August 2008 Archives

So I'm at the beach Sunday afternoon with my friend Batman and her husband Mr. Science, and she asks, out of the blue: "How you manage to imbibe enough calories? With all the biking, I mean?"

"Simple," I said. "I eat six meals a day."

Now, this is unremarkable, except for the fact that I was wondering, last night at about 3 am, as I finished my sixth, why it is that I always seem to be running out of groceries. Well, duhhhhhh. I am basically eating for two people. I mean, if the average human eats three meals a day, and I am eating six, well, there you have it.

It's not that the meals themselves are especially large. They're average-sized, for a person of my height and gender. There are just a lot of them, and I guess it adds up.

I am not really sure why I am telling you this. It just struck me as funny. I keep getting frustrated by things like eating right before I leave for a bike ride, riding to a friend's new apartment (about 40 minutes away), and then being hungry again within ten minutes of having arrived. Sigh.

Oh well. I am currently replete with spaghetti, so it's all happy satiation in the vicinity of Lizbon's tummy at the moment. Though by the time I am done writing this, it may well be snacktime.

Anyway, to leap from the trivial to the slightly less trivial, the other thing that's been on my mind is this:

I wonder if getting older carries with it a higher tolerance for relationships that are less strictly defined. I have wondered this several times in recent weeks, as I keep coming up against examples of undefined relationships in my own life, which give me greater enjoyment and cause less consternation that I would have expected.

For example, I called Boywich last night because I was feeling blue, and he is still (often) my go-to guy when I feel that way. Sometimes it makes me feel better to talk to him, and sometimes it doesn't, but that's okay. Our relationship would look very odd to an outsider. Sometimes it looks that way to us, too. But we both appreciate it, even treasure it.

We love each other. We aren't exactly romantic, and we're not in love anymore, but we care deeply and differently for each other than we do for our other friends. And I'm cool with that. In fact, it's really nice.

Example #2: Redhead #1. We are certainly friends. And I am quite friendly with his girlfriend, whom I met recently, and whom I quite like. And yet we were, until his girlfriend arrived on the scene, highly flirtatious. The kind of flirtatious where you realize, at some point, that people you both know are talking about you, and wondering if there's something going on.

There's nothing going on, and there never has been. And won't be, because I don't get involved with other people's boyfriends. But I have really enjoyed the flirtatiousness, the fact that there's that energy between us, even if it will never be acted upon. In years past, that kind of thing would have driven me crazy. Now, I like it. It's as if it's a spice, something that adds a little extra enjoyment to being around him.

Example #3: da blonde. A guy I dated for a few months, then stopped seeing, then slept with once casually, then didn't see again for several months, then recently saw in a platonic context, and then had text sex with. Could it get more nebulous than that?

In the bad old days, I would never have wanted to see him again unless I could see him. Or I wouldn't have still been attracted to him, once I realized he wasn't right for me. Or something.

Now, though, it's lovely and fun. I have a playmate, whom I only see now and then, when one or the other of us feels like getting in touch. It's light, and I find that enjoyable.

I find, too, that I am able to enjoy the "crush" stage of things a lot more. It used to simply be painful. Heck, it's been simply painful at various times and with various people this year. But I don't know - I think I am growing more open to the permutations of love, lust, attraction, and everything in between. It's like enjoying the whole process instead of just racing to the orgasm. I am being metaphorical, mind you.

Some nights I just want to eat a Frankendinner, ya know?

You know what I mean. A little bit of this and a little bit of that, and none of it adding up to a cohesive whole, but somehow that's what I want anyway.

It occurred to me, after eating the veggie hot dogs and the zucchini in garlic and olive oil and the tomato and basil salad, that we're always expecting life to be like a story is. To have a beginning, a middle, and an end - and more than that - a thrust, a meaning, a punchline - something to pull it all together.

We expect it to be like spaghetti and meatballs, not like a Frankenmeal.

But it feels a lot more like my little plates. A little of this, and a little of that, things that taste different, songs that don't go together. Milkshakes before the meal, pancakes for dinner, chocolate in the morning, and fruit with vinegar. It's weird. And it makes very little sense, except in snippets, flashes of insight that peek through at us like the stars winking here and there in the heavy backlit blanket of a NYC night.

Okay, it's pop quiz time. What is wrong with this picture?

a) The hot boy in the foreground is not offering Lizbon candy.
b) The fracking road is in the sky.
c) Lizbon is not at the front of the line (for either boy-candy or road returning to earth).
d) All of the above.

Yes, it's time for everyone's favorite annoying/amusing game - waiting for the drawbridge to come down at rush hour. As usual when I am waiting for a drawbridge (which is admittedly not often), I was torn between being frustrated at having to wait so long and tickled by the fact that my bicycle journey was being delayed by the need for the road to come back down from the sky.

I watched the little tug push the big flat barge through, and thought about how I forget that NY is a working harbor.

Then I rode on my merry way, slightly too oblivious to traffic craziness for my taste (I had a mild migraine and was not at my best). Later, I dined with several young boys, as is my wont, met Miz Fury and her beau for a couple of Campari and tonics, and spent the rest of the evening trading increasingly flirtatious and X-rated texts with the boy formerly known as the blonde.

'Cause that's how I roll, baby.

Once you start down the Dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny. - Yoda.

Put it down to a sudden onslaught of girly bleeding. I have resisted and resisted and resisted. I bought the French press just in case I had a coffee-drinking visitor, months ago. The boy in question vanished before I could use it on him, and there it sat, in the upper cupboard, looking sexy.

All glass and stainless, small, sleek, batting its little French mesh at me. Drat the thing.

I'd also bought a pound of this. (The Hair Bender - do you even have to ask?)

And again, there it sat, well-sealed against air, in the fridge.

Every night it calls to me and I say, no, it's late, I'm not drinking you. And then today I crawled wearily out of bed at 1pm. Okay 2pm, but that was after doing my exercises. Padded into the kitchen. Threw some bras in the sink to soak. (The ones that got hailed on and danced all night in, respectively - I figured they were due.)

Fed the yowling feline.

And looked up into the cupboard, where she sat, twinkling at me. "Lizzzzzbon.....Psssssst. You know you want it."

Yeah, I do, but "It" is usually some glamorous and flouting-the-laws-of-physics escapade involving multiple young boys.

"You can put hot milk in it."

Yeah, honey, I can put hot milk on young boys, too.

"But they are not in your cupboard. And I am."

Well, I can't really argue with that, can I?

Everyone from doctors to gypsy fortune tellers have warned me that coffee is just not good for me. I've got a sensitive stomach, and my brain doesn't respond well to drugs. I had a terrible time, years ago, kicking an only-mild daily coffee habit, and since then I've really just stuck to green tea, and that not even daily.

But:

My redheads are gone - one's moving away, and the other's got a girlfriend. And my new bike is still waiting for all its parts to arrive. And I've recently come to the conclusion that I am not up to letting anyone get closer to me than a safe biking distance. And....look how pretty it looks in that nice big purple cup.

It tastes just the way I remember it, too. And smells even better.

And now, yes, my stomach hurts. Sigh. Perhaps I ought to just find a new crop of boys.

After a little shameless idea pilfering, followed by judicious googling, I have come up with a list.

What Lizbon needs: (according to the bots)

My agenda needs updating.
My process needs a fresh start.
My referendum debate needs more passion.
The Irish rejection of my treaty has sent shockwaves.
Ireland needs to hold a second referendum about me.
I need a drummer.
And the Irish Times, when reporting about me, needs to use new crayons.

If you ask me, on the other hand:

I could use a 46-tooth chainring, rather than the 45-tooth ones I received. No biggie, but it's a preference.
I could use a good roll in the hay with a good bad boy, preferably at least 15 years my junior, with no significant consequences to either party.
I could use a few days at a nice beach, and a small drink with a big paper umbrella on it.
I could use a nice long bike ride, maybe to Coney Island, maybe with the blonde. It's all platonic now, with him, you know. All fine.
I could use to never have to go on another awful, dreadful, ooky, dull, heebie-jeebie inspiring date.

I could use a little candy. A little sugar in my bowl.

"Meow." That last is from Kitwich. Who knows what the hell she wants?

As humans (operating in little isolated islands of awareness), it's often hard to believe we have much impact on others, even those we know well and see often.

I was having a very interesting conversation this evening, with a friend with whom I often get into such conversations, because we are both built that way.

He said something to the effect that he thinks he's very selfish because he has trouble remembering things that don't directly affect him. I told him that I don't think he's selfish at all (he's not), and that being selfish is about not being interested in or caring about anybody but oneself, rather than a lack of remembering the details of things other people have told you.

Anyway, that's slightly beside the point. I do think, though, that it's very hard, in some ways, to imagine the world beyond our mental four walls. We all have the George Bailey syndrome to a certain extent.

So I find it interesting that a chalked message on a Portland sidewalk so affected two knitters of that city that they posted photos of it on their respective blogs.

I've been chewing on something the last few days, and it's coming into flower as a full-fledged theory, I think - or close to it. It's one of those based-on-personal experience (and observation) theories that may or may not be applicable to the wider world of humans. But I suspect there's something in it.

Talking to a friend the other day who was puzzled over why two of his female friends had gotten offended by something he'd said, in jest - something they absolutely knew was in jest and did not reflect his views at all.

And I said to him that it might be because they are young - in their early/mid-20s. And he said, "But I'm that age, and I don't get offended by those things."

"But you are a boy."

My theory is this: that women view things very seriously, in deadly earnest, in their early adulthood, and tend to grow more playful as they get older. Whereas, young men start out playful and grow more serious.

Well, that was my theory up until that point. Mulling it around in my head a few more days, and I think I've found out why. It has to do with one's perception of time. Or rather, with what kind of time one is focused on. Girls set their sights on their future lives - on imagining them, and gathering the bricks to build them.

Boys, I think, focus much more on the present - on having fun, on being light, and footloose and fancy free.

Later on (sometimes much later), men begin to feel that it's time for them to "settle down," and live in a more finished, subdued, responsible kind of way. To become what used to be called a "family man."

Women - well, I don't really know about all women, or to be fair even about most women - but in my own case at least, I find that my focus is so much on the present, on today, on this moment, this hour, this stroke of the pedal, that view over the bridge, this raincloud about to perhaps dump the weight of the Hudson River on me, that I can scarcely plan a Friday night.

I don't want to schedule anything. I don't want to decide much of anything - beyond, perhaps, what to eat for dinner (though I don't want to have to shop for it, either).

What I do want to do is play. Relax. Smile. Look at the sun (when it's out, which isn't often lately).

And this, I think, is why I feel so happy being around young boys. We are alike, in a way - both brimming with hormones and energy and impatience and the desire to bounce ourselves off the walls of the world, or better - to leap right the hell over them, executing a perfect wheelie in mid-air on the way down.

(What photograph could possibly go with that? Nothing I've taken, because I've been too busy doing.)

A new set of handlebars, choosing rims, having my pedal threads retapped.

Flirting outrageously (redhead, natch). A couple of new dates in the works (non-redheads - well, one of them is in fact redheaded, but is not one of my fair redheaded friends).

A ride in a monsoon. A lovely cool ride the next day.

A thought about what I'd do if I were given another 40 years of life (just now), a thought about what death is, a thought that it's really best not to think such thoughts.

A list written to a boy I'll likely never meet. The world exists so much in the unwritten category these days - letters on a screen but never on a page.

I watched a documentary on the retrieval of a famous pirate ship wreck, and the objects they pulled up - the coins that used to be cut into eight pieces (yep, "pieces of eight"), a boy's shoe with a piece of his legbone still caught in it after 300 years. The cannon. More than 60 of them: English, French, and Spanish. The captain, a legendary dandy. The crew, run as a democracy, with even a primitive form of health insurance - they got paid for missing limbs.

My friends, pirates themselves, in one way or another, braving many, many dangers to flit in and out of traffic, delivering other people's packages for pittances - more money for faster riding. Bold, ignoring the laws of physics and the push of fear. Beautiful, strong, dirty, admirable, trash-talking, fiercely loyal, strangely kind.

That bit of knitting is a new hat, to go under my winter helmet. Yarn: Bought at Rhinebeck last fall, hand-dyed by a woman whom I met. The most glorious irislike colours. Colours is prettier with a "u," if you ask me.

Apparently there is an interview meme going 'round, whereby the blogger interviews her/his spouse regarding his/her feelings about her/his knitting activities, and knowledge of knitting terms. Having no spouse or even remote equivalent, I have decided to interview Kitwich instead.

Below is our interview, translated for your reading ease.

Girlwich: Has my knitting in public ever embarrassed you?
Kitwich: You never let me go out in public.

Girlwich: Do you know my favorite kind of yarn?
Kitwich: I know my favorite kind of yarn. Malabrigo.
Girlwich: Yeah, that's mine, too.

Girlwich: Can you name another blog?
Kitwich: No, but I can type something on yours. Here, let me walk on the keyboard.

Girlwich: Do you mind that I want to check out yarn stores everywhere we go?
Kitwich: See that first question. We don't go anywhere. You go out on that damn bike and leave me all alone to pine in the window. See me pining? Where's my catnip? I deserve catnip after such a long day of pining.

Girlwich: Do you understand the importance of a swatch?
Kitwich: I understand that it's tasty. But I really prefer the work-in-progress because it has those nice dangly ends.

Girlwich: What exactly is a swatch?
Kitwich. Yawn.

Girlwich: Do you read the blog?
Kitwich: No, but I write on it sometimes. xftrytfv. See? There. I just wrote something nice for you. Now gimme some catnip. Or milk. Milk is good, too.

Girlwich: Have you ever left a comment?
Kitwich: Um, hello. I comment all the time. Don't you hear me? Geez. What bad hearing you humans have.

Girlwich: Do you think the house would be cleaner if I didn't knit?
Kitwich: I think my litter box would be cleaner if you didn't knit. Or bike. Or think about boys.

Girlwich: Is there anything you would like to add in closing?
Kitwich: Yes. That Malabrigo looks tasty. I'm going to abscond with it now. And I should definitely get some milk and catnip after this blasted interview.

Turns out there is something I can do. When the going gets tough and terrible, the friends of the tough make cookies for them.

And deliver them by bicycle. Yes, Claudia, I will be counting it in the weekly BAT trip tally.

Cookies apparently have medicinal properties. Who knew?

The world is a mess, and I just need to...rule it. - Dr. Horrible

Sitting here in the construction site (aka. my apartment), with the cat determinedly stalking some manner of flying thing (I am afraid to look; I dearly hope it's a bird), and waiting for the damn tea to steep so I can wake the hell up, I wonder where god went wrong.

Note that I do not capitalize, because a) I hate that word, and b) I am uncertain as to the nature of this creature's existence.

It's not that I'm an atheist, exactly, but, in the words of the immortal Inigo Montoya, "I do not think that word means what you think it means." Not that there is a specific "you" intended here.

And then at this exact moment, Nina Simone sings, "Sinnerman, you ought to be prayin'."

Yeah yeah.

I wasn't intending to talk about this at all, mind you. I was just going to put up some photos.

I guess what I think, though, is that we are here for various reasons known only (and occasionally, at that) to ourselves, and it's up to us to glean meaning out of our lives. I have a clue as to my reasons for being here, as I imagine most people do. But the terrifying and sad things that happen to people while they're here are as mysterious as they ever were.

I like movies that tackle this question, even (sometimes) the ones that do it ham-handedly. I've had disagreements over the movie Contact, for example. Boywich thinks it's rather silly (though he'll watch it with me), and I like it and can't especially articulate why. Sure, some of the characters are too black and white; it departs from Carl Sagan's book in some significant ways, and yet I like it.

And I don't think it's solely to do with the fact that I can watch almost anything Jodie Foster does because I like that gleam of intelligence in her sharp blue eyes.

I think it's actually the earnestness of the thing. It's so like Carl, for one, and like me, for another.

One thing I admire about Carl (yes, i know the verb ought to be past-tense, but I still admire him in the present tense, even though he is not himself in the present tense) is his lack of pussyfooting. He loves science, he loves the big questions, and he wants to share these things with Everyone.

I've been known to pussyfoot on occasion, to stick my toe in the sand and pretend lukewarmness when actually I am standing in a furnace like Liz. I guess I am working away from that.

But I don't see why caring about something should be cause for embarrassment. A friend of mine recently proclaimed that it's now cool to be obsessed with something. I don't know that he's right. Maybe it's cool to be obsessed with something material. But the very word "cool" gives the lie to the idea that being impassioned is ever going to be cool. Just look at how men react when they see you actually feeling something about them.

Everyone says they are looking for a passionate person, and one who will be passionate about them, but in the moment of seeing it, they realize they don't want it. It makes them nervous - even when it's purely physical passion. Honestly. I've seen it time and time again.

Real feeling makes people edgy. Does it remind them that we are actually here, that these are really our lives, that we might actually connect with one another? And does that, in turn, remind them that this is it, and it means something, because we are all going to die, and that very much sooner than we realize?

I was wondering where I was going with this, because I hadn't thought of anything in particular when I sat down, just that I had some photos to put up, and I just went with the stream to see where it led. Wondering, perhaps, if it had anything to do with death. Thought so.

Again I tried to take pictures from the bike for you, and again I saw beautiful images - a graffiti-covered plaque on the bridge, all blues and blacks; the Domino Sugar factory on the Brooklyn side, bathed in golden light - and yet I didn't want to stop. I told myself I'd take some, walking, on my way to the bar with the friend I was going to meet, but then she wasn't feeling up to going out (she's recovering from surgery), so I didn't take any.

The light would've been gone by then anyway, and I knew that, and I still couldn't stop.

I'm a little heartbroken today, and maybe for the last few days, and I'm not sure how much of it is for me, and how much of it is for the various people in my life who are going through rough times. When I say rough times, I am talking more serious than breakups or job losses. I am talking cancer.

I won't go into detail here, because these stories are not mine to tell, but suffice it to say that several of my friends - two of them very close friends and one a more recent friend whom I'm nevertheless very worried about - are having to deal with some heavy shit. And I as their friend am having to deal with being afraid for them, and knowing how much they mean to me, and how intolerable it would be to lose them.

And then I check my email and see yet another message from yet another guy I'd emailed who is telling me that he is not interested because I am older than his chosen age range (in this case only a couple of years older). If he'd just said that and not included a bunch of chatty banter as well, I wouldn't have minded. But the combination was, somehow, like a slap in the face.

I don't know why that particular email mattered - it's not that I was super-interested in the guy; it just hurt, even coming from a stranger. I suspect it is to do with something larger, something that I can't examine just now, because I can't even examine the things that I'm aware are going on. It's a big tangle - like that giant ball of string that's either an actual or apocryphal tourist attraction in the midwest.

Another friend of mine mentioned to me, just offhand, that he's hung up on somebody, "hung up bad," and I was dumbfounded for a minute trying to figure out how I'd describe my own state. I was going to say that I'm not hung up on anybody, and that that is unusual for me, and somewhat uncomfortable in its own right. Which seems weird - why should I prefer to be suffering unrequited passion, instead of just feeling nothing very much? I guess because it isn't that the alternative is to feel nothing very much. The alternative is to feel much blanker and more empty than one does when suffering the unrequited.

How are these things related? "Even the wisest cannot tell." (Galadriel)

PS. Obviously, these pictures were taken on a different bike ride, on a different day - but at much the same time of day, for there is that slanting evening light. Pocketcam, auto exposure, flash off.

I'm watching Bladerunner tonight, and it occurs to me that melancholia is a lot more attractive when one has an art director, good lighting, and an interested audience.

In a solitary room, with no noise but that of the fans, there isn't much that's romantic about being in that mood, other than that it gives a little extra frisson to having selected a movie that's so perfectly in keeping with it.

After a pause to wash the cat fur off me (she doesn't seem to realize that it's a billion degrees and muggy in here), I pulled out the Nikon to see if I could make myself some similarly good mood lighting.

I have always loved the light (or lack of it) in Deckard's apartment. So tawny and dusty-seeming.

It's all just about the color and feel of that amber whiskey he drinks out of the perfectly square handmade glass.

I'm surprised Crate and Barrel never copied those glasses outright. They are beautiful, and in synch with the angles and weird square relief designs carved into the balcony.

Anyway. Lacking an audience, not to mention Ridley Scott to paint up my face and make me look like an eerie nine-foot-tall ragdoll (Pris), the photos don't do much to make me feel dramatic and vive la melacholie.

But they looked rather nice in black and white, I thought.