I first wrote about the Fritzl family’s ordeal a few weeks ago, and I’ve continued to keep tabs their recovery in Austria, which, happily, is going far better than I think anybody anticipated. And I continue to use their experience as a touchstone for reminding myself just how lucky I am in life.
Some updates:
The Fritzl family made a big poster for the town of Amstetten, to thank them for their love and support. It said: “We, the whole family, would like to take the opportunity to thank all of you for sympathy at our fate. Your compassion is helping us greatly to overcome these difficult times, and it shows us there also are good and honest people here who really care for us. We hope that soon there will be a time where we can find our way back into a normal life.” They traced their handprints on the poster and each person wrote a message in his or her handprint. The messages included:
Stefan: I miss my sister. Am enjoying freedom and my family. Like the sun, fresh air, and nature.
Alexander: I wish for freedom, power, and strength, and the sun. I miss fire brigade, school, and my sister Kerstin.
Grandma: I wish to live with my children in peace with the help of God. I miss my kind friends and my freedom.
Elisabeth: Wishes—my daughter Kerstin’s recovery, my children’s love, protection for my family, people with warm hearts and understanding.
Lisa: Wishes—health, that everything goes well, love, happiness. Misses—Kerstin, school, friends, fresh air, Class 1C.
Felix: Sleigh rides, driving in a car, playing ball, swimming. Playing with other children, friendship, running in the meadows.
Monika: Wishes—that Kerstin gets better, lots of love, that everything is soon past. Misses—fire brigade, music school, friends, school, Kerstin.
Meanwhile, Josef Fritzl has been sent hundreds of love letters from lonely women offering him romance. Some of the women have said that Fritzl is “good at heart” and misunderstood. Oy.
And in that vein, a scant two months after Elisabeth and her children were rescued, tourists have begun posing for photographs outside the Fritzl house. Two police officers are now permanently stationed at the house to deter tourists. One local resident told the press, “It is bad enough that journalists and TV crews have beleaguered our town, but now there is this ghoulish tourism with people coming to Amstetten just to see the house in Ybbstrasse. It is appalling, we just want to be left in peace.”
Backtracking a bit, it’s being reported that when Elisabeth saw her mother for the first time in April she broke down in tears and said: “I can’t believe I’m free—is it really you?” At their emotional reunion, Elisabeth said: “I can’t believe I’m out. I didn’t think I would ever see you again. It’s all too much for me. I don’t ever want to see him again.” She was also reunited with the children that were taken away from her while she was forced to living the tiny dungeon with her three other children. “My babies. You are so beautiful,” Elisabeth said as she held them close and stroked their faces.
Elisabeth’s sister Gabriele has said: “None of us can believe how normal Elisabeth seems. She is healthy and very chatty and doing very well. Every day she gets a bit stronger. I can’t say what the family is going through. It’s more than anyone can believe. It has devastated us. We are working together to support Elisabeth. She is overjoyed to see her children. She told them they were beautiful and she is spending all the time getting to know them.”
The family’s lawyer Christoph Herbst said: “Elisabeth is very happy to be re-discovering the world. She is very keen to go outside and feel the rain on her skin. But it is important for them to adjust slowly. For now they just talk to each other. But Elisabeth and her children who lived in the cellar have no concept of time and of the future. Some people who hear the story think Elisabeth is like something from a horror film. But rumors that she has no teeth and cannot talk are not true. If you met her you would not realize what she has been through, as she seems just like every normal person. She tells her family that all she longs for is a normal life—or as normal a life as they can get. That’s her only wish.”
Life is also difficult for the three children who were living upstairs because they are now in darkness at the clinic. Herbst said: “But they are all happy and there is a lot of laughter, which you might not expect. Felix makes everyone laugh. They are teaching him to run because inside the cellar he could not run. It is really brilliant how Elisabeth has reacted to the outside world. They are all rather fine. Elisabeth is really an impressive person. She is very strong. She’s happy now for the first time.”
In his first British TV interview, Herbst told how five-year-old Felix recently saw a thunderstorm for the first time. He said the family live a “more or less regular life” in the Austrian hospital they have lived in since the authorities discovered that Josef Fritzl had locked up his secret family in the cellar. He said: “They rise at about six or seven in the morning. Then they have breakfast together. They get the breakfast from the hospital... Then they sit together at a large table and talk, discuss and make jokes. Then everybody does their own thing. They play on the computer, they read books, do some drawings, whatever they want ... It’s very amazing to watch the family because they behave like a normal family.”
He said of the children: “Elisabeth tried to educate the children in the dungeon. They had lessons, they learned grammar, they learned the language, mathematics. So they have been raised very well, they are very well behaved....I think Elisabeth tried to give them a structure and a good life under the circumstances in the dungeon.”
Meanwhile, Felix was recently thrilled to discover McDonald’s was real—after being taken on a secret trip there. The six-year-old was told ads he saw on TV for the burger giant were fiction. A source said after the youngster tucked into his first Happy Meal: “He loved it.”
Stefan, Felix, and Elisabeth have now discarded the protective goggles doctors insisted they wear as their eyes adjusted to sunlight. The boys have also been given immunization shots normally received by newborn babies—but which their mother was unable to provide during their years of incarceration.
A source said: “It was wonderful. The light sensitivity they were suffering two weeks ago has almost disappeared. Doctors were concerned that the boys lacked immunization to everyday illnesses. But after the jabs, they’re happy that they now have enough resistance to mix with others.” This means that Stefan and Felix have taken their first-ever steps in the “magical” outside world. The brothers finally ventured out of the psychiatric clinic and they marveled at their surroundings as they wandered among trees, picked flowers, and gazed at the abundance of wildlife. They were especially fascinated by hundreds of goldfish swimming in a pond in the grounds of Austria’s Mauer Landesklinkum clinic. Before the dusk adventure, the lads had been allowed only to watch from their hospital apartment—staring open-mouthed at the sight of night turning to day.
The source added: “Elisabeth and Rosemarie enjoy cooking for the children and giving them new tastes. Stomaching new foods is no problem for Stefan and Felix—they are fascinated by every dish. The youngsters are allowed DVDs and computer games at night. The siblings have gelled incredibly well. It’s astounding to think how quickly they have all slotted into their new family roles.”
And the source denied reports that Elisabeth is now white-haired with stumps for teeth. He said: “She is attractive. Her hair’s a normal color, she still has her teeth and her figure is slim.”
But the freed family have been forced to start rigorous exercise routines to restore bodies crippled by lack of sunlight and movement in their 180 square feet prison. Stefan was practically bent double when police rescued him.
Orthopedic specialist Dr. Stefan Preis said: “Their cardiovascular systems, muscles, and joints have been severely diminished.”
Kerstin Fritzl is said to be recovering well after being woken up from her artificially induced coma on May 15.
“She opened her eyes and showed emotions for the first time, we laughed and she laughed,” said Amstetten hospital chief Dr. Albert Reiter, adding that he expected her to develop normally and suffer no lasting damage.
“I said “hi” to her and she replied with a “hallo.” It was an intensely dramatic moment. I am especially proud that Kerstin could walk the distance to her new residence and into her new life,” Reiter said.
Kerstin saw daylight for the first time in her life after she awoke in the intensive care ward. According to Reiter, the first wish she made to her carers was to go on a boat trip—and to visit a Robbie Williams concert. “Even immediately after she awoke she would listen to Robbie Williams until 3am. I then would have to intervene, for her to turn down the music and get some rest,” Reiter said. According to him, Kerstin is able to read and write, communicates easily, and is on the road to a full recovery.
“For all of us, Kerstin’s surprising recovery is a great relief,” said Berthold Kepplinger, director of the Mauer Landesklinkum clinic.
Kerstin’s mother Elisabeth visited her daughter regularly in the hospital but had to be transported in utmost secrecy in order to avoid the attention of the international press. Doctors also insisted on her presence for therapeutic reasons, and claim that her presence alongside Kerstin immediately after she woke had had an “immensely positive effect.”
Herbst described the successful family reunion as “miracle” and thanked the medical team for their achievement. He said: “It was a truly touching and happy moment. It was everyone’s—and especially Kerstin’s—great wish to be reunited. It was a miracle.”
In a recent report, Kepplinger said: “The tempo of the lives of the children who lived above ground is very different to those who were confined to the cellar. To them the simple movement of a cloud in the sky can be quite exciting. The others are more active and are being taught by teachers at the clinic. Those who lived below ground are discovering the world for the first time.”
Herbst said: “They all love to pay together and get along really well. They want to make a life together and now we are looking for a place they can start again. To be together is something very precious indeed.”
The family have been given a special area within the clinic where they are expected to stay for several months.
Reiter said: “It was an extraordinary moment when Kerstin, holding my arm, and I were able to walk through the door into a new home, crossing the threshold into a new life. The entire family is happy that they are all together for the first time.”
Felix is enjoying playing outside and also loves climbing stairs, having not been able to in the cellar.
But his brother Stefan is having more trouble adapting to the outside world.
A source at the clinic said: “Stefan is thin as a rake and very pale. For the first few weeks after he came out he only moved very slowly but his motor functions are getting better.”
Rosemarie, meanwhile, returned to the house last week for the first time to pack up personal items before going back to the psychiatric clinic.
This extraordinary family remains in my thoughts!
song heard most recently before posting:
Mad about You—Hooverphonic
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Friday, June 06, 2008
another year older
Mother Nature went bananas on my birthday! Four tornadoes touched down in the area and the tornado-free stretches were pummeled by violent storms. There are widespread power outages, damaged houses, downed tree limbs, and at least one person was killed.
My day was good, though, despite the weather. Initially I thought things were getting off to a lousy start, because I arrived at the Metro station and found that every single space had already been snagged by morning commuters. I crept through both parking garages and a big lot and didn’t see any free spaces. As soon as 10am hit, I pounced on a block of spaces that are off-limits until that time.
My first stop was the Natural History Museum. I groaned when I saw a long line of school buses parked out front, and a mind-bogglingly huge oil spill of students clogging the sidewalk. Thankfully not many of them were in the butterfly room at the same time as me. The exhibit was lovely, and its butterfly habitat was prettier than the one at Brookside Gardens, but I think I preferred Brookside because the butterflies were easier to photograph and there was more breathing room.
I had an unhealthy and rather tasteless lunch in the museum’s food court, and then trudged through the heat along the National Mall, checking out two tiny Smithsonian gardens along the way, as well as one of the Botanical Garden’s outside gardens. The Botanical Garden was as beautiful as I remembered it, but it was also smaller than I remembered. Maybe I just moved really quickly, I don’t know, but it didn’t take me long to get through it at all. While there, my memory card filled up, and I had to delete a bunch of pictures, which didn’t thrill me. Note to self: buy a big-ass memory card in the future!
I wandered through the Botanical Garden’s second outside garden, breezed through the Hirshhorn, and when I arrived at the Haupt Garden outside the Smithsonian castle, it began to rain. I ran into the castle just as the first ginormous storm hit. There was really nothing to do in there, so I just sat around, watching people and the clock. Then I stood outside under an eave, waiting for the last of the rain to disappear. I returned to the Haupt Garden, then killed some time doing this and that until it was time to head over to the Elephant & Castle pub to meet Debbie for dinner.
Dinner was great! I custom-ordered a meatless and gravyless Yorkshire pudding, and then Debbie and I split a gigantic brownie/ice cream combo that was so huge, we couldn’t even finish it. I had a pint of Strongbow cider and we each had a small pot of tea as we rode out the rest of the second huge storm.
The third storm hit when I was on the train, but by the time I got to my Metro station, it had passed. Thankfully I never lost the power in my condo. I feel so sorry for everyone who is still without power, because we’re in the middle of a damn heat wave.
Photos covering everything from Saturday’s dinner and burlesque show to my vegetarian Yorkshire pudding are here.
I went to work yesterday morning and saw a sign on a car that was parked at the entrance of our parking lot; it said that we had no power because of the storm and were thus closed, and employees should check back throughout the morning, and TPTB hoped to have power back by noon. If I knew the power would come back quickly, I would’ve stuck around, perhaps bumming around the local library until the power was restored. But Pepco can take forever to restore power, and time is so precious to me these days, because I have so much freelancing to do, that I just couldn’t take the chance of squandering a whole morning that could be spent chipping away at the freelancing, only to find out that the office was going to stay closed all day long because the power didn’t come back. So I turned around and went home. I got into comfortable clothes, started working on freelancing, and then checked my work email. Aaaaaand….I learned that the power had been restored by, like, 10:00. Great. The office only officially opened at noon, though, so I spent the morning working on freelancing and then switched to my regular work at noon. I just didn’t want to drive the 23 miles back to work for the second time in one morning.
Today my department threw me a birthday party with a yummy cake from Whole Foods and a card signed by everybody. Awes!
In even happier news, my oldest and one of my dearest friends Antoinette had her second baby yesterday. I was hoping all day long that the baby would be born on my birthday, but nope—he waited until 11:50pm on June 5th to make his arrival. And he’s a big one: 10 pounds and 11 ounces! Ouch! I thought for sure she’d be having a girl this time (I kept dreaming it was a girl, anyway), and was surprised to learn this morning that she actually had a second son: Matteo Mariano Rudolph. I can’t wait to meet him!
song heard most recently before posting:
Twenty Years—Augustana
My day was good, though, despite the weather. Initially I thought things were getting off to a lousy start, because I arrived at the Metro station and found that every single space had already been snagged by morning commuters. I crept through both parking garages and a big lot and didn’t see any free spaces. As soon as 10am hit, I pounced on a block of spaces that are off-limits until that time.
My first stop was the Natural History Museum. I groaned when I saw a long line of school buses parked out front, and a mind-bogglingly huge oil spill of students clogging the sidewalk. Thankfully not many of them were in the butterfly room at the same time as me. The exhibit was lovely, and its butterfly habitat was prettier than the one at Brookside Gardens, but I think I preferred Brookside because the butterflies were easier to photograph and there was more breathing room.
I had an unhealthy and rather tasteless lunch in the museum’s food court, and then trudged through the heat along the National Mall, checking out two tiny Smithsonian gardens along the way, as well as one of the Botanical Garden’s outside gardens. The Botanical Garden was as beautiful as I remembered it, but it was also smaller than I remembered. Maybe I just moved really quickly, I don’t know, but it didn’t take me long to get through it at all. While there, my memory card filled up, and I had to delete a bunch of pictures, which didn’t thrill me. Note to self: buy a big-ass memory card in the future!
I wandered through the Botanical Garden’s second outside garden, breezed through the Hirshhorn, and when I arrived at the Haupt Garden outside the Smithsonian castle, it began to rain. I ran into the castle just as the first ginormous storm hit. There was really nothing to do in there, so I just sat around, watching people and the clock. Then I stood outside under an eave, waiting for the last of the rain to disappear. I returned to the Haupt Garden, then killed some time doing this and that until it was time to head over to the Elephant & Castle pub to meet Debbie for dinner.
Dinner was great! I custom-ordered a meatless and gravyless Yorkshire pudding, and then Debbie and I split a gigantic brownie/ice cream combo that was so huge, we couldn’t even finish it. I had a pint of Strongbow cider and we each had a small pot of tea as we rode out the rest of the second huge storm.
The third storm hit when I was on the train, but by the time I got to my Metro station, it had passed. Thankfully I never lost the power in my condo. I feel so sorry for everyone who is still without power, because we’re in the middle of a damn heat wave.
Photos covering everything from Saturday’s dinner and burlesque show to my vegetarian Yorkshire pudding are here.
I went to work yesterday morning and saw a sign on a car that was parked at the entrance of our parking lot; it said that we had no power because of the storm and were thus closed, and employees should check back throughout the morning, and TPTB hoped to have power back by noon. If I knew the power would come back quickly, I would’ve stuck around, perhaps bumming around the local library until the power was restored. But Pepco can take forever to restore power, and time is so precious to me these days, because I have so much freelancing to do, that I just couldn’t take the chance of squandering a whole morning that could be spent chipping away at the freelancing, only to find out that the office was going to stay closed all day long because the power didn’t come back. So I turned around and went home. I got into comfortable clothes, started working on freelancing, and then checked my work email. Aaaaaand….I learned that the power had been restored by, like, 10:00. Great. The office only officially opened at noon, though, so I spent the morning working on freelancing and then switched to my regular work at noon. I just didn’t want to drive the 23 miles back to work for the second time in one morning.
Today my department threw me a birthday party with a yummy cake from Whole Foods and a card signed by everybody. Awes!
In even happier news, my oldest and one of my dearest friends Antoinette had her second baby yesterday. I was hoping all day long that the baby would be born on my birthday, but nope—he waited until 11:50pm on June 5th to make his arrival. And he’s a big one: 10 pounds and 11 ounces! Ouch! I thought for sure she’d be having a girl this time (I kept dreaming it was a girl, anyway), and was surprised to learn this morning that she actually had a second son: Matteo Mariano Rudolph. I can’t wait to meet him!
song heard most recently before posting:
Twenty Years—Augustana
Thursday, May 29, 2008
burlesque or bust
Memorial Day weekend. I worked on Friday night, all day Saturday, and the latter part of Sunday. I gave myself a few hours of freedom on Sunday to wander around downtown Frederick, taking photos, and buying a birthday gift for a friend and some cards. The weather was glorious and it was so amazing to be outdoors, instead of sitting hunched over my computer.
I never touch freelancing on holidays, so even though I had a ton of it to do, I still set it aside on Monday. It felt like such a decadent luxury! In lieu of work, I walked one of the trails at Monocacy National Battlefield and then spent a few hours reading on my balcony (again: luxury!), before settling down to watch a movie and some TV.
On Tuesday we had a brief shot of summer—mid-80s, humid—and so when I got home from work I did something I haven’t done since the 20th century: I turned on the air-conditioning. See, from January 2000 until December 2007 I lived in basement apartments where I had no control over my own heating and air-conditioning. I was completely at the mercy of the people upstairs. I really, really fucking hate the heat, so on hot days I’d spend my whole commute home chanting, “Please let the a/c be on when I get home…please let the a/c be on when I get home…,” and if I got home and it wasn’t on, and instead my apartment felt like the surface of the sun, I’d start to cry. I seriously hate the heat that much. So you can imagine what it was like to go home on Tuesday and have the freedom to touch one button and have my place cool down. It was like…like…witchcraft!
This weekend I’ll be bogged down with work, of course, but I may also borrow one of Kristen’s dogs and meet a coworker at the Walk n’ Wag event in Frederick on Saturday morning. At night I’m meeting Julie and Susan at DC’s hip, organic vegetarian restaurant, Vegetate, for a pre-birthday dinner. Then Susan and I will haul our overstuffed asses to the Palace of Wonders, where we’ll attend a bona fide burlesque show. Hot! I’m such an old fogey, I’m almost agog at the fact that the show only starts at 10pm (ohmigod that’s so late!), but it will be worth it, I think. It seems like silly, bawdy fun, and it’ll be nice to pull my ruminating head out of my morose ass for once and do something completely inane at night. But this is assuming I can even snag tickets; this particular burlesque revue has been known to sell out, and I’m having trouble snagging tickets in advance.
*knocks on wood*
song heard most recently before posting:
September Morn—Neil Diamond
I never touch freelancing on holidays, so even though I had a ton of it to do, I still set it aside on Monday. It felt like such a decadent luxury! In lieu of work, I walked one of the trails at Monocacy National Battlefield and then spent a few hours reading on my balcony (again: luxury!), before settling down to watch a movie and some TV.
On Tuesday we had a brief shot of summer—mid-80s, humid—and so when I got home from work I did something I haven’t done since the 20th century: I turned on the air-conditioning. See, from January 2000 until December 2007 I lived in basement apartments where I had no control over my own heating and air-conditioning. I was completely at the mercy of the people upstairs. I really, really fucking hate the heat, so on hot days I’d spend my whole commute home chanting, “Please let the a/c be on when I get home…please let the a/c be on when I get home…,” and if I got home and it wasn’t on, and instead my apartment felt like the surface of the sun, I’d start to cry. I seriously hate the heat that much. So you can imagine what it was like to go home on Tuesday and have the freedom to touch one button and have my place cool down. It was like…like…witchcraft!
This weekend I’ll be bogged down with work, of course, but I may also borrow one of Kristen’s dogs and meet a coworker at the Walk n’ Wag event in Frederick on Saturday morning. At night I’m meeting Julie and Susan at DC’s hip, organic vegetarian restaurant, Vegetate, for a pre-birthday dinner. Then Susan and I will haul our overstuffed asses to the Palace of Wonders, where we’ll attend a bona fide burlesque show. Hot! I’m such an old fogey, I’m almost agog at the fact that the show only starts at 10pm (ohmigod that’s so late!), but it will be worth it, I think. It seems like silly, bawdy fun, and it’ll be nice to pull my ruminating head out of my morose ass for once and do something completely inane at night. But this is assuming I can even snag tickets; this particular burlesque revue has been known to sell out, and I’m having trouble snagging tickets in advance.
*knocks on wood*
song heard most recently before posting:
September Morn—Neil Diamond
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
disasters
Last night I decided to take a break from ruminating over the ceaseless, churning horrors of the world (especially the devastating catastrophes in China and Burma) by distracting myself with a Netflixed movie. Did I watch a frothy comedy or heartwarming chick flick? No, I watched Cloverfield. With all the lights off. Naturally. (But in my defense, I snuggled under a cozy blanket and had Freyja sprawled beside me, one leg kicked over me as she slept, as a source of comfort.)
Well, I was eager to see the movie because it was created by JJ Abrams and involves a monster, and, given that Lost is my crack, any Abrams/monster pairing is a good thing in my book. Besides, one could say that a good distraction from real-world horrors is to watch fake horrors, since they make everything else look semi-decent in comparison. Well, that’s the logic in my world, anyway—I think it’s why I’m so entranced with depressing books (especially those in the dystopian and postapocalyptic oeuvre).
But the movie didn’t actually comfort me very much, because parts of it were very 9/11-ish, to an almost disconcerting degree. However, the CGI was great and I thought—in spite of the stomach-churning bouncing of the handheld camera—it was a very well-done movie, and deliciously scary in its own right (I mean, away any fear caused by the parallels between Cloverfield’s rampage in New York and the terrorist attacks in New York).
When recommending the movie to friends, I advised them to follow it up with a quick visit to the movie’s FAQ on IMDB, because it helps to explain some background material that appeared in viral marketing websites (à la Lost), and this material adds a new dimension to the movie.
Torturing myself even more, I’ve been reading a book (The Long Emergency, by James Howard Kunstler) loaned to me by my boss, and this thing is astoundingly terrifying and makes me want to slit my wrists. But it’s fascinating, too, because I’m admittedly ignorant about the oil crisis. It’s really opening my eyes to what’s looming before us: the day when we will run out of oil. It’s also opening my eyes to the inadequacy of alternative fuels, and how no current alternative can keep our society functioning at its current level. Nothing—not wind power, solar power, biofuels, nor hydrogen—can sustain our society at its current level of growth and speed. Some alternative fuels would do better than others, but in an ironic twist, pretty much all of them need a fossil fuel platform to either get started or to flat-out exist (like how oil is needed to run the machinery that produces wind turbines, solar panels, and usable hydrogen). When oil ends, our society as we know it will end. It won’t disappear, but even with alternative fuels, it will be drastically, permanently altered and shrunk.
The out-of-control population boom of our age is due to the cheap and plentiful oil we’ve thus far enjoyed. It has fueled (no pun intended) globalization, suburban sprawl, factory farming, the inhabitation of areas barely able to support life (such as hyper-arid areas), and the construction of buildings that are completely incompatible with their local climate (for example, southern McMansions without traditional cooling mechanisms such as breezeways and transom windows, and office buildings whose windows won’t open). And these things, in turn, fuel their own set of problems, with environmental degradation, climate change, and antibiotic-resistant diseases being just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
So yes, for the sake of the planet’s health, it’s actually beneficial that our oil days are numbered. However, this also spells catastrophic changes for humans and modern society as we know it. We can barely support the Earth’s current population even with fossil fuels; without them, vast numbers of people will die from starvation and the wars that will undoubtedly be fought over the remaining (and dwindling) oil and natural gas reserves. Our drastically reduced population will have to become intensely local. And that’s where suburban sprawl really becomes problematic. After all, the very definition of sprawl is spreading without restraint, and how local can a community be when it’s spread carelessly over miles and miles? Many communities have no town center containing shops, businesses, and homes within walking distance, because everything is contained in far-flung strip malls and subdivisions. Really, they can scarcely even be called communities, because their individual pieces are so disconnected from one another, they’re not functioning as a cohesive whole.
Kunstler pointed out that America is in a particularly bad spot, because no other country has produced as much suburban sprawl as us, with such a pervasive habit of metaphorically torching our cities as we retreat. Sure, some urban communities remain as intact as ever, and gentrification has breathed new life into formerly abandoned spaces, but so many cities still have cores that have become mere shells—ghost towns littered with crumbling infrastructures, debris, and pollution. They’d need a lot of work before they could sustain a population fleeing from the suburbs. Europe, said Kunstler, is in a better position to survive, because their sprawl is limited, their cities were never forsaken, and most cities and towns have strong agricultural areas not far beyond their borders. Plus they have excellent public transportation, so when oil reserves are too low to give the average person access, people will still be able to get from Point A to Point B.
It got me thinking about my own home, and how I’m in one of those soulless, sprawling suburbs, 23 miles away from my office. In a perfect world, I would’ve been able to buy a home within walking distance of my office or within the DC city limits, but neither was an affordable option for me. So out, out, out I went. And while Frederick is a great city—very community-minded and independent (its residents don’t think of themselves as being in a DC suburb)—I couldn’t afford any non-ghetto houses/condos there, either (downtown, I mean). So I’m outside the city, in a development full of condos and McTownhouses, not near a train station, dependent on my car. In a post-fossil fuel world, I’d be kind of fucked. But then again, if I changed to a local job and got a bike, I could bike to work and bike to downtown Frederick where I could find food and supplies. I imagine the city would handle a post-fossil fuel world surprisingly well, since it already has a wealth of local businesses (not just big-box chain stores in suburban strip malls), a farmer’s market, and agricultural areas.
If you want to learn more about the looming oil crisis; get a thorough, eye-opening overview of fossil fuels, alternative fuels, and the intricate codependency between fossil fuels and modern life; and get scared out of your pants, then I recommend checking out this book.
Anyway, moving on. I know I’ve been M.I.A. lately. A number of major changes are going on at work, leaving me nervous and withdrawn. And freelancing has been hectic, with several tight deadlines hitting at once. Still, things are pretty good for the most part. My mom and aunt visited from out of state over Mother’s Day weekend and I had a lot of fun during their visit. The highlight was when they joined my sister and me for a Mother’s Day brunch at Isabella’s, a superb tapas restaurant in downtown Frederick. Afterwards we wandered through the boutiques downtown, but it was rainy and chilly and not the best day for leisurely strolling around.
This past weekend’s weather was much better, and although much of my time was spent confined indoors, working on freelancing, I did escape for a bit on Saturday to attend a lovely garden party at an ex-coworker’s house. And more of my wood laminate floors were installed on Sunday, leaving me gleefully giddy with excitement.
We’re shifting into a long holiday weekend that’s supposed to have stellar weather. I won’t be traveling anywhere (no beach for me, unfortunately), but I do intend to kick freelancing aside for a little while to A) check out the hiking trails at Monocacy National Battlefield (I’ve heard they’re great), and B) spend some time truly exploring Frederick: photographing the old buildings, learning my way around, poking around all the cool shops, checking out the graves at historic Mt. Olivet Cemetery, and buying birthday presents for a friend.
song heard most recently before posting:
Hometown Glory—Adele
Well, I was eager to see the movie because it was created by JJ Abrams and involves a monster, and, given that Lost is my crack, any Abrams/monster pairing is a good thing in my book. Besides, one could say that a good distraction from real-world horrors is to watch fake horrors, since they make everything else look semi-decent in comparison. Well, that’s the logic in my world, anyway—I think it’s why I’m so entranced with depressing books (especially those in the dystopian and postapocalyptic oeuvre).
But the movie didn’t actually comfort me very much, because parts of it were very 9/11-ish, to an almost disconcerting degree. However, the CGI was great and I thought—in spite of the stomach-churning bouncing of the handheld camera—it was a very well-done movie, and deliciously scary in its own right (I mean, away any fear caused by the parallels between Cloverfield’s rampage in New York and the terrorist attacks in New York).
When recommending the movie to friends, I advised them to follow it up with a quick visit to the movie’s FAQ on IMDB, because it helps to explain some background material that appeared in viral marketing websites (à la Lost), and this material adds a new dimension to the movie.
Torturing myself even more, I’ve been reading a book (The Long Emergency, by James Howard Kunstler) loaned to me by my boss, and this thing is astoundingly terrifying and makes me want to slit my wrists. But it’s fascinating, too, because I’m admittedly ignorant about the oil crisis. It’s really opening my eyes to what’s looming before us: the day when we will run out of oil. It’s also opening my eyes to the inadequacy of alternative fuels, and how no current alternative can keep our society functioning at its current level. Nothing—not wind power, solar power, biofuels, nor hydrogen—can sustain our society at its current level of growth and speed. Some alternative fuels would do better than others, but in an ironic twist, pretty much all of them need a fossil fuel platform to either get started or to flat-out exist (like how oil is needed to run the machinery that produces wind turbines, solar panels, and usable hydrogen). When oil ends, our society as we know it will end. It won’t disappear, but even with alternative fuels, it will be drastically, permanently altered and shrunk.
The out-of-control population boom of our age is due to the cheap and plentiful oil we’ve thus far enjoyed. It has fueled (no pun intended) globalization, suburban sprawl, factory farming, the inhabitation of areas barely able to support life (such as hyper-arid areas), and the construction of buildings that are completely incompatible with their local climate (for example, southern McMansions without traditional cooling mechanisms such as breezeways and transom windows, and office buildings whose windows won’t open). And these things, in turn, fuel their own set of problems, with environmental degradation, climate change, and antibiotic-resistant diseases being just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
So yes, for the sake of the planet’s health, it’s actually beneficial that our oil days are numbered. However, this also spells catastrophic changes for humans and modern society as we know it. We can barely support the Earth’s current population even with fossil fuels; without them, vast numbers of people will die from starvation and the wars that will undoubtedly be fought over the remaining (and dwindling) oil and natural gas reserves. Our drastically reduced population will have to become intensely local. And that’s where suburban sprawl really becomes problematic. After all, the very definition of sprawl is spreading without restraint, and how local can a community be when it’s spread carelessly over miles and miles? Many communities have no town center containing shops, businesses, and homes within walking distance, because everything is contained in far-flung strip malls and subdivisions. Really, they can scarcely even be called communities, because their individual pieces are so disconnected from one another, they’re not functioning as a cohesive whole.
Kunstler pointed out that America is in a particularly bad spot, because no other country has produced as much suburban sprawl as us, with such a pervasive habit of metaphorically torching our cities as we retreat. Sure, some urban communities remain as intact as ever, and gentrification has breathed new life into formerly abandoned spaces, but so many cities still have cores that have become mere shells—ghost towns littered with crumbling infrastructures, debris, and pollution. They’d need a lot of work before they could sustain a population fleeing from the suburbs. Europe, said Kunstler, is in a better position to survive, because their sprawl is limited, their cities were never forsaken, and most cities and towns have strong agricultural areas not far beyond their borders. Plus they have excellent public transportation, so when oil reserves are too low to give the average person access, people will still be able to get from Point A to Point B.
It got me thinking about my own home, and how I’m in one of those soulless, sprawling suburbs, 23 miles away from my office. In a perfect world, I would’ve been able to buy a home within walking distance of my office or within the DC city limits, but neither was an affordable option for me. So out, out, out I went. And while Frederick is a great city—very community-minded and independent (its residents don’t think of themselves as being in a DC suburb)—I couldn’t afford any non-ghetto houses/condos there, either (downtown, I mean). So I’m outside the city, in a development full of condos and McTownhouses, not near a train station, dependent on my car. In a post-fossil fuel world, I’d be kind of fucked. But then again, if I changed to a local job and got a bike, I could bike to work and bike to downtown Frederick where I could find food and supplies. I imagine the city would handle a post-fossil fuel world surprisingly well, since it already has a wealth of local businesses (not just big-box chain stores in suburban strip malls), a farmer’s market, and agricultural areas.
If you want to learn more about the looming oil crisis; get a thorough, eye-opening overview of fossil fuels, alternative fuels, and the intricate codependency between fossil fuels and modern life; and get scared out of your pants, then I recommend checking out this book.
Anyway, moving on. I know I’ve been M.I.A. lately. A number of major changes are going on at work, leaving me nervous and withdrawn. And freelancing has been hectic, with several tight deadlines hitting at once. Still, things are pretty good for the most part. My mom and aunt visited from out of state over Mother’s Day weekend and I had a lot of fun during their visit. The highlight was when they joined my sister and me for a Mother’s Day brunch at Isabella’s, a superb tapas restaurant in downtown Frederick. Afterwards we wandered through the boutiques downtown, but it was rainy and chilly and not the best day for leisurely strolling around.
This past weekend’s weather was much better, and although much of my time was spent confined indoors, working on freelancing, I did escape for a bit on Saturday to attend a lovely garden party at an ex-coworker’s house. And more of my wood laminate floors were installed on Sunday, leaving me gleefully giddy with excitement.
We’re shifting into a long holiday weekend that’s supposed to have stellar weather. I won’t be traveling anywhere (no beach for me, unfortunately), but I do intend to kick freelancing aside for a little while to A) check out the hiking trails at Monocacy National Battlefield (I’ve heard they’re great), and B) spend some time truly exploring Frederick: photographing the old buildings, learning my way around, poking around all the cool shops, checking out the graves at historic Mt. Olivet Cemetery, and buying birthday presents for a friend.
song heard most recently before posting:
Hometown Glory—Adele
Thursday, May 01, 2008
Is God up there?
I’ve been alarmingly over-obsessed with the Fritzl case lately. Maybe I’m just a ghoul, or maybe reincarnation really does exist and this case is striking a note with me because of something I endured in a past life. (Christ, I hope not!)
I’ve seen some uncomfortably tasteless remarks about the case online. Look, I can be as snarky and inappropriate as the next gal, but joking about other people’s traumas is way over the line. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t think kidnapping, rape, incest, and being forced to live in a dungeon for years is particularly amusing. The least the public can do is show Elisabeth and her children some fucking respect.
While the mocking jokesters online got to spend their twenties and thirties leading a normal life—going to parties, hanging out with friends, dating, drinking too much, gaining their independence, getting married, going on vacations, etc.—Elisabeth spent her twenties and thirties condemned to a hellish prison, immersed in a horror movie that boggles the imagination. Her youth—her formative years—were wrenched from her in the cruelest possible way. She couldn’t even use suicide as an escape, because doing so would mean leaving her kids alone with their monster father.
And those kids of hers…my god. The youngest is close in age to my niece. I think of all the things Olivia has experienced in her life so far (she’s even been to Disney World twice; I’ve never even been there once!) and how little Felix never got to experience even the smallest of those moments: making snow angels, attending a friend’s birthday party, playing with pets.
Realizing what has been stolen from those three kids is almost more than the mind can process. Yes, they had a TV and VCR, so yes, they’ve technically seen what exists in the real world. But we all know that seeing something on TV isn’t the same thing as seeing it in real life; it really doesn’t even count. I saw the Alps on TV before I got to see them in real life, and let me tell you, the former experience doesn’t hold a fucking candle to the latter. Case in point: one Daily Mail report says:
Another report said:
Even the simplest, most commonplace sights fill them with wonder. So, disregarding whatever they’ve seen on TV over the years, let’s think for a minute about all the things denied to these children.
Aside from the biggies, like freedom and fresh air, there are a billion little things that we take for granted every day. These kids have never seen the moon, sun, stars, rainbows, or clouds. They’ve never seen a thunderstorm or falling rain or bright autumn foliage. They’ve never seen birds flying overhead. They’ve never felt the refreshment of the warm sun on a cool day or a cool breeze on a warm day. They’ve never walked barefoot through soft grass. They’ve never even seen grass. They’ve never watched fireworks. They’ve never been to the movies. They’ve never seen sleek horses grazing in a field or fish and ducks swimming in a pond. They’ve never seen or petted dogs and cats. They’ve never been swimming or splashed in a puddle. They live in Austria—land of the Alps—and yet they’ve never seen mountains or snow. They’ve never been sledding or played in the snow. They’ve never ridden an amusement park ride. They’ve never been shopping. They’ve never used a telephone or a computer. They’ve never seen or smelled flowers. They’ve never gone for a walk or run with abandon. They’ve never seen butterflies and fireflies. They’ve never seen a Christmas tree glistening with lights.
Their dungeon life has contained no gardens, libraries, friends, parties, restaurants, or sunsets. The teens have never experienced standard rites of passage like attending sleepovers and friends’ parties, dating and falling in love, driving a car, getting a summer job, testing parental boundaries.
Think of the freedoms you’re able to exercise every single day. Think of the choices you’re allowed to make. You can lock yourself in a room or let yourself out. You can choose to venture outside or stay indoors. You can wear what you want and eat what you want.
The tiniest spark of good news? The kids have youth on their side and their mom does, too. She lost her formative years, but at 42, she’s still young enough to have many years of joy and exploration ahead of her, if she’s not too damaged to embrace them. Kerstin and Stefan lost their childhood, but at least they didn’t emerge from their prison at, like, age 95. At least there is still time for them to hopefully learn how to forge connections with other people, make friends, gain independence, see more of the world, and fall in love. The same goes for Elisabeth.
I just hope they’re able to survive this trauma and regain the dignity that was stolen from them by their father.
song heard most recently before posting:
New Year’s Day—U2
I’ve seen some uncomfortably tasteless remarks about the case online. Look, I can be as snarky and inappropriate as the next gal, but joking about other people’s traumas is way over the line. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t think kidnapping, rape, incest, and being forced to live in a dungeon for years is particularly amusing. The least the public can do is show Elisabeth and her children some fucking respect.
While the mocking jokesters online got to spend their twenties and thirties leading a normal life—going to parties, hanging out with friends, dating, drinking too much, gaining their independence, getting married, going on vacations, etc.—Elisabeth spent her twenties and thirties condemned to a hellish prison, immersed in a horror movie that boggles the imagination. Her youth—her formative years—were wrenched from her in the cruelest possible way. She couldn’t even use suicide as an escape, because doing so would mean leaving her kids alone with their monster father.
And those kids of hers…my god. The youngest is close in age to my niece. I think of all the things Olivia has experienced in her life so far (she’s even been to Disney World twice; I’ve never even been there once!) and how little Felix never got to experience even the smallest of those moments: making snow angels, attending a friend’s birthday party, playing with pets.
Realizing what has been stolen from those three kids is almost more than the mind can process. Yes, they had a TV and VCR, so yes, they’ve technically seen what exists in the real world. But we all know that seeing something on TV isn’t the same thing as seeing it in real life; it really doesn’t even count. I saw the Alps on TV before I got to see them in real life, and let me tell you, the former experience doesn’t hold a fucking candle to the latter. Case in point: one Daily Mail report says:
When Felix first looked at the moon on his release, he asked his rescuers: “Is God up there?”
And when he saw the sun he was even more excited, making a squeaking noise and trying to look directly at it through his fingers.
Doctors said that since he came out he is in a constant state of excitement. When he saw a cow for the first time in his life he excitedly made “gurgling noises,” but when police took him in a lift he was petrified and clung on to his mother as the floor moved.
Another report said:
The police who took Stefan and Felix to the reunion with their other siblings were the first strangers the boys had ever seen. The pair had never been in a car and whooped with excitement as the vehicle set off, as if they were on a fairground ride. Etz said: “They were amazed at the speed and really excited. They had never known anything like it – they had only ever seen cars on TV in the dungeon. Little Felix was beside himself with excitement. He was shrieking with pleasure when he saw cars coming the other way. He and his brother braced themselves whenever a car went past. They kept thinking there was going to be a head-on crash. They were fascinated by the headlights and were shouting and hiding behind the seats.”
Even the simplest, most commonplace sights fill them with wonder. So, disregarding whatever they’ve seen on TV over the years, let’s think for a minute about all the things denied to these children.
Aside from the biggies, like freedom and fresh air, there are a billion little things that we take for granted every day. These kids have never seen the moon, sun, stars, rainbows, or clouds. They’ve never seen a thunderstorm or falling rain or bright autumn foliage. They’ve never seen birds flying overhead. They’ve never felt the refreshment of the warm sun on a cool day or a cool breeze on a warm day. They’ve never walked barefoot through soft grass. They’ve never even seen grass. They’ve never watched fireworks. They’ve never been to the movies. They’ve never seen sleek horses grazing in a field or fish and ducks swimming in a pond. They’ve never seen or petted dogs and cats. They’ve never been swimming or splashed in a puddle. They live in Austria—land of the Alps—and yet they’ve never seen mountains or snow. They’ve never been sledding or played in the snow. They’ve never ridden an amusement park ride. They’ve never been shopping. They’ve never used a telephone or a computer. They’ve never seen or smelled flowers. They’ve never gone for a walk or run with abandon. They’ve never seen butterflies and fireflies. They’ve never seen a Christmas tree glistening with lights.
Their dungeon life has contained no gardens, libraries, friends, parties, restaurants, or sunsets. The teens have never experienced standard rites of passage like attending sleepovers and friends’ parties, dating and falling in love, driving a car, getting a summer job, testing parental boundaries.
Think of the freedoms you’re able to exercise every single day. Think of the choices you’re allowed to make. You can lock yourself in a room or let yourself out. You can choose to venture outside or stay indoors. You can wear what you want and eat what you want.
The tiniest spark of good news? The kids have youth on their side and their mom does, too. She lost her formative years, but at 42, she’s still young enough to have many years of joy and exploration ahead of her, if she’s not too damaged to embrace them. Kerstin and Stefan lost their childhood, but at least they didn’t emerge from their prison at, like, age 95. At least there is still time for them to hopefully learn how to forge connections with other people, make friends, gain independence, see more of the world, and fall in love. The same goes for Elisabeth.
I just hope they’re able to survive this trauma and regain the dignity that was stolen from them by their father.
song heard most recently before posting:
New Year’s Day—U2
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
observations and collective nouns
This weekend was largely spent working and marveling at the four or five violent storms that rolled through the region during Sunday (two tornadoes even touched down in Maryland, but neither were in my county). On Saturday I played hooky, though, so I could wile away some time in the modern art and folk art wings at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. While there, I saw this:
Electronic Superhighway, by Nam June Paik
Afterwards I sat outside the museum for a while, soaking in the beautiful day, and during this time a hockey game (the Washington Capitals versus the Philadelphia Flyers) ended over at the Verizon Center, and suddenly there was this rising tide of movement and chaos and noise as fans in their red jerseys spilled through the streets, screaming, banging their noisemaking sticks (what are those things called, anyway?), honking, and chanting “Let’s go Caps!” as they returned to their cars and the Metro. I felt like an anthropologist studying an exotic culture in a far-flung place. Because these? Are not my people. Being nonathletic and reclusive, I’m so hopelessly disconnected from the sporting world and the kind of enthusiasm and group camaraderie it ignites in its fans, it’s truly like watching Pygmy mating rituals.
...so I just sat and watched them roll by, photographing them stealthily like a creepy voyeur.
After staring at the passers-by for a while, I killed some time in H&M and West Elm, resisting the urge to pull imaginary money out of thin air so I could buy all this stuff I don’t need but totally want, and on the way there I noticed a Scottish flag inexplicably and delightfully dangling from some random office building.
My next stop was the Grand Hyatt, where Angela is staying while in town on business. Her digs there are quite fancy, and her suite contained a huge jacuzzi tub (with a flatscreen TV across from it!) that had me foaming at the mouth with envy.
Management delivered a complimentary tray of Mediterranean hors d’oeuvres, and, not having eaten since breakfast, I shamelessly shoveled hummus and sun-dried tomatoes into my maw like I was on the cusp of starvation. Dignity? What is this dignity of which you speak?
We headed over to Arlington to pick up our pal Eleazar, but there was a roadblock near the Pentagon that threw us off-course, and by the time we finally got to his place and pulled into the Lost Dog Café, it was already pushing 7pm. Since Angela had an early day on Sunday, things had to end early for us—right after dinner, really. So I returned Eleazar to his apartment and Angela to her hotel, and then began the loooong ride back to my condo in the sticks.
Anyway, to veer into completely different waters, recently I was thinking about one of the many peculiar aspects of the English language—collective nouns. Most people know about swarms of bees, schools of fish, murders of crows, decks of cards, hosts of angels, and quivers of arrows. But what about other animals and objects? What are their collective nouns? I researched the subject a bit and found interesting results. With animals in particular, it seems there are often numerous words used to describe a plural of a particular animal. For example, a group of crows is also called an alibi of crows, a storytelling of crows, and a hoover of crows. You can have a corps of giraffes, a herd of giraffes, or tower of giraffes. Some collective nouns are fairly dull, but others are delightfully eccentric. Who on earth created these nouns? Someone who was smoking crack, apparently. Here are the ones I love the most:
shrewdness of apes
blush of boys
wake of buzzards
flock of camels
postern of candidates
spoonful of caribou
cartload of chimpanzees
trades union of chinchillas
drunken ship of cobblers
quiver of cobras
rag of colts
cover of coots
congregation of crocodiles
piteousness of doves
aerie of eagles
mob of emus
business of ferrets
giggle of girls
implausibility of gnus
tribe of goats
charm of goldfinches
glint of goldfish
skein of goslings
leash of greyhounds
covey of grouse
morning of hammers
horde of hamsters
husk of hares
kettle of hawks
prickle of hedgehogs
siege of herons
crash of hippopotami
bloat of hippopotami
smack of jellyfish
neverthriving of jugglers
flight of locks (as in canal locks)
tidings of magpies
stud of mares
richness of martens
superfluity of nuns
parliament of owls
ostentation of peacocks
huddle of penguins
parcel of penguins
rookery of penguins
nest of pheasants
drove of pigs
wing of plovers
string of ponies
coterie of prairie dogs
bevy of quail
bury of rabbits
gaze of raccoons
mischief of rats
rhumba of rattlesnakes
storytelling of ravens
unkindness of ravens
crash of rhinoceri
disworship of Scots
harem of seals
shiver of sharks
hurtle of sheep
bed of snakes
scurry of squirrels
murmuration of starlings
faggot of sticks
muster of storks
knot of toads
blessing of unicorns
prudence of vicars
generation of vipers
descent of woodpeckers
zeal of zebras
song heard most recently before posting:
Breaking Up the Girl—Garbage
Electronic Superhighway, by Nam June Paik Afterwards I sat outside the museum for a while, soaking in the beautiful day, and during this time a hockey game (the Washington Capitals versus the Philadelphia Flyers) ended over at the Verizon Center, and suddenly there was this rising tide of movement and chaos and noise as fans in their red jerseys spilled through the streets, screaming, banging their noisemaking sticks (what are those things called, anyway?), honking, and chanting “Let’s go Caps!” as they returned to their cars and the Metro. I felt like an anthropologist studying an exotic culture in a far-flung place. Because these? Are not my people. Being nonathletic and reclusive, I’m so hopelessly disconnected from the sporting world and the kind of enthusiasm and group camaraderie it ignites in its fans, it’s truly like watching Pygmy mating rituals.
...so I just sat and watched them roll by, photographing them stealthily like a creepy voyeur. After staring at the passers-by for a while, I killed some time in H&M and West Elm, resisting the urge to pull imaginary money out of thin air so I could buy all this stuff I don’t need but totally want, and on the way there I noticed a Scottish flag inexplicably and delightfully dangling from some random office building.
My next stop was the Grand Hyatt, where Angela is staying while in town on business. Her digs there are quite fancy, and her suite contained a huge jacuzzi tub (with a flatscreen TV across from it!) that had me foaming at the mouth with envy.We headed over to Arlington to pick up our pal Eleazar, but there was a roadblock near the Pentagon that threw us off-course, and by the time we finally got to his place and pulled into the Lost Dog Café, it was already pushing 7pm. Since Angela had an early day on Sunday, things had to end early for us—right after dinner, really. So I returned Eleazar to his apartment and Angela to her hotel, and then began the loooong ride back to my condo in the sticks.
Anyway, to veer into completely different waters, recently I was thinking about one of the many peculiar aspects of the English language—collective nouns. Most people know about swarms of bees, schools of fish, murders of crows, decks of cards, hosts of angels, and quivers of arrows. But what about other animals and objects? What are their collective nouns? I researched the subject a bit and found interesting results. With animals in particular, it seems there are often numerous words used to describe a plural of a particular animal. For example, a group of crows is also called an alibi of crows, a storytelling of crows, and a hoover of crows. You can have a corps of giraffes, a herd of giraffes, or tower of giraffes. Some collective nouns are fairly dull, but others are delightfully eccentric. Who on earth created these nouns? Someone who was smoking crack, apparently. Here are the ones I love the most:
shrewdness of apes
blush of boys
wake of buzzards
flock of camels
postern of candidates
spoonful of caribou
cartload of chimpanzees
trades union of chinchillas
drunken ship of cobblers
quiver of cobras
rag of colts
cover of coots
congregation of crocodiles
piteousness of doves
aerie of eagles
mob of emus
business of ferrets
giggle of girls
implausibility of gnus
tribe of goats
charm of goldfinches
glint of goldfish
skein of goslings
leash of greyhounds
covey of grouse
morning of hammers
horde of hamsters
husk of hares
kettle of hawks
prickle of hedgehogs
siege of herons
crash of hippopotami
bloat of hippopotami
smack of jellyfish
neverthriving of jugglers
flight of locks (as in canal locks)
tidings of magpies
stud of mares
richness of martens
superfluity of nuns
parliament of owls
ostentation of peacocks
huddle of penguins
parcel of penguins
rookery of penguins
nest of pheasants
drove of pigs
wing of plovers
string of ponies
coterie of prairie dogs
bevy of quail
bury of rabbits
gaze of raccoons
mischief of rats
rhumba of rattlesnakes
storytelling of ravens
unkindness of ravens
crash of rhinoceri
disworship of Scots
harem of seals
shiver of sharks
hurtle of sheep
bed of snakes
scurry of squirrels
murmuration of starlings
faggot of sticks
muster of storks
knot of toads
blessing of unicorns
prudence of vicars
generation of vipers
descent of woodpeckers
zeal of zebras
song heard most recently before posting:
Breaking Up the Girl—Garbage
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
miscellany
The Pope is in town today, and since I’m a recovering Catholic (I can’t really say ex-Catholic because it’s not like I was officially excommunicated), you won’t see me lining up along the PopeMobile route to wave at him, nor attending the mass he’s conducting at Nationals Stadium tomorrow. John Paul II had a certain amount of charisma—almost an aura of rock star quality (or at least as much rock star quality as you can possess when you’re wearing a gigantic white hat)—that may have led me down to the PopeMobile route, despite not agreeing with his policies. But Benedict XVI? Not so much. Still, I hope the visit goes smoothly, protestors and all. At least he’ll have lovely spring weather for the occasion.
This is making me realize that after 10½ years of living in the greater DC area, I still haven’t visited the Basilica downtown. It’s the largest Catholic church in North America—one that I’ve passed who knows how many times while on the Metro—and I’ve never been there. Huh. I should work on changing that, because it looks like a truly beautiful building.
This is one of those bipolar days when I need to crank the heat and wear a winter coat in the morning and by afternoon I’m in short sleeves with all the windows in my car rolled down. And the cherry blossoms outside my office, which grace us with a week or so of delicate, incandescent fire, have begun that annual war where green and pink engage in rigorous hand-to-hand combat for control of the trees, with green winning in the end.
It’s also the one-year anniversary of the Virginia Tech massacre. April is the cruelest month indeed. Stuffed with memories of Virginia Tech, Waco, Oklahoma City, and Columbine, it has become a peculiar month that simultaneously straddles beginnings (the proverbial rebirth of spring) and endings.
In that vein, yesterday marked 17 years since my much-adored grandmother passed away. I think that with a lot of deaths, the full extent of what has been lost is only realized years later. With my grandmother, it’s sinking in now—nearly two decades later—just how many things she never lived long enough to see. She was around to see my sister graduate from high school but missed the rest of her grandkids’ high school graduations and all of our college graduations. She didn’t get to see two of her grandkids get married and have kids. She didn’t get to see my aunt happily retire to her dream home or see my mom develop a stable new life after a chaotic divorce. If you believe in a traditional religious afterlife, it’s easy to say, “My loved one is up in heaven and is watching everything that’s happening, even if s/he can’t be here to experience it.” But when you don’t believe in an afterlife? That sense of loss gets no easy resolution.
song heard most recently before posting:
The Walk—Imogen Heap
This is making me realize that after 10½ years of living in the greater DC area, I still haven’t visited the Basilica downtown. It’s the largest Catholic church in North America—one that I’ve passed who knows how many times while on the Metro—and I’ve never been there. Huh. I should work on changing that, because it looks like a truly beautiful building.
This is one of those bipolar days when I need to crank the heat and wear a winter coat in the morning and by afternoon I’m in short sleeves with all the windows in my car rolled down. And the cherry blossoms outside my office, which grace us with a week or so of delicate, incandescent fire, have begun that annual war where green and pink engage in rigorous hand-to-hand combat for control of the trees, with green winning in the end.
It’s also the one-year anniversary of the Virginia Tech massacre. April is the cruelest month indeed. Stuffed with memories of Virginia Tech, Waco, Oklahoma City, and Columbine, it has become a peculiar month that simultaneously straddles beginnings (the proverbial rebirth of spring) and endings.
In that vein, yesterday marked 17 years since my much-adored grandmother passed away. I think that with a lot of deaths, the full extent of what has been lost is only realized years later. With my grandmother, it’s sinking in now—nearly two decades later—just how many things she never lived long enough to see. She was around to see my sister graduate from high school but missed the rest of her grandkids’ high school graduations and all of our college graduations. She didn’t get to see two of her grandkids get married and have kids. She didn’t get to see my aunt happily retire to her dream home or see my mom develop a stable new life after a chaotic divorce. If you believe in a traditional religious afterlife, it’s easy to say, “My loved one is up in heaven and is watching everything that’s happening, even if s/he can’t be here to experience it.” But when you don’t believe in an afterlife? That sense of loss gets no easy resolution.
song heard most recently before posting:
The Walk—Imogen Heap
Friday, April 04, 2008
40 years
Quite astoundingly, today marks a whopping 40 years since Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated. And equality-wise, how far have we come since then? Some progress has been made, to be sure, but we still have a long way to go. Not just in terms of chipping away the barriers between blacks and whites but also between different religions (or lack thereof; there is still a tremendous amount of prejudice against atheists), nationalities, and ethnicities. I’ll never understand why equality is such a foreign concept to so many people. I’m not looking for a bland utopia—just a level playing field.
song heard most recently before posting:
Ruhe Sanft—W.A. Mozart
song heard most recently before posting:
Ruhe Sanft—W.A. Mozart
Tuesday, April 01, 2008
white trash weekend
Today is one of those days when I want to take my commute out back and shoot it (it’s drizzly, so 270 is a parking lot and I got to work a half-hour late). I’d like to take my car out back and shoot that as well, as it’s been giving me nothing but grief lately. Over the past two weeks I pumped $2000 into it (a large part of which went into the exhaust) and yet it still failed emissions testing last week. And it still rides like shit. And the check engine light is still on. It’s like this angry little orange eye that glares at me accusingly from the dashboard, acting as though I’m a neglectful car owner or some such nonsense.
I ended up unexpectedly going home to Lebanon this weekend. I learned on Friday morning that Saturday was when a group of us were supposed to have a You Can’t Do That On Television marathon. My old friend Kelly (with whom I’ve recently reconnected on Facebook) somehow managed to snag the entire series on DVD (it was basically a bootleg copy culled from old videotapes), and we were going to sit around and watch the whole shebang. This was going to be awesome, because good god did I obsess over that show back in junior high. Due to some miscommunication, though, I didn’t realize our gathering was supposed to be this weekend, and I couldn’t postpone it because our old friend Kendra was going to be in town for this, and Kendra rarely gets back to Lebanon since she lives several hours away. The only thing on my weekend agenda was working on freelancing, and I was happy to kick it (and my hermit lifestyle) to the curb for a bit.
So on Friday night a group of us went to this sleazy dive bar in Lebanon that attracts drunken scumbags and has white trash karaoke every weekend (and as an added touch of class, they also aired the STD Power Hour on a corner TV: Rock of Love and Flavor of Love). It was great fun, especially since it involved lots of bad karaoke, messy drunkenness, crotch-grabbing, splits, scumbag mating rituals, and the like (none of which was done by me—sorry!), but the downside was the smoke. I’m allergic to cigarette smoke and it doesn’t take long for it turn me into a heaving mess. And now that all Maryland bars and restaurants are smoke-free, I’m especially sensitive to smoke because I’m just not used to it anymore. Breathing through my mouth on Friday night (like some half-evolved beast) helped to keep the worst of the nausea at bay, but my eyes were really burning and my stomach started flipping a bit toward the end.
Shawn, Brad, and I were the only people who drank no alcohol at all, so getting everyone home required some careful maneuvering, but we did succeed in the end. I only got to bed at 3:30am and didn’t get much sleep, which means I felt like crap on Saturday, and the YCDTOTV marathon never took place because we couldn’t get in touch with Kendra and Missy had to sleep off her hangover. However, I did go to Kelly’s house for an hour or so to watch two YCDTOTV episodes, which was really cool. In the afternoon we met up with a buncha friends—a clusterfuck of lesbians and freaks, if you will—and piled in two cars to drive to the roller derby in Lancaster. Missy’s parents met us there as well. It was just as fun as the last derby tournament I attended (in November 2007) and I managed to avoid getting rammed in the teeth by a wayward roller skate while sitting on the same floor where the competition was taking place.
After the derby we went bowling in Lancaster. I’ve only gone bowling, like, twice in my life, so my performance was less than stellar and I lost the first round by a landslide. By the second round I was so angry at losing, I began slamming the ball into the lane, and that did the trick—I bowled two strikes in a row. Basically I swooped in at the last minute and won the round by an impressive lead (and yes, I did resort to using bumpers toward the end, and yes, that’s a form of cheating, but who cares? That old adage about cheaters never prospering is bullshit). My favorite part of bowling was eying the trash around us and also ogling the hot guy bowling next to us. Messy brown hair? Check. Geek-chic glasses? Check. Tall and lanky? Check. Too socially inept to even make eye contact with him, much less say anything? Check.
Also, while bowling we gave ourselves roller derby names, and that’s what appeared on the scorekeeping monitor. Kendra = Ginger Ninja, Travis = Ash Tre (since he can’t quit the cigarettes), Missy = Mennonitemare, Shawn = Shawniqua, me = Jenocide, Ang = Angel of Death, Kelly = Special K, Kelley = BGK (Big Gay Kel), Deana = Deanasaur.
On the way home Kendra got a flat right as we were passing through Mount Gretna. Pitch-black woods surrounded us on all sides, and changing the tire was difficult for Travis because he had virtually no light (only a tiny penlight that Ang was carrying and the light spilling out of the open doors). We had to get out of the car (in case someone hit it when it was on the shoulder) and it was insanely cold for March, so we shivered violently while we stood uselessly on the roadside. Travis was able to change the tire but it took ages because Kendra drives a VW, and, as I learned firsthand last autumn, VWs have those anti-theft tires that are a bitch to change.
So we stood there on the shoulder, teeth clacking together from the cold, and a cop showed up. Then a second cop showed up. They gave us lots of light, which was a help, and chatted with us. They turned out to be amazingly cool. They asked us how we knew each other and where we were from, and we were like, “Well, Travis is from Arkansas, and he and Kendra met while living in Seattle, which is why this car has Washington tags, but they live in Virginia Beach now, and Jen lives in the DC area, and everyone else lives in Lebanon, and most of us met in junior high, but Shawn and Ang are cousins, etc, etc.” Ang mentioned that we had just come from the roller derby and they were so interested in it. They looked at the program and this season’s schedule, asked lots of questions, and were excited when we told them that the girls wear tank tops and shorty shorts. Since Shawn works for the city, they asked if he knew various Lebanon cops, and I piped in, “My uncle used to be the chief of police—Bernard Reilly” and they gushed about how great a guy and a great cop he was and how he died way too soon, and it was so nice because it reminded me about how highly respected he was and how cool a guy he was.
In the middle of this adventure Missy’s car sailed right past us, with everyone inside cackling madly because they thought they were seeing a drug bust. They saw two cop cars, a car with its trunk and all of its doors open, and they saw someone crouched on the ground (that would be Travis, looking for the part of the tire-changing kit that accidentally fell when getting pulled from the trunk), and so they thought they were witnessing some huge drug bust. No, it was only us!
I had to get up early on Sunday morning so I could stop at Wal-Mart (the Lebanon Wal-Mart is apparently and unfortunately the only place left on earth that still sells the cereal to which I’m addicted—Eggo Cinnamon Toast cereal) before meeting up with Papa for breakfast at 9am. Then I headed home and planned to do as much freelancing as possible, but not a lot got done in the end. I had a nice long phone conversation with Heather and then Mom stopped by for a visit and took me out to dinner before heading home to PA, and I was just so freaking exhausted from lack of sleep, I could barely focus on work. Plus I started falling ill with something, and that sure didn’t help my ability to quickly churn out work. My badass immune system is valiantly trying to fight it off, and it may win in the end, but for now I’m really dragging. I ended up going to bed by 10pm the past two nights, which is something that never happens. C’mon, immune system...don’t let me down, girl!
song heard most recently before posting:
Evermore—Neil Diamond
I ended up unexpectedly going home to Lebanon this weekend. I learned on Friday morning that Saturday was when a group of us were supposed to have a You Can’t Do That On Television marathon. My old friend Kelly (with whom I’ve recently reconnected on Facebook) somehow managed to snag the entire series on DVD (it was basically a bootleg copy culled from old videotapes), and we were going to sit around and watch the whole shebang. This was going to be awesome, because good god did I obsess over that show back in junior high. Due to some miscommunication, though, I didn’t realize our gathering was supposed to be this weekend, and I couldn’t postpone it because our old friend Kendra was going to be in town for this, and Kendra rarely gets back to Lebanon since she lives several hours away. The only thing on my weekend agenda was working on freelancing, and I was happy to kick it (and my hermit lifestyle) to the curb for a bit.
So on Friday night a group of us went to this sleazy dive bar in Lebanon that attracts drunken scumbags and has white trash karaoke every weekend (and as an added touch of class, they also aired the STD Power Hour on a corner TV: Rock of Love and Flavor of Love). It was great fun, especially since it involved lots of bad karaoke, messy drunkenness, crotch-grabbing, splits, scumbag mating rituals, and the like (none of which was done by me—sorry!), but the downside was the smoke. I’m allergic to cigarette smoke and it doesn’t take long for it turn me into a heaving mess. And now that all Maryland bars and restaurants are smoke-free, I’m especially sensitive to smoke because I’m just not used to it anymore. Breathing through my mouth on Friday night (like some half-evolved beast) helped to keep the worst of the nausea at bay, but my eyes were really burning and my stomach started flipping a bit toward the end.
Shawn, Brad, and I were the only people who drank no alcohol at all, so getting everyone home required some careful maneuvering, but we did succeed in the end. I only got to bed at 3:30am and didn’t get much sleep, which means I felt like crap on Saturday, and the YCDTOTV marathon never took place because we couldn’t get in touch with Kendra and Missy had to sleep off her hangover. However, I did go to Kelly’s house for an hour or so to watch two YCDTOTV episodes, which was really cool. In the afternoon we met up with a buncha friends—a clusterfuck of lesbians and freaks, if you will—and piled in two cars to drive to the roller derby in Lancaster. Missy’s parents met us there as well. It was just as fun as the last derby tournament I attended (in November 2007) and I managed to avoid getting rammed in the teeth by a wayward roller skate while sitting on the same floor where the competition was taking place.
After the derby we went bowling in Lancaster. I’ve only gone bowling, like, twice in my life, so my performance was less than stellar and I lost the first round by a landslide. By the second round I was so angry at losing, I began slamming the ball into the lane, and that did the trick—I bowled two strikes in a row. Basically I swooped in at the last minute and won the round by an impressive lead (and yes, I did resort to using bumpers toward the end, and yes, that’s a form of cheating, but who cares? That old adage about cheaters never prospering is bullshit). My favorite part of bowling was eying the trash around us and also ogling the hot guy bowling next to us. Messy brown hair? Check. Geek-chic glasses? Check. Tall and lanky? Check. Too socially inept to even make eye contact with him, much less say anything? Check.
Also, while bowling we gave ourselves roller derby names, and that’s what appeared on the scorekeeping monitor. Kendra = Ginger Ninja, Travis = Ash Tre (since he can’t quit the cigarettes), Missy = Mennonitemare, Shawn = Shawniqua, me = Jenocide, Ang = Angel of Death, Kelly = Special K, Kelley = BGK (Big Gay Kel), Deana = Deanasaur.
On the way home Kendra got a flat right as we were passing through Mount Gretna. Pitch-black woods surrounded us on all sides, and changing the tire was difficult for Travis because he had virtually no light (only a tiny penlight that Ang was carrying and the light spilling out of the open doors). We had to get out of the car (in case someone hit it when it was on the shoulder) and it was insanely cold for March, so we shivered violently while we stood uselessly on the roadside. Travis was able to change the tire but it took ages because Kendra drives a VW, and, as I learned firsthand last autumn, VWs have those anti-theft tires that are a bitch to change.
So we stood there on the shoulder, teeth clacking together from the cold, and a cop showed up. Then a second cop showed up. They gave us lots of light, which was a help, and chatted with us. They turned out to be amazingly cool. They asked us how we knew each other and where we were from, and we were like, “Well, Travis is from Arkansas, and he and Kendra met while living in Seattle, which is why this car has Washington tags, but they live in Virginia Beach now, and Jen lives in the DC area, and everyone else lives in Lebanon, and most of us met in junior high, but Shawn and Ang are cousins, etc, etc.” Ang mentioned that we had just come from the roller derby and they were so interested in it. They looked at the program and this season’s schedule, asked lots of questions, and were excited when we told them that the girls wear tank tops and shorty shorts. Since Shawn works for the city, they asked if he knew various Lebanon cops, and I piped in, “My uncle used to be the chief of police—Bernard Reilly” and they gushed about how great a guy and a great cop he was and how he died way too soon, and it was so nice because it reminded me about how highly respected he was and how cool a guy he was.
In the middle of this adventure Missy’s car sailed right past us, with everyone inside cackling madly because they thought they were seeing a drug bust. They saw two cop cars, a car with its trunk and all of its doors open, and they saw someone crouched on the ground (that would be Travis, looking for the part of the tire-changing kit that accidentally fell when getting pulled from the trunk), and so they thought they were witnessing some huge drug bust. No, it was only us!
I had to get up early on Sunday morning so I could stop at Wal-Mart (the Lebanon Wal-Mart is apparently and unfortunately the only place left on earth that still sells the cereal to which I’m addicted—Eggo Cinnamon Toast cereal) before meeting up with Papa for breakfast at 9am. Then I headed home and planned to do as much freelancing as possible, but not a lot got done in the end. I had a nice long phone conversation with Heather and then Mom stopped by for a visit and took me out to dinner before heading home to PA, and I was just so freaking exhausted from lack of sleep, I could barely focus on work. Plus I started falling ill with something, and that sure didn’t help my ability to quickly churn out work. My badass immune system is valiantly trying to fight it off, and it may win in the end, but for now I’m really dragging. I ended up going to bed by 10pm the past two nights, which is something that never happens. C’mon, immune system...don’t let me down, girl!
song heard most recently before posting:
Evermore—Neil Diamond
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Mary, Mary, quite contrary
I go above and beyond having a brown thumb—my thumb is damn near black. I manage to kill every living thing I attempt to grow (even cacti), with the exception of these two sunflowers I planted back in 1983 and 1996, which grew so astoundingly huge—like, there-must-be-a-nuclear-power-plant-around-here huge—that they were kind of alarming. In retrospect, they remind me of this short story I read last year, wherein a nuclear war caused flowers to mutate to the point where they became sentient, bloodthirsty things who killed those unlucky enough to cross their path in the most gruesome ways imaginable.
My black thumb has made me feel somewhat blasé about gardening. I feel like it should interest me, since I really do love nature, but I just never felt its clarion call.
However, that didn’t stop me from attempting to gussy up my first apartment’s balcony with loads of potted flowers. I attempted to turn it into a relaxing little haven, with chairs, a bird feeder, candles, etc. Then everything died and I realized I was living in a ghetto, which made being exposed on the balcony a not-very-wise choice, and I threw up my hands in surrender.
Years later at my Wheaton apartment I tried to grow wildflowers, but not a single bloom appeared. Fortunately, though, the yard already had annuals firmly in place, thanks to my landlord, so without having to do a lick of work, I was able to spend five years enjoying tulips, roses, azaleas, berries, and more.
Now that I’m finally a homeowner with a cute, albeit small, balcony, I decided to resurrect my “little haven” idea from exactly 10 years ago. I am going to attempt, god help me, to grow a wild abundance of flowers. Aside from heather, wildflowers are my favorite, and I especially love when they’re growing side by side in a joyous, clashing cacophony of riotous color, with purple sidling up to orange and pink and red tangoing nearby. Like this pub I photographed in Edinburgh in 2003:
...and this pub I photographed in Bayswater, London, in 2006:
If it’s an utter disaster—a floral graveyard—well, I guess I’ll just switch to fake flowers in the future. But hopefully I’ll have some modicum of success. Aside from the flowers, I plan to buy a bistro table and chairs set, so when it’s not blazing hot, I can hang out on the balcony with a book and a cold drink and savor the flowers (if they actually grow!). I already bought cool strings of carved wooden lights from World Market which I’ll loop around the perimeter of the balcony, and I’m going to set up the lovely rock fountain Heather bought me as a housewarming gift. I have my bird feeder and wind chimes in place, along with the metal and glass spiral thingy I bought in London which twirls alluringly in the breeze. Last, but not least, I’m stealing an idea from an interior design book I own—one that involves making a chandelier out of a multi-pronged tree branch. The chandelier appears in the background of a photo and is never mentioned or explained, but I adore it. It’ll give me an opportunity to burn citronella candles to keep bugs away without having to fill up my little bistro table with rows of candles.
Or course, the whole point of my little haven scheme will be moot if I end up having a dreadful summer with constant rain (not likely) or constant blast-furnace heat and humidity (always a possibility). But, at the very least, I know my cats will love it out there!
song heard most recently before posting:
Dónal Agus Mórag—Altan
My black thumb has made me feel somewhat blasé about gardening. I feel like it should interest me, since I really do love nature, but I just never felt its clarion call.
However, that didn’t stop me from attempting to gussy up my first apartment’s balcony with loads of potted flowers. I attempted to turn it into a relaxing little haven, with chairs, a bird feeder, candles, etc. Then everything died and I realized I was living in a ghetto, which made being exposed on the balcony a not-very-wise choice, and I threw up my hands in surrender.
Years later at my Wheaton apartment I tried to grow wildflowers, but not a single bloom appeared. Fortunately, though, the yard already had annuals firmly in place, thanks to my landlord, so without having to do a lick of work, I was able to spend five years enjoying tulips, roses, azaleas, berries, and more.
Now that I’m finally a homeowner with a cute, albeit small, balcony, I decided to resurrect my “little haven” idea from exactly 10 years ago. I am going to attempt, god help me, to grow a wild abundance of flowers. Aside from heather, wildflowers are my favorite, and I especially love when they’re growing side by side in a joyous, clashing cacophony of riotous color, with purple sidling up to orange and pink and red tangoing nearby. Like this pub I photographed in Edinburgh in 2003:
...and this pub I photographed in Bayswater, London, in 2006:
If it’s an utter disaster—a floral graveyard—well, I guess I’ll just switch to fake flowers in the future. But hopefully I’ll have some modicum of success. Aside from the flowers, I plan to buy a bistro table and chairs set, so when it’s not blazing hot, I can hang out on the balcony with a book and a cold drink and savor the flowers (if they actually grow!). I already bought cool strings of carved wooden lights from World Market which I’ll loop around the perimeter of the balcony, and I’m going to set up the lovely rock fountain Heather bought me as a housewarming gift. I have my bird feeder and wind chimes in place, along with the metal and glass spiral thingy I bought in London which twirls alluringly in the breeze. Last, but not least, I’m stealing an idea from an interior design book I own—one that involves making a chandelier out of a multi-pronged tree branch. The chandelier appears in the background of a photo and is never mentioned or explained, but I adore it. It’ll give me an opportunity to burn citronella candles to keep bugs away without having to fill up my little bistro table with rows of candles.
Or course, the whole point of my little haven scheme will be moot if I end up having a dreadful summer with constant rain (not likely) or constant blast-furnace heat and humidity (always a possibility). But, at the very least, I know my cats will love it out there!
song heard most recently before posting:
Dónal Agus Mórag—Altan
Thursday, March 13, 2008
questions and answers
There’s really nothing to write, so I’m just going to post another one of those questionnaire thingies for the hell of it. I don’t even remember where I got this thing!
1. Do you like cheese? Oh yes. I wish I knew how to quit it. (I’m a vegetarian who’d like to become a vegan.)
2. Have you ever smoked heroin? No!
3. Do you own a gun? No, and I have no particular desire to own one, although I wouldn’t be adverse to firing one—just once, to see what it’s like—on a firing range.
4. Your favorite song? I have loads of faves. Right now it’s a four-way tie between two Fionn Regan songs and two Johnathan Rice songs.
5. Do you get nervous before doctor appointments? Not really, no.
6. What do you think of hot dogs? I’m a vegetarian, so I only eat the veggie version. I loved the real version when I was a kid, but now that I know what’s in them? I wouldn’t touch them even if I weren’t a vegetarian!
7. What’s your favorite Christmas song? A tie between Greensleeves and Carol of the Bells. Other runner-ups include: O Come Emmanuel, Do You Hear What I Hear?, and God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
8. What do you prefer to drink in the morning? A gigantic mug of coffee with lots of sugar in it.
9. Can you do pushups? Hell no!
WHERE THE HELL IS 10? I dunno!
11. What’s your favorite piece of jewelry? It’s hard to pick one particular favorite. I’m crazy for my Finnish Aarikka necklaces and the necklaces Annida made for me. I like the necklaces I made out of old ’80s earrings, too. If I absolutely had to pick only one favorite it would probably be the mosaic pin and bracelet set my grandfather bought for my grandmother in Florence during WWII.
12. Favorite hobby? Photography. And worrying. Okay, that’s not actually a favorite. So I’ll say vegging while trying not to worry.
13. What is your secret weapon to lure in the opposite sex? Wait…you mean “repel the opposite sex,” right? Because that’s apparently the only thing I’m capable of doing.
14. Do you have A.D.D.? No, but my antidepressants do affect my concentration levels.
15. What one trait do you hate about yourself? I’m so fucking lazy. Physically, I hate my uneven eyes and my forehead dent. And my gut and thighs.
16. Middle Name: Lynne
17. Name 3 thoughts at this exact moment...
1. Where do I need to go after work tonight?
2. I’m thirsty.
3. Where the hell’s Julie?
18. Name the last 3 things you have bought?
1. Shit at a party store to decorate Julie’s cubicle.
2. Lunch at Red Robin (a Santa Fe veggie burger and side salad—yum!)
3. fabric and thread at Jo-Ann Fabric
19. Name 3 drinks you regularly drink?
1. water
2. coffee
3. apple juice
20. Current worry right now? The upheavals at work.
21. Current hate? My unhappiness and inertia.
22. Favorite place to be? Home or London.
23. How did you bring in the New Year? 2008, you mean? I went home to Lebanon, to a small gathering at Shawn’s house, and then we walked over to the Bologna Drop.
24. Where would you like to go? More places than I can count. Next on my agenda: Eastern Europe and a second trip to Iceland.
25. Name three people who will complete this and return? I’m not sending it to anyone, so the point is moot!
26. Do you own slippers? Yes—charcoal gray bootie slippers with rubber bottoms. They’re starting to fall apart.
27. What shirt are you wearing? Just a regular gray short-sleeved shirt from Target.
28. Do you like sleeping on satin sheets? Not really. I mean, they’re OK, but I prefer cotton with a high thread count.
29. Can you whistle? Nope!
30. Favorite color? plum
31. Would you be a pirate? Naw—I’m through with my thieving ways.
32. What songs do you sing in the shower? I usually don’t sing in the shower. I try to get in and out as quickly as possible!
33. Favorite girl’s name? Right now, Freyja.
34. Favorite boy’s name? Right now, Finn/Finley.
35. What’s in your pocket right now? nothing
36. Last thing that made you laugh? I went out to lunch with my coworkers Deborah and Nathaniel today, and several of their work gossip and pop culture comments made me laugh.
37. Best bed sheets as a child? I just had plain old white cotton sheets—nothing to celebrate. After a while the sheets got pilly, which I hated, so any sheets that weren’t pilly were considered the best.
38. Worst injury you’ve ever had? Hmm…probably when I accidentally dropped a rusty iron fence fragment which, as it fell, slid down my leg and ripped it open. The pain was excruciating, I had to get a tetanus shot, and nearly 10 years later, I still have a scar! Runner-up would probably be when I dropped a glass bottle full of water on my toe in college. The pain was beyond description and I couldn’t walk properly for weeks. My nail turned black and fell off, too. Nasty! Oh, and when I was a kid, I got run over by a neighbor on his bike when we were playing Chicken, and it ripped my knees open damn near to the bone (or so it seemed). I couldn’t kneel in church for a while because of the injury, and I was so worried that I’d go to hell because of it!
39. Do you love where you live? Well, I don’t like the location, even though it’s a really nice location. I wanted to stay closer to DC, but I just couldn’t afford it. As for the condo itself…yeah, it’s a great condo. Not my dream house, but I love it for now!
40. How many TVs do you have in your house? two
41. Who is your loudest friend? Antoinette, probably!
42. Who is your most silent friend? Uhhh…do I even have any who are silent?
43. Does someone have a crush on you? I highly doubt it.
44. Do you wish on shooting stars? I would if I ever saw one.
45. What is your favorite book? It’s hard to say, because I love so many books. If I had to pick only one, it would probably be Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale.
46. What is your favorite candy? There are several: Andes mints, Yorkie bars, Cadbury Mini Eggs, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Hershey Peanut Butter Kisses, and gumdrops.
47. Favorite sports team? None—I hate sports!
48. What song do you want played at your funeral? A bunch! I have a whole mix of them! These days my biggest jones is to have Annida sing Con te partiro. She doesn’t want to, because it’s a tenor song, so I’ll have to haunt her until she relents.
49. What were you doing 12 AM last night? Sleeping!
50. What was the first thing you thought of when you woke up? I don’t think anything when I wake up; I just groan and then stumble out of bed to start the rote movements of my morning (piss, put the kettle on, feed the cats, etc).
song heard most recently before posting:
Devil Inside—INXS
1. Do you like cheese? Oh yes. I wish I knew how to quit it. (I’m a vegetarian who’d like to become a vegan.)
2. Have you ever smoked heroin? No!
3. Do you own a gun? No, and I have no particular desire to own one, although I wouldn’t be adverse to firing one—just once, to see what it’s like—on a firing range.
4. Your favorite song? I have loads of faves. Right now it’s a four-way tie between two Fionn Regan songs and two Johnathan Rice songs.
5. Do you get nervous before doctor appointments? Not really, no.
6. What do you think of hot dogs? I’m a vegetarian, so I only eat the veggie version. I loved the real version when I was a kid, but now that I know what’s in them? I wouldn’t touch them even if I weren’t a vegetarian!
7. What’s your favorite Christmas song? A tie between Greensleeves and Carol of the Bells. Other runner-ups include: O Come Emmanuel, Do You Hear What I Hear?, and God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
8. What do you prefer to drink in the morning? A gigantic mug of coffee with lots of sugar in it.
9. Can you do pushups? Hell no!
WHERE THE HELL IS 10? I dunno!
11. What’s your favorite piece of jewelry? It’s hard to pick one particular favorite. I’m crazy for my Finnish Aarikka necklaces and the necklaces Annida made for me. I like the necklaces I made out of old ’80s earrings, too. If I absolutely had to pick only one favorite it would probably be the mosaic pin and bracelet set my grandfather bought for my grandmother in Florence during WWII.
12. Favorite hobby? Photography. And worrying. Okay, that’s not actually a favorite. So I’ll say vegging while trying not to worry.
13. What is your secret weapon to lure in the opposite sex? Wait…you mean “repel the opposite sex,” right? Because that’s apparently the only thing I’m capable of doing.
14. Do you have A.D.D.? No, but my antidepressants do affect my concentration levels.
15. What one trait do you hate about yourself? I’m so fucking lazy. Physically, I hate my uneven eyes and my forehead dent. And my gut and thighs.
16. Middle Name: Lynne
17. Name 3 thoughts at this exact moment...
1. Where do I need to go after work tonight?
2. I’m thirsty.
3. Where the hell’s Julie?
18. Name the last 3 things you have bought?
1. Shit at a party store to decorate Julie’s cubicle.
2. Lunch at Red Robin (a Santa Fe veggie burger and side salad—yum!)
3. fabric and thread at Jo-Ann Fabric
19. Name 3 drinks you regularly drink?
1. water
2. coffee
3. apple juice
20. Current worry right now? The upheavals at work.
21. Current hate? My unhappiness and inertia.
22. Favorite place to be? Home or London.
23. How did you bring in the New Year? 2008, you mean? I went home to Lebanon, to a small gathering at Shawn’s house, and then we walked over to the Bologna Drop.
24. Where would you like to go? More places than I can count. Next on my agenda: Eastern Europe and a second trip to Iceland.
25. Name three people who will complete this and return? I’m not sending it to anyone, so the point is moot!
26. Do you own slippers? Yes—charcoal gray bootie slippers with rubber bottoms. They’re starting to fall apart.
27. What shirt are you wearing? Just a regular gray short-sleeved shirt from Target.
28. Do you like sleeping on satin sheets? Not really. I mean, they’re OK, but I prefer cotton with a high thread count.
29. Can you whistle? Nope!
30. Favorite color? plum
31. Would you be a pirate? Naw—I’m through with my thieving ways.
32. What songs do you sing in the shower? I usually don’t sing in the shower. I try to get in and out as quickly as possible!
33. Favorite girl’s name? Right now, Freyja.
34. Favorite boy’s name? Right now, Finn/Finley.
35. What’s in your pocket right now? nothing
36. Last thing that made you laugh? I went out to lunch with my coworkers Deborah and Nathaniel today, and several of their work gossip and pop culture comments made me laugh.
37. Best bed sheets as a child? I just had plain old white cotton sheets—nothing to celebrate. After a while the sheets got pilly, which I hated, so any sheets that weren’t pilly were considered the best.
38. Worst injury you’ve ever had? Hmm…probably when I accidentally dropped a rusty iron fence fragment which, as it fell, slid down my leg and ripped it open. The pain was excruciating, I had to get a tetanus shot, and nearly 10 years later, I still have a scar! Runner-up would probably be when I dropped a glass bottle full of water on my toe in college. The pain was beyond description and I couldn’t walk properly for weeks. My nail turned black and fell off, too. Nasty! Oh, and when I was a kid, I got run over by a neighbor on his bike when we were playing Chicken, and it ripped my knees open damn near to the bone (or so it seemed). I couldn’t kneel in church for a while because of the injury, and I was so worried that I’d go to hell because of it!
39. Do you love where you live? Well, I don’t like the location, even though it’s a really nice location. I wanted to stay closer to DC, but I just couldn’t afford it. As for the condo itself…yeah, it’s a great condo. Not my dream house, but I love it for now!
40. How many TVs do you have in your house? two
41. Who is your loudest friend? Antoinette, probably!
42. Who is your most silent friend? Uhhh…do I even have any who are silent?
43. Does someone have a crush on you? I highly doubt it.
44. Do you wish on shooting stars? I would if I ever saw one.
45. What is your favorite book? It’s hard to say, because I love so many books. If I had to pick only one, it would probably be Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale.
46. What is your favorite candy? There are several: Andes mints, Yorkie bars, Cadbury Mini Eggs, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Hershey Peanut Butter Kisses, and gumdrops.
47. Favorite sports team? None—I hate sports!
48. What song do you want played at your funeral? A bunch! I have a whole mix of them! These days my biggest jones is to have Annida sing Con te partiro. She doesn’t want to, because it’s a tenor song, so I’ll have to haunt her until she relents.
49. What were you doing 12 AM last night? Sleeping!
50. What was the first thing you thought of when you woke up? I don’t think anything when I wake up; I just groan and then stumble out of bed to start the rote movements of my morning (piss, put the kettle on, feed the cats, etc).
song heard most recently before posting:
Devil Inside—INXS
Monday, March 03, 2008
I’m still alive
I’ve been M.I.A. lately, mostly because of my very heavy freelancing schedule. Everything else has been shoved to the back burner as I attempt to keep about 10 balls in the air at the same time. I did manage to cap off Saturday evening with a nice dinner at Union Jack’s pub in Bethesda with my friend Susan—after working a good nine hours on-site at my old office—but aside from that, it has been work, work, work.
Mentally/emotionally, there has also been a bit of…errr…shall I say turmoil. There are some work issues, some insecurity and paranoia issues, some speculation that perhaps depression is managing to leak through cracks that may or may not be developing in my Effexor wall, and so on and so forth. I won’t go into specifics here—they’re being saved for my journal and maybe an elite corps of my closest friends, if I end up feeling like I need to talk to someone who can actually talk back to me.
I need to focus on something solid and positive, so I’m turning my attention to traveling, which is really the only thing for which I still feel a modicum of passion these days. Domestic travel is essential; I want to visit David in Chicago, Angela in North Carolina, and Annida in Georgia. And I want to figure out a way to squeeze in a budget visit to Richard in York, England.
Biggest of all is the trip for which I began saving back in October. Originally this was supposed to be my spend-three-weeks-driving-around-Iceland trip with Missy, but that may take longer than expected to accomplish, due to budgetary constraints. So I emailed Richard and asked if he would be interested in revisiting Eastern Europe with me in two years or so. We worked well as travel partners during our 2005 trip and I’d love to explore new territory with him. What I said to him was this:
At this point all I can do is continue setting aside money in my travel fund and wait for a response from Richard. There are lots of places where I’m willing to travel alone, but Eastern Europe ain’t one of them. Besides, as much as I love being alone, traveling with a friend can be a rewarding way to add more juice to the travel experience.
And hopefully, in the meanwhile, I won’t completely lose my fucking marbles. Hang in there, Effexor, baby—just hang in there.
song heard most recently before posting:
If I Fall—Aqualung
Mentally/emotionally, there has also been a bit of…errr…shall I say turmoil. There are some work issues, some insecurity and paranoia issues, some speculation that perhaps depression is managing to leak through cracks that may or may not be developing in my Effexor wall, and so on and so forth. I won’t go into specifics here—they’re being saved for my journal and maybe an elite corps of my closest friends, if I end up feeling like I need to talk to someone who can actually talk back to me.
I need to focus on something solid and positive, so I’m turning my attention to traveling, which is really the only thing for which I still feel a modicum of passion these days. Domestic travel is essential; I want to visit David in Chicago, Angela in North Carolina, and Annida in Georgia. And I want to figure out a way to squeeze in a budget visit to Richard in York, England.
Biggest of all is the trip for which I began saving back in October. Originally this was supposed to be my spend-three-weeks-driving-around-Iceland trip with Missy, but that may take longer than expected to accomplish, due to budgetary constraints. So I emailed Richard and asked if he would be interested in revisiting Eastern Europe with me in two years or so. We worked well as travel partners during our 2005 trip and I’d love to explore new territory with him. What I said to him was this:
What I’m most keen on doing is visiting Krakow (with a side trip to Auschwitz) and Kiev (with a side trip to Chernobyl). Then I thought I’d try to work one or two more destinations into the mix. There are so many other options that are appealing: Prague, Budapest, Romania (Cluj and the countryside [including Dracula’s castle and the Transylvanian Alps] moreso than Bucharest), Vilnius, Riga, and Dubrovnik, to name but a few.
All have their advantages. For example, Dubrovnik is said to offer a spectacular coastal views on top of a beautifully preserved Old Town and ancient city walls that “are among the best preserved and most attractive on this planet.”
Riga has medieval architecture and cobblestone streets out the wazoo, as well as a Museum of the Occupation and other sites devoted to the memory of Soviet and Nazi victims.
Vilnius is stuffed with spectacular Baroque architecture, has a statue of Frank Zappa (!), provides access to the fabulous-beyond-words Stalin World, and could offer a side trip to Kaunas, which looks like a beautifully historic place and has some cool-looking destinations: the Devil Museum, the Medicine and Pharmacy Museum, the Museum for the Blind, and the Museum of Exiles and Political Prisoners.
Meanwhile, Kiev has some Soviet-themed restaurants like the ones we hit in St. Petersburg, and these two activities are also available:
Drive the Soviet party boss’ car
To feel as a Soviet party boss, call Ukrainian Express travel at tel. 536 12 37 to rent Chaika or ZIM brand of a limousine-class car. In the past, Chaikas could only be purchased by the Soviet communist party or government offices, and were not available to the members of public (who probably couldn’t afford one anyway). Chaikas were one step down from the more prestigious ZIM limousines, and were issued to the elite few top professionals, party officials, top scientists, academics, and other celebrities. For their massive size Chaikas were also purchased in some quantity by the KGB. Nikita Kruschev, although entitled to a ZIM, was known to prefer Chaikas, and kept Chaika M13 at his summer dacha.
Drive the Soviet tank
14 years ago, after obtaining independence, as part of former Soviet Union’ military heritage Ukraine received the most complex military bases with the most advanced armament of that time. If you feel enthusiastic about monstorus tanks and roaring high-powered military vehicles, you may as a crew member participate in a real test drive of an old and modern machines, even the most exotic ones, at one of the Ukrainian Army’s proving grounds. You may also take part in the real combat shooting exercises on one of the real shooting ranges of the former Soviet Army. www.ukrainianexpress.com, www.alaris.com.ua.
Wow, now that would be hot. “What’d you do on your summer vacation?” “Oh, I drove a Soviet tank, engaged in some combat shooting exercises, and went to Chernobyl.”
At this point all I can do is continue setting aside money in my travel fund and wait for a response from Richard. There are lots of places where I’m willing to travel alone, but Eastern Europe ain’t one of them. Besides, as much as I love being alone, traveling with a friend can be a rewarding way to add more juice to the travel experience.
And hopefully, in the meanwhile, I won’t completely lose my fucking marbles. Hang in there, Effexor, baby—just hang in there.
song heard most recently before posting:
If I Fall—Aqualung
Thursday, February 14, 2008
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.)
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.)
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