich Leopold

Breathe your life into my soul and know the greatest story ever told is you and I... –Neil Diamond, “Create Me”

I know where you are
with my eyes closed, we are bound to each other
with huge invisible threads, our sexes
muted, exhausted, crushed, the whole
body a sex—surely this
is the most blessed time of my life...
–Sharon Olds, “True Love”

We are two sides of the same magic... –Unicorn, in The Last Unicorn

I long for him most
during these long moonless nights.
I lie awake, hot,
the growing fires of passion
bursting, blazing in my heart.
–Ono No Komachi

that boy who told me: pass
some honey from your hive
I answered: give me back some
on your tongue
& he got angry, yelled:
shall we two sin against the living God?
I answered: let your sin,
sweet master, be with me.
–Samuel Ha-Nagid

Think how unspeakably sweet
the taste of snow at midsummer,
how sweet a kind spring breeze
after the gales of winter.
But as we all discover,
nothing’s quite as sweet
as one large cloak
wrapped around two lovers.
–Asklepiados

I have a thousand images of you in an hour; all different and all coming back to the same…And we love. And we’ve got the most amazing secrets and understandings. Noël, whom I love, who is so beautiful and wonderful. I think of you eating omelette on the ground. I think of you once against a skyline: and on the hill that Sunday morning. And that night was wonderfullest of all. The light and shadow and quietness and the rain and the wood. And you. You are so beautiful and wonderful that I daren’t write to you…And kinder than God. Your arms and lips and hair and shoulders and voice—you. –Rupert Brooke, to Noël Olivier

Now in the quiet of the evening and in the warmth of the bed a drugged and dreamy feeling steals over me and I am with you once more. Lying here I love to think you near me, your arms encompassing me, my head buried in your shoulder, catching the rhythm of your breathing and living for a few exquisite moments as one being—I said I was dreaming, darling, but I am so delightfully intoxicated, relishing such heavenly moments with you that I wish it to go on forever. –Live Lewis, to Leslie Couzens

When you’re young, you think that sex is the culmination of intimacy. Later you discover that it’s barely the beginning. –Peter Høeg, Smilla’s Sense of Snow

To lie with you under a ceiling bright with shifting water shadows—that’s good. To drowse in flower-scented darkness—that’s good. But best of all is rain—drumming, roaring, gushing from the guttering—and we two warm and dry and safe together, in each other’s arms. –Pam Brown

i.
in those first minutes
before light starts making sense
we uncurl and kiss
ii.
snowflake on your tongue
my tongue on your burning thigh
your thigh: a sweetness
v.
fleeting, frail, formless:
love is nothing more than breath
in late December
vi.
in hindsight, starvation
is the closest approximation
to love
–JLB

I.
I would kiss your nub of collarbone
and trail my lips down your salt-
solid spine, tracing the words
“all my days remaining”
in the hallow of your back.
And before morning, we could ignite a fire
greater than any planets’ suns.
II.
What are words
but a means of conjuring up flesh?
It is your fingers I want, not words;
your fingers tangled in my matted hair,
your tongue trailing across my heart,
the damp nape of your neck resting
against my shoulder.
But words are sustenance in times of hunger...
III.
This chaos is as maddening
and gentle as the moths
that thump against porch lights
on summer evenings
and all I want, sweet boy,
is a moment of respite,
a moment when I can remember
that sometimes joy is nothing more
than a fleeting stillness,
an interlude from longing.
–JLB

Winter skies are cold and low,
with harsh winds and freezing sleet.
But when we make love beneath our quilt,
we make three summer months of heat.
–Tzu Yeh, “Song”

A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person. –Mignon McLaughlin

Sex contains all, bodies, souls,
Meanings, proofs, purities, delicacies, results, promulgations,
Songs, commands, health, pride, the maternal mystery, the
seminal milk,
All hopes, benefactions, bestowals, all the passions, loves,
beauties, delights of the earth…
–Walt Whitman, “A Woman Waits for Me”

And if I can’t speak about my love—
if I don’t talk about your hair, your lips, your eyes,
still your face that I keep within my heart,
the sound of your voice that I keep within my mind,
the days of September rising in my dreams,
give shape and colour to my words, my sentences,
whatever theme I touch, whatever thought I utter.
–C.P. Cavafy, “December, 1903”

We seem to have a deep life together apart from all other people on earth, and which we cannot show, explain, or impart to them. At least my affection seems to isolate me in the deepest moments from all others, and it makes me speak with my whole heart and soul to you and you only. And perhaps this isolation is one reason why deep love makes one feel—at least in some moments—so religious. –Walter Bagehot to Eliza Wilson

…you can’t come into the room without my feeling all over me a ripple of flame, and if, wherever you touch me, a heart beats under your touch, and if, when you hold me, and I don’t speak, it’s because all the words in me seem to have become throbbing pulses… –Edith Wharton, to W. Morton Fullerton

Sex and beauty are inseparable… –DH Lawrence, “Sex Versus Loneliness”

Historically, intercourse was the act through which male and female experienced God. The ancients believed that the male was spiritually incomplete until he had carnal knowledge of the sacred feminine. Physical union with the female remained the sole means through which man could become spiritually complete and ultimately achieve gnosis—knowledge of the divine. Since the days of Isis, sex rites had been considered man’s only bridge from earth to heaven. …it’s important to remember that the ancients’ view of sex was entirely opposite from ours today. Sex begot new life—the ultimate miracle—and miracles could be performed only by a god. The ability of the woman to produce life from her womb made her sacred. A god. Intercourse was the revered union of the two halves of the human spirit—male and female—through which the male could find spiritual wholeness and communion with God. … It’s a deeply sacrosanct ceremony. –Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code

When you fall in love, it is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake, and then it subsides. And when it subsides, you have to work out whether your roots have become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. –John Hurt, in Captain Corelli’s Mandolin

They’re at that stage where so much desire streams between them,
so much frank need and want,
so much absorption in the other and the self and the self-admiring
entity and unity they make—
her mouth so full, breast so lifted, head thrown back so far in her
laughter at his laughter,
he so solid, planted, oaky, firm, so resonantly factual in the headiness
of being craved so,
she almost wreathed upon him as they intertwine again, touch again,
cheek, lip, shoulder, brow,
every glance moving toward the sexual, every glance away soaring
back in flame into the sexual—
that just to watch them is to feel again that hitching in the groin, that
filling of the heart,
the old, sore heart, the battered, foundered, faithful heart, snorting
again, stamping in its stall.
–CK Williams, “Love: Beginnings”

From every human being there rises a light that reaches straight to heaven. And when two souls that are destined to be together find each other, their streams of light flow together and a single brighter light goes forth from their united being. –Baal Shem Tov

I cannot breathe without you. –John Keats, in a letter to Fanny Brawne

Our love is like the misty rain that falls softly, but floods the river. –African proverb

Your love is comfort in sadness, quietness in tumult, rest in weariness, hope in despair. –Marion Garretty

Where there is love there is no sin. –Montenegrin proverb

As we were sitting together, suddenly there came into her eyes a look that I had never seen there before. My lips moved towards hers. We kissed each other. I can’t describe to you what I felt at that moment. It seemed to me that all my life had been narrowed to one perfect moment of rose-colored joy. –Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

What a happy and holy fashion it is that those who love one another should rest on the same pillow. –Nathaniel Hawthorne

We two form a multitude. –Ovid

Nothing new here, except my marrying, which to me is a matter of profound wonder. –Abraham Lincoln

You would not believe it; I sat
at the table with my family,
with my father saying grace, then
solemnly passing the bowls of
corn, of beans, the heavy
platter of turkey and dressing.
I filled my plate and lifted
my fork to my mouth,
but no matter what I put in,
it wasn't what I tasted,
not the creamed potatoes,
not the smooth brown crust
of bread. It was you my mouth
remembered, the familiar musk
of your sex, its smooth heat,
its quick fullness. My mind was
a reel flashing pictures inside
my skull, and there was no detail
missing. I sat like a drunk
trying to act sober. I chewed
and swallowed while in my thoughts
I knelt; I gave thanks for you.
–Anne K. Smith, “Giving Thanks”

in the mirror in front of me
my hands on you
your hands reach back
as we stand dripping
slippery and delicious
our tongues and we
begin again
the long slow dance
we have perfected
like pilgrims returning
home again
to the promised land.
–Charles Rossiter, “Your Body Glistens from the Bath”

In bed this morning
you tucked into the cove of my belly
our feet slipping past each other like fish
I reached out to embrace
the flat rock of your back
and carved out our names
with my tongue
–Teresa Blagg, “In Bed This Morning”

Somewhere on the other side of this wide night
and the distance between us, I am thinking of you.
The room is turning slowly away from the moon.
This is pleasurable. Or shall I cross that out and say
it is sad? In one of the tenses I singing
an impossible song of desire that you cannot hear.
La lala la. See? I close my eyes and imagine
the dark hills I would have to cross
to reach you. For I am in love with you and this
is what it is like, or what it is like in words.
–Carol Ann Duffy, “Words, Wide Night”

As we made love for the third day,
cloudy and dark, as we did not stop
but went into it and into it and
did not hesitate and did not hold back we
rose through the air, until we were up above
the timber line. The lake lay
icy and silver, the surface shirred,
reflecting nothing. The black rocks
lifted around it into the grainy
sepia air, the patches of snow
brilliant white, and even though we
did not know where we were, we could not
speak the language, we could hardly see, we
did not stop, rising with the black
rocks to the black hills, the black
mountains rising from the hills. Resting
on the crest of the mountains, one huge
cloud with scalloped edges of blazing
evening light, we did not turn back,
we stayed with it, even though we were
far beyond what we knew, we rose
into the grain of the cloud, even though we were
frightened, the air hollow, even though
nothing grew there, even though it is a
place from which no one has ever come back.
–Sharon Olds, “Ecstasy”

The next day, I am almost afraid.
Love? It was more like dragonflies
in the sun, 100 degrees at noon,
the ends of their abdomens stuck together, I
close my eyes when I remember. I hardly
knew myself, like something twisting and
twisting out of a chrysalis,
enormous, without language, all
head, all shut eyes, and the humming
like madness, the way they writhe away,
and do not leave, back, back,
away, back. Did I know you? No kiss,
no tenderness—more like killing, death-grip
holding to life, genitals
like violent hands clasped tight
barely moving, more like being closed
in a great jaw and eaten, and the screaming
I groan to remember it, and when we started
to die, then I refuse to remember,
the way a drunkard forgets. After,
you held my hands extremely hard as my
body moved in shudders like the ferry when its
axle is loosed past engagement, you kept me
sealed exactly against you, our hairlines
wet as the arc of a gateway after
a cloudburst, you secured me in your arms till I slept—
clasped, fragrant, buoyant, that was
the morning after love.
–Sharon Olds, “Last Night”

I watch her silhouette
in the green glow
of alarm clock light,
imagine the lace of freckles
draped across her back,
inhale the tumble of hair,
cataracting over shoulders.
I reach around,
feel her fullness,
slowly enter.
She molds to me
gentler than any cloud
has ever drifted
across a starlit sky,
and I am a prayer,
a ghost, a vapor,
nebulous as the night.
–Ed Stever, “Her Back to Me”

Your hair lost in the forest,
your feet touching mine.
Asleep you are bigger than the night,
but your dream fits within this room.
How much we are who are so little!
Outside a taxi passes
with its load of ghosts.
The river that runs by
is always
running back.
Will tomorrow be another day?
–Octavio Paz, “Last Dawn”
_________________________________________

Your body is a new country,
hidden landscape in cotton and chambray
that I want to travel with every vehicle I own:
hands, tongue, slide of silk.

Below, in the heat
and rush of wet, we’re learning again
how summer moves through the deep canyons,
stirring grasses and honeying fruit.
–Kim Ly Bui-Burton, “Poem for R.”
_________________________________________

Ten years of fitting our bodies together
and still they sing wild songs in new keys.
It is more and less than love: timing,
chemistry, magic and will and luck.

One plus one equal one, unknowable except
in the moment, not convertible into words,
not explicable or philosophically interesting.
But it is. And it is. And it is. Amen.
–Marge Piercy, “Implications of One Plus One”
_________________________________________

Drunk as drunk on turpentine
From your open kisses,
Your wet body wedged
Between my wet body and the strake
Of our boat that is made out of flowers,
Feasted, we guide it—our fingers
Like tallows adorned with yellow metal—
Over the sky’s hot rim,
The day’s last breath in our sails.

Pinned by the sun between solstice
And equinox, drowsy and tangled together
We drifted for months and woke
With the bitter taste of land on our lips,
Eyelids all sticky, and we longed for lime
And the sound of a rope
Lowering a bucket down its well. Then,
We came by night to the Fortunate Isles,
And lay like fish
Under the net of our kisses.
–Pablo Neruda, “Drunk as drunk on turpentine...”
_________________________________________

If anyone asks you
how the perfect satisfaction
of all our sexual wanting
will look, lift your face
and say,
Like this.

When someone mentions the gracefulness
of the nightsky, climb up on the roof
and dance and say,
Like this?

If anyone wants to know what “spirit” is,
or what “God’s fragrance” means,
lean your head toward him or her.
Keep your face there close.
Like this.

When someone quotes the old poetic image
about clouds gradually uncovering the moon,
slowly loosen knot by knot the strings
of your robe.
Like this?

If anyone wonders how Jesus raised the dead,
Don’t try to explain the miracle.
Kiss me on the lips.
Like this. Like this.

When someone asks what it means
To “die for love,” point:
here…
–Rumi, “Like This”
_________________________________________

Two bodies face to face
are at times two waves
and night is an ocean.

Two bodies face to face
are at times two stones
and night a desert.

Two bodies face to face
are at times two roots
laced into night.

Two bodies face to face
are at times two knives
and night strikes sparks.

Two bodies face to face
are two stars falling
in an empty sky.
–Octavio Paz, “Two Bodies”
_________________________________________

I wanted you in the kitchen of my heart;
and there, after many cold lunches,
I found you; and there, like herbs
undressing in soup, I came to love you;
and there, like a delicate tea
of mangoes and marigolds your mouth
opened, and your words, flecked with gold
and the eroticism of your Latin blood,
flowed, like the blood I long for, into me.

And how could I lose you among these cups
and spoons, among these golden candles,
these jars of honey lined along the window?
And what forget-me-nots in winter
tie me to you still? I could die in this bread
I have made without you. For you I would burn
this dry brain for incense; I would
serve you the wine inside the night; I would
drink the sea to give you salt.
–James Tipton, “I Wanted You in the Kitchen of My Heart”
_________________________________________

All night I have slept with you
next to the sea, on the island.
Wild and sweet you were between pleasure

and sleep,
between fire and water.

Perhaps very late
our dreams joined
at the top or at the bottom,
up above like branches moved by a common
wind,
down below like red roots that touch.

Perhaps your dream
drifted from mine
and through the dark sea
was seeking me
as before,
when you did not yet exist,
when without sighting you
I sailed by your side,
and your eyes sought
what now—
bread, wine, love, and anger—
I heap upon you
because you are the cup
that was waiting for the gifts of my life.

I have slept with you
all night long while
the dark earth spins
with the living and the dead,
and on waking suddenly
in the midst of the shadow
my arm encircled your waist.
Neither night nor sleep
could separate us.

I have slept with you
and on waking, your mouth,
come from your dream,
gave me the taste of earth,
of sea water, of seaweed,
of the depths of your life,
and I received your kiss
moistened by the dawn
as if it came to me
from the sea that surrounds us.
–Pablo Neruda, “Night on the Island”



song heard most recently before posting:
Big Girls Don’t Cry—Fergie (Shut up; it’s what happened to be playing on the radio when I squealed into work an hour late this morning.)

[Stephanie Tanner voice]How rude![/Stephanie Tanner voice]

I’m insanely non-confrontational, to a degree where people who don’t know me might say, “Oh, she’s so Jesus-y—all ‘turn the other cheek’ and shit.” While I don’t disagree that turning the other cheek is sometimes the most mature thing to do—whether you’re a Christian or not—that’s not why I cringe and turn mute when confrontation rears its ugly head or when I’m expected to defend myself. No, I cringe and turn mute because…well, I just don’t like confrontation. It scares me, really. I don’t even like witnessing heated confrontations between other people.

But for the first time in my 33½ years, I actually grew a teeny, tiny, blink-and-you-miss-’em pair of balls on Friday. I was standing in line at Michael’s, waiting to purchase some frames for the fabulous pulp art cards I bought a few months ago, and the woman behind me was all agitated and antsy, repeatedly muttering “What’s taking so long?” and stepping a bit out of line to stare pointedly at the cashier. This annoyed me. I hate when people act like impatient douchebags while waiting in line. No matter how long or slow a line is (and this line wasn’t even excessively long or slow), sighing, bitching, and pacing like a caged animal isn’t going to make it move any faster. Nobody likes waiting in line—everybody’s time is equally valuable—but most people manage to suck it up and queue quietly and patiently like grown-ups.

When I reached the register, some woman who was behind the impatient woman and me ended up moving in front of me to sign some kind of log book that was with the cashier. Impatient Woman asked if the log book signer and I were together and we both said no. That’s when Impatient Woman accused me of cutting in front of her in line. Huh? Look, I’m no saint, and I certainly have my moments of being as hateful and/or annoying as anyone else, but when it comes to dealing with other people, I do pride myself on having good manners. Even if I’m inwardly bashing someone (for example, a rude clerk), I’m always polite and respectful, and, because I try to live by the Golden Rule, I would never willfully cut in front of somebody in line. And while I definitely have my fair share of spacey moments, I can’t believe I’d be so spaced out that I’d be behind somebody in line, and then suddenly in front of her, and fail to notice the switch. So while I think this chick was probably just talking bollocks, yes, it’s entirely possible I inadvertently cut in front of her. Perhaps she was standing a bit apart from the rest of the line, thus giving the impression that she wasn’t actually in line, and in joining what I thought was the end of the line, I cut in front of her. But if that’s the case, then why didn’t she just say to me, “Hey, excuse me—you’re cutting in front of me?”

Anyway, after she told me I cut in front of her, our brief conversation went something like this:

Me: What? I did?

Her: Yes, you did, and you knew exactly what you did.

Me: No, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize…

Her (in a low, tightly-controlled, slightly menacing way): You did—you knew exactly what you were doing.

Me (snippy): Fine, whatever! (Grabs shopping bag and stalks away.)

Aaaaaaaaaand…you’re all like, “Wait, what? That’s it?” Yes, that’s it. I am so pathetically meek and non-confrontational, snipping “Fine, whatever” constitutes a revolution in my book. Baby steps, y’all. But because I was offended by her charge—that I’d deliberately (in a kind of calculating, Mean Girl way) cut in front of her and then lie about it—I wish I’d had the gumption to say something vitriolic enough to make that cow clasp her throat and declare, “Well, I never!” Or at least I wish I would’ve said, “How dare you! How dare you insinuate that I’m rude and bitchy and bratty enough to act the way you’re accusing me of acting?” But, this is me we’re talking about, so my little snip and stomp was the extent of my retaliation.

Meanwhile, I’ve been doing a lot of freelancing lately, thank god, but one of my freelance employers is really, really late with paying me, so money remains tight. Added to that, my iPod recently died on me, and I can’t decide if I want to spend another $100 to get it repaired again or if I just want to invest in a new one. Nothing can happen right now—I’m still too broke—but once the freelancing money arrives, I’ll have to make a quick decision, because my commute is quite cruddy without my iPod, even when I have CDs in the car. Also, my check engine light came on last Sunday and has stayed on consistently, so I really need to get my car to the mechanic (especially since it hasn’t been riding smoothly for a few months), but again: dead broke. I’m crossing every finger and toe that I’m not looking at any hardcore repair bills here.

In brighter news, this weekend’s workload was alleviated by some family visits on both Saturday and Sunday (just like last weekend’s workload was broken up by a fun visit at Antoinette’s house in Virginia, followed by a great dinner in West Virginia). Best of all, on Saturday Dad and Jill treated me to lunch at Café Anglais, the English tearoom in Frederick I’ve been dying to try. Oh lordy, was I in heaven. This tearoom is so quaint and cute, and it apparently has a sizable, gorgeous garden where patrons can eat during nicer weather. It’s owned by an Englishman who’s friendly, chatty, and very hands-on with patrons—a refreshing change from many restaurants. Café Anglais serves a full high tea (as long as you give them 24 hours’ notice) and an impressive range of pub fare, such as shepherd’s pie, fish and chips, ploughman’s lunch, bangers and mash, and so on. It’s not exactly a haven for vegetarians, but neither is English cuisine in general. What really drew me to this place is the fact that they sell pasties—both Cornish and vegetarian. I heart onion pasties almost more than I can say, and they’re extremely difficult to find in the States. The British pubs in DC, Bethesda, and Wheaton don’t sell them. I did find them at the British restaurant in NYC where I had my birthday dinner last year, and there is a British store near Chantilly, VA, that sells frozen versions of them, but beyond that, nada. So you can imagine how ecstatic I was to discover that Café Anglais sells them. I savored every. single. bite. And I washed it all down with a pot of tea, even though I’m not much of a tea drinker. For desert Jill and I split my all-time favorite British desert: a Heinz chocolate pudding. When warmer days prevail we’re going to return for high tea in the garden. I can’t wait!



song heard most recently before posting:
Evidence—Joseph Arthur

feeling apolitical

I hate to sound like an apathetic slug, but I must confess that I’ve been tuning out the bulk of the presidential election news filling the airwaves. The election has been the talk of the town for a year already, and we’ve still got nearly a year to go before the election, so I guess I just got sick of it all (even though I fully understand the importance of this election, and I did take a look at this). It doesn’t help that, as a registered Independent, I’m not allowed to vote in Maryland’s primary. So analyzing each candidate to death kind of seems like a futile effort, since I’m not allowed to have a say in who gets the official Democratic party nomination. Once a final Democratic nominee is picked, I’ll start analyzing his/her credentials and his/her stance on the issues that matter to me. If I like him/her more than the Independent candidate, then that’s who’ll get my vote. For me it always comes down to a choice between the Democratic candidate and the Independent candidate—I’ve never voted for a Republican candidate.

But anyway, I watch the news every morning, and yesterday something related to the presidential race actually penetrated my bleary-eyed stupor. It was reported that Mike Huckabee said something like, “The Constitution should be amended to fit the word of God—the word of God shouldn’t be amended to fit the Constitution.”

All I could do was thunk my head into a pillow and groan. This guy could absolutely end up being the next president of the United States. To say it’s unsettling would be...uh...a bit of an understatement.

And in that vein, Debbie pointed me to a fabulous website, Fundies Say the Darndest Things. This is effing brilliant. Check out some of these nuggets of wisdom:

[about a girl being born with mental disabilities]

Most afflictions like this are caused by sins committed while still inside the womb.

Me: See, and that’s totally why I was born with craniosynostosis—because my time in the womb was spent murdering people and coveting my neighbor’s wife.

[about an 11-year-old girl who was raped and then buried alive]

god was sacrificing this child as a way to show others the light. much as he did his own child. what a beautiful gift he has given us.

Me: Yes, when I hear about children being raped and buried alive, “beautiful” is most certainly the first word that comes to mind. :-/

I often debate with evolutionists because I believe that they are narrow mindedly and dogmatically accepting evolution without questioning it. I don’t really care how God did what He did. I know He did it.

Me: Pot, meet kettle.

If u have sex before marriage then in Gods eyes u are married to that person if a man rapes a woman in Gods eyes they are married it sucks for the girl but what can we do lol

Me: omg rape totally sucks 4 the girl but u gotta do what u gotta do and the girl and the rapist can have tru luv 4-eva in Gods eyes lol!!!!!

Marriage entitles sexual relations biblically. If the WIFE resists there could be PHYSICAL ABUSE CHARGES (yesterday), but not RAPE biblically because her body is NOT her own after marriage, but the husbands. That’s like saying you just STOLE something from a store that you legally had paid for in full. Logic to the contrary is also proof that America has been feminized, sad, but true.

Me: Hell yeah! If I ever get married, my body will absolutely belong to my husband. He can do with it what he pleases—beat it, sodomize it, scar it, whatever. THY WILL BE DONE. After all, this is the 12th century, right? Now please excuse me while I step away from my computer to apply leeches to myself in order to stabilize my levels of melancholic black bile.

The musical “Beauty and the Beast” made by atheist homosexual heathens at Walt Disney is designed to subtly create tolerance in the foolish american society for BESTIALITY !

Me: I knew there was something diabolical about those Disney Princesses and their quest for world domination. (No, seriously.) But just last Sunday, when I was babysitting Olivia, we watched Beauty and the Beast (I was obliged to do so; it’s one of her favorite movies, and you try pulling a 3 ½-year-old girl away from her Disney DVDs). Not only did we watch the whole film—we also watched it with the dogs lying next to us. How on earth did we restrain ourselves from humping those dogs???

This is what it would be like, if the majority of people were athiests.
ATHIEST KID: Mom, I’m going to go fuck a hooker.
ATHIEST MOM: Okay, son.
ATHIEST KID: Afterwards, I’m going to go smoke pot with my friends, since it’s “not addictive.”
ATHIEST MOM: Okay, come home soon!

The athiest kid leaves the room. The father comes home from work several minutes later.

ATHIEST DAD: Hey!
ATHIEST MOM: Hi, honey! I’m pregnant again. I guess I’ll just get another abortion, since “fetuses don’t count as human life.”
ATHIEST DAD: Okay, get as many abortions as you want!
ATHIEST MOM: Oh, and don’t go in the bedroom.
ATHIEST DAD: Why not?
ATHIEST MOM: There are two gay men fucking eachother in there.
ATHIEST DAD: Why are they here?
ATHIEST MOM: I wanted to watch them do it for awhile. They just aren’t finished yet.
ATHIEST DAD: Okay, that’s fine with me!

Suddenly, their neighbor runs into the house.

ATHIEST NEIGHBOR: Come quick, there’s a Christian outside!
ATHIEST MOM: We’ll be right there!

The athiest couple quickly put on a pair of black robes and hoods. They then exit the house, and run into the street, where a Christian is nailed to a large, wooden X. He is being burned alive. A crowd of athiests stand around him, all wearing black robes and hoods.

RANDOM ATHIEST: Damn you, Christian! We hate you! We claim to be tolerant of all religions. But we really hate your’s! That’s because we athiests are hypocritical like that! Die, Christian!

THE END

Scary, isn’t it?

Me: Bwah! This is the finest piece of playwriting I’ve ever read. Now I know what all my “athiest” friends are doing after I leave their houses! One friend in particular is really involved with an animal protection charity, and she devotes a lot of time to doing free spay/neuter clinics for low-income people. And the thing is, I just don’t know how she finds the time to do all this after a long day of burning Christians, screwing hookers, getting abortions, and watching gay men have sex.

To limit one’s family size for economic reasons is to demonstrate a lack of trust in the sovereign God of the universe to provide an heritage for you and to meet your family’s needs.

Me: I know. All those children living in grinding poverty in Africa and the slums of Rio and Calcutta can certainly attest to that.

Gravity: Doesn’t exist. If items of mass had any impact of others, then mountains should have people orbiting them. Or the space shuttle in space should have the astronauts orbiting it. Of course, that’s just the tip of the gravity myth. Think about it. Scientists want us to believe that the sun has a gravitation pull strong enough to keep a planet like neptune or pluto in orbit, but then it’s not strong enough to keep the moon in orbit? Why is that? What I believe is going on here is this: These objects in space have yet to receive mans touch, and thus have no sin to weigh them down. This isn’t the case for earth, where we see the impact of transfered sin to material objects. The more sin, the heavier something is.

Me: *crickets*

The cure is to not be a faggot, to not use needles/drugs, and to not treat the women of ones own nation (people) as hoes. Keep it righteous. The only cure for America in nuclear fire.

Me: Okay, all joking aside, this stuff makes me uneasy. It’s a sad but true fact: there are still a lot people in modern-day America who think that AIDS is solely a disease for gays, junkies, and the promiscuous. But what’s really scary about this person’s comment is the last bit tacked on the end. When lunatics fall into this mindset, catastrophes happen. It doesn’t matter if the lunatic in question is Christian, Muslim, a cult leader, a survivalist in Wyoming, or none of the above. Innocent lives are taken, families are cleaved apart.

And I’m sorry, but wanting America to be purified in a nuclear fire? It makes you no better than the radical Islamic suicide bombers who are blowing up cafés in Jerusalem, nightclubs in Bali, and skyscrapers in New York. It makes you no better than the IRA members blowing up streets in Omagh and the ETA Basque separatists blowing up trains in Madrid. You, a proud American whose blood surely runs red, white, and blue—who would probably rather die than even be mentioned in the same breath as a Muslim—are behaving exactly like the Jihad-happy fundamentalists shown waving their Kalashnikovs on al-Jezeera. You’re actually okay with that? Oh, wait—stupid me. I forgot that Jesus’s motto was “Love thy neighbor, turn the other cheek, and vaporize millions of innocent people.”


song heard most recently before posting:
Paperweight—Schuyler Fisk & Joshua Radin

I don't hate religion

I’m temporarily putting my ceaseless, grinding financial worries on the back burner to show my neglected website some lovin’. In anticipation of its 10th anniversary (which will arrive in a blast of angels’ trumpets in August 2009), I’m trying to spruce things up a bit. Because my webmaster skills haven’t improved since my last big site overhaul, changes will have to be minimal and primarily cosmetic. As a starting point I’ll make the site searchable (via Google) and I’ll install a few purdy new banners on various pages. I also went ahead and reworked my religion quotations page, splitting all the quotes into relevant subcategories, such as Women and Religion, The Bible, Thoughts on God, Separation of Church and State, and others (the changes will be reflected within the next week or so).

In doing this huge task, I really started to notice the pervasive negativity twirling through nearly every crevice of my religion quotations page. All the quotes are there for a reason—it’s not like I’m suddenly turning my back on them—but I wanted to take a minute to explain why I’m not the vitriolic, hate-mongering creature that is perhaps implied by the quotations.

To do that, I should first explain my own religious views. Actually, I won’t reinvent the wheel; I did a decent job of explaining the subject in an old blog entry here.

Basically, I’m agnostic—I don’t believe that anyone can know whether god does or does not exist. And I’m a pagan in the sense of not belonging to any organized religion.

This doesn’t mean I’m anti-religion. I actually believe religion can be a great thing when it truly brings a person a sense of happiness and contentment. And I believe it’s capable of doing remarkable things, such as motivating people to be charitable and forgiving.

But.

It has a dark side, as many things do. And that dark side? Wooo, baby, it kicks some ass. It’s a force to be reckoned with. And it gave birth to all these feral little monsters who have been running wild for centuries. Sometimes they work in tandem with (or are driven by) cultural mores, personal bigotries, misguided ignorance, and countless other realities of history. For example, we all know that the conflict in Northern Ireland wasn’t merely a case of Catholics hating Protestants and vice versa. But all too often these monsters existed solely because of religion: because corrupt dogma and corrupt leaders bowing before an all-too-often maleficent god decided that witches had to be burned, inquisitions had to be conducted, bombs had to be detonated, and abortion doctors had to be killed. Religion in and of itself has spawned a jaw-dropping amount of atrocities and injustices.

In deference to that reality, and perhaps as a backlash to the increasingly pervasive presence of evangelicals in America and the weakening wall between church and state, I choose to highlight the dark side of religion on my quotations page. There are some positive quotes in there, sure, but the majority of them focus on the negative, because those are the quotes—eloquent, moving, and powerful as they are—that resonate with me most deeply.

Yes, I’ll readily admit that some of the quotes are unnecessarily antagonistic, a bit like a bratty child thumbing his nose at his teacher and yelling, “Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah!” Why did I include them? I don’t know. They made me smile.

So, basically, I just want it to be on the record that I’m not anti-religion. What I’m against is religion’s dark side; I’m against people who commit atrocities in the name of god, the bible, and religion. I’m against the intolerance and bigotry inspired by religion. That’s my stance in a nutshell.

Anyway…I know I haven’t been writing in my blog very often lately, and I never even got around to mentioning the holidays (they were swell; Christmas was lovely and New Year’s Eve was an easygoing evening with friends in Lebanon, which culminated in us attending the city’s infamous and cheesetastic Bologna Drop at midnight) or mentioning some of the fun things I’ve done lately, like meeting up with five friends for an Indian dinner on Capitol Hill and finally checking out the Annie Leibowitz and Ansel Adams exhibits at the Corcoran Gallery with Angela. I guess I just haven’t felt like writing because I’ve been so preoccupied with money worries and hunting for another part-time job that won’t turn me into a roman candle of stress, it’s been hard for me to pull my head out of my own ass. It’s all I’m thinking about, which means it’s more likely to leak into my journal and blog entries and emails to friends. Who wants to hear me whining? It’s boring and it’s getting old. So I’ve been pretty quiet on many fronts—writing and emailing especially—but hopefully when my life gets back on track both areas will reawaken.


song heard most recently before posting:
The Post War Dream—Pink Floyd

anniversaries

For me, today isn’t just New Year’s Day—it also marks the 25th anniversary of when I began keeping a journal. One of my gifts from my grandparents on Christmas 1982 was a diary with carefully dated pages:

I was 8 ½ years old and in the third grade. My sixth-grader sister Kristen got a diary, too, but hers was pink and a bit more grown-up than mine.

On January 1, 1983, I wrote my first entry:

(My spelling and handwriting were terrible, not because I was learning disabled but because of sheer laziness. I always did well in language arts classes and could write neatly when it suited me, but when writing in my diaries, sloppiness and laziness took over!)
x

I’m so thankful that my grandparents had the foresight to expose me to the wonderful habit of journal writing. I have no doubt I would’ve discovered this lovely task on my own at some point (probably when the teen angst kicked in, ’round about the ninth grade), but a wealth of recorded life would be lost if I had only picked up a pen in, say, 1989. Years of flotsam—the minutiae of daily life during my formative years—would be gone forever. My barely legible scribblings, rants against Kristen, starry-eyed mooning over school crushes, unbridled excitement over receiving my first Cabbage Patch Kid…none of that will move mountains or change the course of history, but it’s part of my history, and for that reason—no matter how inane it seems—it’s important to me, and I’m glad I have it documented.

I confess, though, that laziness did drive me to surrender pens and notebooks in favor of typed journal entries by mid-1997. Typewritten entries don’t have the charm of their handwritten bretheren, but to be fair, when my life began increasing in speed thanks to full-fledged adulthood, finding the time and energy to write all that needed to be written became increasingly difficult, and since typing is less tiring than writing, and it can be done more quickly, switching to electronic writing was actually a way of preserving the art of journal writing. I doubt my journals would’ve slipped by the wayside completely, but they probably would’ve entered starvation mode. And I did decide to compromise. Rather than maintaining a journal exclusively on my computer, I opted to print out all of my typed entries and insert them into three-ringed binders, which are numbered and dated. It gives me the best of both worlds: a) quick and easy writing, and b) the satisfaction of holding a physical book in my hands.
x

This month also marks 15 years since I officially started my quotations collection. I was a college freshman home on winter break when I decided to use the blank journal I’d received from my best friend on Christmas 1991 to formally record the myriad quotations scattered throughout my journals and personal notebooks. It quickly became a passion and I quickly became a full-fledged quotes whore. Fifteen years later, my collection is still going strong, and it’s bigger than ever. It’s been solely electronic since 2000 and at some point I want to learn how to make it searchable, too. All in good time!

song heard most recently before posting:
Bunker or Basement—Fionn Regan

And the Christmas bells that ring there are the clanging chimes of doom

This morning my coworker Cynthia talked about the Charlie Brown Christmas tree she bought over weekend; she felt so sorry for it, she almost cried when she saw it looking so pitiful on the tree lot. As someone who has been known to *ahem* anthropomorphize the occasional item, I sympathized greatly. Naturally this got us talking about how depressing that cartoon is, with its poor, mocked Christmas tree who is only considered worthy in society’s eyes when it becomes a flashy, showy, garish replica of all the other trees; when it’s forced to surrender its individuality in order to become acceptable to the derisive and conformist masses (okay, I didn’t actually say that last bit out loud, although—let’s be honest here—nobody would’ve been surprised if I had). From there we got started on those other depressing classics, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Frosty the Snowman.

So, I thought I’d take a break from fretting ceaselessly about my finances and my increasingly chilly condo to expound on the dreary tidings brought to us by certain traditional Christmas specials.

But let me preface this by saying that I do, in fact, like Christmas. I really do. Not from a religious standpoint, because I’m not religious, but I love the secular, usually pagan-oriented side: decorations, lights, traditions. I love giving gifts and receiving gifts. I decorate most years (not this year, though, because of my move) and I own several Christmas CDs. I do loathe how the holiday comes earlier and earlier each year, so before Halloween has even occurred, Christmas items appear on store shelves, lurking smugly in the periphery around the glare of bats and pumpkins. It used to be that Black Friday was the start of the Christmas season, and that was great for me, because it gave me a month to enjoy all the trappings. But now Christmas is starting in October, so by the time the holiday actually arrives, I’m over it. No single day can really live up to months of anticipation—it’s bound to feel anticlimactic in the end. And afterwards it feels so much worse, because there’s this hallow sense of letdown that, as a kid, could be weakly alleviated by New Year’s Eve/Day (because it was a family-oriented holiday that was always fun), but as an adult doesn’t do much to help that deflated sense of “What now?” that comes after Christmas. And I do have to wonder what’s lacking from modern life to such a degree that it causes us to cleave frantically and wild-eyed to Christmas, distending it to ridiculously bloated proportions that leak into every crevice of our awareness and daily activities. Just what the hell kind of void are we trying to fill in our lives?

Anyway, back to my review of Christmas specials.

Granted, there’s a great lesson to be learned in A Charlie Brown Christmas’s treatise on the overcommercialization of the season and the hijacking of a religious holiday by runaway secularism, but at the heart of the matter is this: all but one person felt compelled to mock a sad little tree who looked different from all the other trees. And the tree apparently only deserved their respect after they forcibly transformed it into what they thought it should look like—a mirror image of all the other Christmas trees. It wasn’t, “Oh, it’s beautiful and special the way it is.” It was, “Let’s plump up its branches and douse it in tinsel, ornaments, and lights, and then it’ll be beautiful and we’ll stop laughing at it.” Nice lesson there.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer examined the outcast story from a slightly different angle. In this version, the mocking and ostracism didn’t end when he became Stepfordized, but rather when his unusual nose proved beneficial to society at large. He was considered a freak until he was able to provide them with material gains.

This story breaks my heart on so many levels. First of all, the sheer rejection he faced was staggering. Rather than defend him and bolster his self-esteem by reiterating that the problem wasn’t with him, but with the other intolerant reindeer, Rudolph’s parents forced him to cover his “defect” in shame. Look, I know they were only trying to make life easier on him, but behaving as if his nose were truly a badge of shame that needed to be hidden at all costs really wasn’t the kindest move they could make. Even Santa—kind, beneficent Santa—treated him like damaged goods. If he had stood by Rudolph, everyone else would’ve been forced to stand by him as well. Santa’s the iron-clad ruler of the north; nobody would’ve dared to go against him. If Santa said, “Rudolph is fine the way he is—we’ve gotta respect him even though he’s different, and BTW, you bigot shitheads, different isn’t bad,” everyone else would’ve toed the line. No reindeer or elves would’ve dared to openly mock Rudolph after that point. Mentally they probably still would’ve ridiculed him, but hey, at least the brazen, sanctioned bullying would’ve stopped.

Secondly, the Island of Misfit Toys? Jesus H., if that doesn’t break your heart, nothing will. But on the bright side, being banished to a deserted island just because you’re different is at least better than being tossed in a landfill or sent to a work camp. And the toys did find homes at the end…although I wonder if anybody would’ve bothered with them if they hadn’t been so dazzled by Rudolph. If “freak” Rudolph—versus “heroic” Rudolph—had begged them to find homes for the misfit toys, would anyone have bothered?

So, okay, Rudolph was a freak until he was able to use his nose to save Christmas. Then the other reindeer didn’t love and adore him because he was a good guy, but because he gave them something they wanted. I’d like to think they would’ve eventually come to their senses and realized that, hey, Rudolph really is cool, with or without his guiding nose, but, given my general lack of faith in humanity, I’m doubting that this was the case.

The Grinch Who Stole Christmas is depressing on an obvious level, of course—he burgled every home in Whoville and robbed them of their loot. And yes, it all turned out to be for the best, because it taught everyone the true meaning of Christmas, helped his heart grow 10 sizes, etc, etc. But here’s what depresses the shit out of me: the Grinch’s treatment of his dog. Forcing him to haul heavy sleds up perilous mountains was just one of the many ways in which he displayed flagrant animal abuse. This always upset me—even when I was an ignorant kid who blithely stomped on bugs and carried around a rabbit foot for luck. It bothered me to the point where I had to close my eyes during that scene. It’s been a few years since I’ve seen the show, so my memory is a bit rusty, but if I recall, the Grinch’s epiphany didn’t cause him to ever apologize to his dog and make amends for his appalling and abusive behavior. If I’m wrong about that, please correct me.

Frosty the Snowman is also depressing, but not in the same subtle and insidious ways as the other specials. No, it’s depressing simply because Frosty DIES. It’s admirable that he gives his life to save Karen, sure, and we all know that he comes to life again (hmmm, messianic parallel, anyone?), but before his resurrection children are treated to the traumatizing sight of him slowly dying before their very eyes. Yeah, Merry Christmas.

’Twas the Night before Christmas—one of the lesser-known Christmas specials—casts Santa in a most unfavorable light. Here he’s the merciless autocrat who abruptly cancels Christmas for all of Junctionville simply because one little mouse pissed him off with a letter to the editor expressing doubt about Santa’s existence. Granted, the letter was signed “from all of us,” but how can a man who professes to be omniscient not realize that not everyone in Junctionville truly felt that way? And really, Albert the cute nerdy mouse was entitled to his beliefs. I’m an agnostic, and so, if the mood strikes me, I want the freedom to write a letter to the editor denying god’s existence without fear of retribution. If I am wrong and there is a god, I sure wouldn’t want my entire town to be punished because of my belief. The Santa of this special isn’t quite a terrifying tyrant of Old Testament proportions, but nonetheless, I sure wouldn’t want to get on his bad side.

Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town has one kick-ass element going for it: it’s set in a place called Sombertown. Otherwise known as Scranton. HAW HAW HAW. No, Sombertown is wherever I live, truthfully, be it Scranton or London or Frederick.

(A second kick-ass element? Mrs. Claus starts off as a voluptuous va-va-voom schoolteacher named Jessica with mile-long eyelashes that your average woman would kill to have.)

Sombertown is ruled by a tinpot dictator named Burgermeister Meisterburger who has outlawed all toys; anyone found with a toy is arrested and thrown in a dungeon. Niiiiice. It seems like all or most of the town’s children are forced to toil in a Gulag-like state of permanent hard labor. Eventually a young and red-headed Santa triumphs in the end, after being on the Burgermeister’s Most Wanted list for a few years, blah blah blah. Of course it has a happy ending. But that doesn’t negate the fact that the holiday special opens up in a bleak burg called Sombertown where children are forced into hard labor, now does it?

Truthfully, I don’t think I’ve ever seen The Year without a Santa Claus. If I did, it was wiped clean from my memory. And who can blame my memory traces for heading for the hills? The show features a baby version of Vixen getting sent to a pound in the southern US, where she soon becomes deathly ill from the heat. Umm, okay?

Anyway, “heartwarming” Christmas specials and things like Sid and Marty Krofft programs might help to explain why we Gen-Xers can be kind of fucked up and neurotic. Just a thought.


song heard most recently before posting:
Porushka—The Revels Chorus, Dmitri Pokrovsky Ensemble, and Karelian Folk Music Ensemble

sigh

This week is turning out to be one of those silly roller coaster weeks. It started out marvelously, despite the shitty slug-crawl of my new commute, because I finally found out exactly how much my car insurance is dropping just by leaving the ridiculously overpriced kingdom of Montgomery County (it’s going down around $55/month) and I also learned that my health insurance costs will go down a bit since I’ve been at my job for five years. And things continued to shine because I finally managed to snag my mailbox key (after being without my mail for a week and a half) and I also received a really sweet card and housewarming check from my grandfather.

Then things went south. I learned (through the gigantic pile of accumulated mail waiting for me in my box) that condo fees are going up an extra $25/month. Not a lot, and they’re still cheap fees for this area, but I was annoyed because I didn’t see it coming and because it was one of those two-steps-forward-one-step-back situations. It’s like, “Oh, yay! My health insurance and car insurance costs went down! Aaaaaand my condo fees immediately went up.”

Then I got the icing on the cake: the news from the HVAC guy. The hope was always that my home warranty would cover the half-broken HVAC unit as long as the inspection report said nothing about it not working properly. Well, the HVAC guy unfortunately thought (and rightfully so; I got the final verdict the next morning) that the warranty company won’t cover the repairs after all, because the previous owner made no effort to maintain the HVAC unit. Not maintaining something makes it ineligible for warranty coverage. And the fact that the previous tenant was at fault—instead of me—makes things even worse because it’s showing that the problem is a pre-existing condition, no matter what the inspection report says.

So I paid $150 for the HVAC repair visit, only to be told that the $450 I paid for that warranty is basically useless. I mean, it could cover something else down the line, but the HVAC unit is, hands down, the most expensive item in the condo, so it’s not exactly a victory to find out that the warranty might cover the replacement of, like, a piddly broken stove at some point. I’m going to try to cancel the policy and get a refund. Why keep the policy if it does no good?

Now I’m looking at thousands of dollars in repairs (like around $5000, according the HVAC guy, although my sister’s honest and reasonably-priced HVAC guy will be taking a look at the unit soon and may offer me a better deal). I guess I'll have to hit the bank or credit union and apply for a loan to cover the repairs, since setting up my household drained my savings. Let’s hear it for the American dream, y’all!

Added to that, I just lost my second of five freelancing projects, as the publisher decided that these two journals no longer need a proofreader. After I lost the first gig (about two weeks ago), I became incredibly paranoid that I’d lose all my other projects as well, which means I’d be f-u-c-k-e-d, because I can’t live on my non-profit salary alone—especially now that I’m a homeowner. And I really, really felt in my gut that I was going to lose, at the very least, my biggest freelance project—the one that pays me the most money. And sure enough, I got the news yesterday (my gut can be so freakishly accurate!).

Fortunately, one of my production editors told me that some other of the other journals published by his company need freelancers, and he gave me a lead on one of them, so hopefully I’ll be able to recoup the money I’ll lose with those two journals disappearing.

I’ve also been told that there are freelancing jobs listed on Craigslist; I’ll get on there soon to suss things out. As much as possible, I want to stick with freelance editing, versus getting a second job elsewhere, because unless that job involves, like, cleaning offices or doing data entry alone at night, I’m going to be miserable doing whatever I do, since I’m an asocial mess. I just don’t want to deal with the public.

My last resort would be leaving my non-profit job for a corporate job that pays more. This would solve the second job equation once and for all. But that’s truly a last resort, because I love my job and love working for a cause that means a lot to me.

Being an adult is truly a headache sometimes.


song heard most recently before posting:
Here We Come A-Wassailing/Bottom of the Punch Bowl—Bonnie Rideout

back to reality

I haven’t disappeared into the ether—no sir. But I did the next best thing. I moved. To the stixxx (holla, Frederick!).

Moving—when you’re too cheap to hire professional packers and movers and when you’re a bit of a hoarder—is guaranteed to knock you on your ass. In expectation of this, I took all of last week off work and dropped fully and completely out of life as I focused on unpacking shit, rearranging shit, wringing my hands, hemorrhaging money, running errands, and cursing. My TV watching was minimal, because the DirecTV dude won’t come until the 15th, and my rabbit ears ain’t working so well. My internet surfing was minimal because my connection at the new place is terrible (yes, I’m still on dial-up; yes, I’m a cheap bitch). I feel really out of the loop; for all I know, Bush has been assassinated and Paris Hilton has been named the interim president. For a week I disappeared, but now I’m back.

By the end of the first day I looked like a junkie, my arms were so bruised. Over the course of the week I managed to break a few things and rip off a piece of my finger with a disco ball. Yes, a disco ball. Later, after soaking my wounded finger until it was a mushy mess, I pulled that revolting long sliver of embedded disco ball right outta there and prayed no other mirrored shards remained.

There has been a snafu or two during the whole moving process, but for the most part, things went really smoothly, and for that I’m grateful. And this homeowner thing? Is pretty cool. I think I can get used to this.


song heard most recently before posting:
I’ll Be Home for Christmas—Flipped Fedoras

hair loss, Intercourse, roller derbies, farms

The crazy-ass dervish continues. What’s weird is that aside from my propensity for walking and driving fast, and aside from the fact that I love skydiving and love riding on roller coasters and speed boats, I really tend to be a lethargic slug who prefers shambling leisurely through life. And all this nonsense involved with being constantly on the go, because of preparing to move and needing to buy crap for the condo and shop around for painters and people who can install my wood laminate floors? Oh, this won’t do at all!

I’ve been slammed with a boatload of freelancing lately, too; l haven’t even had time to watch my latest crop of Netflix DVDs. I can’t wait until the effects of the Hollywood writers strike are finally felt, because lord knows I can’t quit the TV on my own—I need it to quit me. And as soon as my shows go off the air because of the strike, I can finally turn my attention to all the other pressing matters buzzing angrily around my head.

Anyway. Last weekend I played hooky from my life and headed home to Pennsylvania. On Saturday my first order of business was getting all my hair chopped off.

before

after

I’ll be sending a 10-inch braid to Locks of Love soon…whenever I can get my overwhelmed ass to the post office. So yes, I’ve been driving around for a week with a swathe of human hair and three gigantic pumpkins on my back seat (that’ll be explained later). Some coworkers and I were cackling about how hot it would be if I crashed my car and the rescuers found a long braid of human hair and huge smashed pumpkins among the wreckage.

In the afternoon Melissa and I went to Intercourse to shop for Amish furniture for my new pad. On the way there, we stopped for lunch at a Mennonite restaurant on the outskirts of town. As we gobbled down our grease-laden food over prayer-filled placemats, we talked about her desire to become prison penpals with Amanda Knox. We also talked about some funny (and by “funny” I mean “warped”) things that I won’t even repeat here. Suffice it to say, there’s no doubt that we’re headed to hell.

In Intercourse I bought three jars of pepper jam and managed to snag three Amish tables for only $180! God, I fucking love the Amish sometimes.

In the evening we rustled up a gaggle o’ lesbians and gays and hit a roller derby in Lancaster. Yes, you heard it right: we actually went to a roller derby.


Apparently roller derby is making a comeback, and Lancaster’s now got its own league. We went to the final championship bout of the season, in which the Hex Offenders and the Distel Finks battled for victory (every team in the league has a PA Dutch-inspired name; those two teams’ names denote Amish hex signs and distelfinks). It wasn’t as theatrical as I expected, but it was still awesome beyond words, even with the high-ish entrance price ($12). However, we had no clue what was going on. The game made absolutely no sense to any of us. All I know is, never go to a roller derby with a bunch of lesbians when you’re the only person with a camera. All night long it was “Photograph her ass!” and “Make sure you get a shot of her tits!”

This past Wednesday the fine folks at Larriland Farm allowed some coworkers and me to spend a damp November morning hoisting pumpkins, picking apples, and pulling beets for charity. These were all crops that weren’t sold during the summer and fall harvest and otherwise would’ve gone to waste. We donated everything to Poplar Spring Animal Sanctuary, a refuge for farm animals.


We left with a station wagon and truck full of goodies, with three more gigantic pumpkins stored on my backseat. As an added bonus, the farm had some cute dogs who kept us company while we picked apples.


This upcoming weekend will be spent doing hardcore condo supplies shopping and a shitload of freelancing. Thankfully next week is a short week (my office is closed Thursday and Friday for Thanksgiving). I’ll be going to my mom’s house in Harrisburg, PA, for Thanksgiving dinner, which will hopefully involve eating mountains of vegetarian ham (if the damn vegan meat store where I buy it actually bothers to stay open one evening; every night I’ve gone there over the past week, they’ve been closed when they were supposed to be open), PA Dutch potato filling, sweet potatoes, corn, dinner rolls, and opera fudge!


song heard most recently before posting:
Cherry Bomb—John Mellencamp

surviving settlement

Yes, it’s official: I’m the landed gentry. Now all I need are some serfs and liverymen. As do all condo dwellers.

Yesterday morning my iPod started acting wonky (to a degree where I assumed I’d have to send it off for repairs again), and I thought, “Great. This is a sign that today is going to be a disaster.” Thankfully, though, I managed to talk some sense into the iPod.

I worked a half day and headed to Frederick to do my final condo walk-through. Then my realtor Allie and I headed to lunch at an Irish pub in downtown Frederick called, appropriately enough, Jennifer’s.


While there, I learned about a gruesome local domestic murder that made me feel utterly sick.

Around this time we learned that someone somewhere didn’t sign or file some kind of deed, which would of course affect my settlement. Then Allie thankfully got a call that everything was okay—the problem had gotten straightened out.

On the way to settlement we were stuck in gridlock (it wasn’t even 4pm!) and I glanced up at the sky and saw this:


I was like, “Is that a rainbow?? What the hell?” It hadn’t rained in over a week! I guess it was just a weird quirk of light—something atmospheric created a faint, rainbowish impression on the clouds.** It cheered me up, though. Instead of seeing a negative sign (like my wonky iPod), I deluded myself into thinking that maybe the sky was functioning as a positive sign, indicating that everything was going to be okay.

At settlement, after I signed a zillion papers, we learned that the deed issue hadn’t been resolved after all, and it was looking like I’d have to take off another afternoon and return to Frederick to re-sign all the settlement papers. But at the last minute—just before we all split for the evening, dejected—a phone call or fax from someone arrived and the realtor selling the condo announced that we were good to go. It was like a last-minute stay of execution.

So I got the keys and the place is now officially mine.


I’m excited, but the excitement is getting crushed by the sheer density of how much still needs to be done! I imagine that everyone at settlement was wondering what was wrong with me. I could barely crack a smile and I showed no flicker of emotion. I totally looked like I was dead inside. But everything was just so overwhelming! And I have so much left to do!

On the bright side, I didn’t have to pay any closing costs, and I got back $1750 of my $2000 good-faith deposit. Also, Allie gave me a card and $100 in Home Depot giftcards to help pay for paint, which was really nice and very much appreciated. Equally bright news: folded into my closing costs were the first six months of my condo fees, so I won’t have to pay them until next spring. And my first mortgage payment isn’t due until January 1st—one month after I expected it to be due. You can’t beat that!


**Thanks to my dear Debbie for pointing out that the rainbow was actually a sundog!


song heard most recently before posting:
Reunited—Peaches and Herb

on and on and on

Oy to the vey. Life has been a bit of a manic dervish lately, what with me getting slammed with a tsunami of freelancing at the same time I’m planning my upcoming move. I feel like I’ve hardly had time to breathe.

Me taking a minute to freak the fuck out.

I’ve been feeling a bit angsty over the past few weeks, too. What it boils down to is that I feel like I’m fine with my life until I find out that former classmates/friends/acquaintances got married, spawned, got a master’s degree, etc. Times like that make me dislike my own life because there are no advances. Aside from buying the condo, I mean. My life is exactly the same now as it was five years ago. I’m in the same apartment, at the same job, in the same position. I’m still not dating anyone and still not doing anything different, new, or exciting. I’m exactly the same.

I dissected all of this with Missy, and since time is a bit tight right now, I think it’s easier to just copy parts of my emails to her here, rather than reinventing the wheel. Why share it? Well, why not? At least it will explain to folks why I haven’t been very communicative lately.

When stuff like that happens, I always go into a tizzy of questioning my life and wondering what’s missing. It’s odd because I never felt the need to keep up with the Joneses, and yet here I am, wondering if I should follow their lead and get my ass down the aisle and into the maternity ward, even if it’s not something I particularly want. At times like these I start to feel like an autistic person who is one step out of beat from the rest of society. It’s somewhat fitting that I’m hopelessly incapable of following sequences of steps (like with dancing and aerobics), because emotionally, that’s exactly how I feel sometimes: like I’m one or two steps behind everyone else, and no matter how carefully I try to do so, I’m unable to keep time with them. Not that I necessarily want to keep time with them...but having the ability to do so would be nice every once in a while.

***

Part of me wants to do something to shake off this stasis and another part of me is happy with things the way they are. After all, I’m not an ambitious person and therefore don’t want to climb any corporate ladders. And I tend to be a creature of habit—someone who takes great comfort in routines—so I actually like that life is pretty safe and predictable. Plus I have no desire to date anyone and I really do love my job. Honestly, the only thing sorely missing from my life is traveling, but it’s not like inertia or my lack of ambition is what’s keeping that from my life. I’m not traveling simply because I don’t have money to travel, but once I save up some money, I’ll begin traveling again. So...I don’t know. The part of me that wants to shake off this stasis really doesn’t make much sense, because I can’t imagine that living my life differently would really make me happy. I mean, dating wouldn’t make me happy and switching jobs wouldn’t make me happy. Maybe I just need to take a class or pick up a hobby—something that will prove to myself that I’m evolving, even if only in tiny increments.

***

I think part of the problem—part of what drives the angst I feel in these situations—is that I haven’t yet found a raison d’être. Not just a dream, but an actual reason for existing. Everybody needs something that fills them with joy. It’s that thing which is the luminous little spark inside of you. Something that eclipses everything else in its orbit. Something which gives you a reason to get out of bed in the morning (aside from obligation, chores, and that onward grinding push for survival). Something which will enable you to continue going onward after everything else has been taken from you. For some it’s a spouse and kids, for others it’s art, singing, creating, gardening, whatever. And I haven’t really found my “thing.” It used to be writing, but now...eh, not so much. So I look at so-and-so and I’m like, “Well, see, clearly he found his raison d’être, because now he’s a happy-looking family man, and meanwhile I’m still here standing here tracing my toe in the dirt, biding my time, just kind of...existing.” And it’s a stupid mentality, really, because you shouldn’t let one relationship or talent or hobby define who you are. You shouldn’t let one single thing be the pivot on which you spin. Besides, nobody knows what goes on behind closed doors. It’s easy to say that so-and-so must now be blissfully happy and feel utterly fulfilled because she found her so-called soulmate, and it’s easy to say that my Scranton classmates have found their raison d’être because they’re now all successful lawyers and corporate crusaders with spouses and two kids, but in reality, I don’t know what bodies might be beneath their floorboards. There could be marital tension or a feeling of emptiness from working at a soulless job. They could be feeling just as lost as I sometimes feel. Who knows.

***

I do feel like I need to inject something new into my life—something I’ll genuinely enjoy, like taking some kind of art class—as a means of trying to figure out what my raison d’être is. But I should also try to stop feeling like I need to fix other areas in my life that may not even be broken.

***

I’m not sure how, or if, I want my life to change. The only thing I’ve striven toward over the past two years was buying a house. Now that I have the condo, I wonder if it’s going to be terribly anticlimactic and I’ll be sitting in there thinking, “Now what?”

***

I never thought I’d stay in this area this long (it’ll be 10 years next month), and I’m not really happy with this area, yet I don’t feel compelled to go elsewhere, because the older I get, the more comfortable I get. I’m sure I’d love living in the Pacific Northwest, and 10 years ago I would’ve had the balls to do it if a job would’ve been available to me there, but I don’t think I have the balls anymore. I don’t even think I’d have the balls to move to London if the opportunity arose. I’m just so safe and comfortable where I am, and nowhere else in the US (aside from the Pacific Northwest and maybe Maine) appeal to me.

***

I’d be all for taking a class for fun, but doing a full stint in grad school? Never. Even if I wanted to, I wouldn’t know what to study. Nothing beyond my major ever appealed to me and my major itself didn’t exactly rock my world.

***

And I don’t want kids, but I also think about what will happen when I’m old and alone, with only nursing home companions to keep me company. (Why does that even matter? I love being alone!) And I think about what will happen before that point, when my family starts dying and I have nowhere to go for the holidays except to friends’ houses, where I’ll feel like I’m intruding in their lives. I always have to remind myself that having kids doesn’t guarantee that I won’t be alone when I’m old. My kids could disown me or die before me or just be such hateful shits, I wouldn’t want them around. Or they could turn out like [Ms. X]. That’s the big thing that scares me about having kids: the idea that I could do everything right and still end up with [Ms. X] or a serial killer or a rapist as my child.

***

I do spend a lot of time wondering what the point of everything is. Not in the same way I did before I was medicated, though. I’m just thinking of the big picture—why we sweat and toil and pay bills and wash dishes and do all this stuff that never leads anywhere, day after day until we die. Just thinking about it is exhausting. Like life is one big boulder and humans are Sisyphus permanently pushing it up that hill. It’s not that life necessarily seems bad—just futile. And yeah, I agree that most people will say that Christ is the point of life, and we’re here to do good works in his name and just savor the fact that we’ve been given the “gift of life,” etc, but that just doesn’t cut it for me. Sometimes being faithless makes life really freaking difficult.

So anyway, that’s how I’ve been feeling lately. After I move and get my condo set up, I just need to focus more attention on finding my raison d’être. The only things that even remotely appeal to me are traveling and photography, which means I should make more of a concerted effort to fit photo safaris into my life and save money for future trips. Actually, I’ve already begun the latter.

Ever since I got back from Iceland, I’ve plotted how I can get back there and see the entire country (as compared to my three days in Reykjavik and the Golden Circle). I figured the ideal scenario would be to rent a car with my dad and drive the entire perimeter of the country on its ring road. I thought it would be nice to spend some one-on-one time with him, and since he’s a massive hiking/nature enthusiast who doesn’t like being around people very much, I figured getting him to Iceland—with its sublime natural scenery and startling dearth of people—would be a slam-dunk case. But it turns out he’d prefer to go back to the western US and do more marathon hikes out there, which is totally understandable.

So I found myself back at square one. Going alone really wasn’t an option, because although I have no qualms with traveling alone to many places abroad, spending 2-2½ weeks alone in the empty wilds of Iceland ain’t one of them. I’d want to split driving duties with someone, and I also wouldn’t want to be alone if something went wrong, like if I got desperately lost or ended up with a flat tire or got into an accident.

That’s when I decided to ask Missy to join me. I knew she always wanted to see Iceland and the northern lights, and, like me, she’s been feeling a bit adrift lately, so the solution seemed simple. And it was. She eagerly accepted my invitation and now we’ve begun the long, arduous process of saving for it. Our tentative plan is to go in September 2009, if we manage to save enough money by then. Two years and counting...



song heard most recently before posting:
Sister Fatima—Don McLean