April 2009 Archives

Yay, it's time for everyone's favorite game - Assorted Contents of Lizbon's Head!

I am having a good day, I've decided. Apart from the long and queasy bus-ride (which sounds like the kind of movie that would make you physically ill - and lo, I am becoming a little ill just thinking about it. So now I'll stop. Thinking about it, that is. And this parenthetical aside, as well).

I got a lot done.

I drank espresso and wished it were cafe au lait and decided that very soon, very soon indeed, it will be cafe au lait, since my unbreakable space-age French press is due to arrive any moment.

In the past week, I have also broken:

1. One side of the male clip on my backpack. This is a very important clip.
2. My bike pump. This is a very important pump.
3. My vow to have no feelings whatsoever, apart from lust, for he-who-shall-remain-nameless.
4. My vow of poverty. Or rather, my vow not to buy anything other than food and shelter for me, and food and shelter for Kitwich.

What did I buy? Well, let me tell you. A big ol' ruby nose-ring, that's what.

Because I don't like the way my current one looks, and I'd simply stared at the ruby so long that my credit card leapt out of its snug little pocket and flung itself into the oncoming SSL transaction.

It'll be here in a couple of weeks; it's being handmade in the UK.

My piercer admonished me to wait a bit longer before changing the jewelry. She never lets me have any fun.

Miss Kitwich loves leaping into and out of cardboard boxes but refuses, absolutely and without hope of parole, to have her photograph taken in one of them. Sorry you have to miss it, folks; it's excruciatingly cute. For those of you who like that sort of thing.

I misbehaved today, in the form of raunchy texting with he-who-shall-not-be-named. But I have an excuse. Goldfrapp made me do it. Don't believe me? Look, just look at this lyric:

Put your dirty angel face
between my legs and knicker lace

Lord.

Okay darlings. Here's the deal.

My head is upside-down. I am avoiding shaking it for fear that it will lose important things like some weird pinata. Maybe it's full of candy and that's why I'm so sweet (ha, I know).

But really, I think the best or only way I can post during this transition time is to rely on my peculiar facility for lists.

So. If you hate my lists, go read somebody else for a few weeks.

If you love my lists, you're in luck.

They will pretty much be in this format: top random things on my mind at present. Hope ya like that.

Anyway, without further ado...

Top Random Things on My Mind

1. Oh drat. I forgot to soak my nose.
2. Should I eat that grapefruit on the counter?
3. I still want a loverboy.
4. Funny story: The other day I was teaching a nice young woman how to change a tube, and she was very appreciative, and she kept telling me about her sweet boyfriend who always ends up just fixing her flats for her, so she hasn't really managed to learn to do it herself, etc. And then she asks me, apropos of nothing very much (except said boyfriend calling her to see how she was getting on), if I have a boyfriend, and I say no. And she looks (or perhaps just radiates) shocked by that. As if it's some kind of unnatural state of affairs to be solo, or maybe to be solo by preference. It's possible that I myself was radiating a degree of horror at the idea of a boyfriend (eeeew! what would I want with one of those?). Who knows? It was just an odd little moment. It made me think about all kinds of things:

a) wow. I really don't want one.
b) weird. She was so shocked by that.
c) do people really think that's the normal state of affairs, that everyone is paired off like some kind of ill-matched Noah's Ark?
d) what kind of boy would make a suitable back-door man?
e) hunh. What a weird conversation.

Back to the main list:

5. Ugh. Boxes.
6. God, the moving process just makes me anxious and ill, from beginning to end.

My head is a whirl. My house the same. And both are only likely to get more like that in the next few weeks.

I think the only way to survive may be to try and focus some of my attention on things outside my own sphere. Like, I was watching this PBS special, The Journey of Man, and, well, it was amazing. It turns out that not only are we theoretically not so different from one another, we are physically all related. All humans on earth have a common ancestor a mere 2,000 generations back.

This team of scientists traced a specific genetic marker on a specific individual man in ancient Africa through the DNA of modern individuals in several far-flung places, and it proves that his descendants migrated from Africa to Australia by way of India, and also to Asia, Europe, and North America.

I am condensing several hours' worth of frankly riveting television into a couple of bare paragraphs, and seriously, if you have any interest at all in this sort of stuff, just see the damn thing. It's available on video and probably being aired several times. It's wonderful.

And it made me think (and apparently the scientist, too, since he said as much about two minutes after I'd been thinking it) that our notion of the Other isn't just wrong in theory; it's biologically false. We are all the same. We are quite literally the human family. And we are African.

I love this. It makes my brain swell in the most delicious way. Yes, it also means that the people who annoy me on the subway are my brothers, but then, that is part of what families do.

In other news, I colored my hair today. I have a headache. A friend of mine has pneumonia and I am a bit worried. It is time for bed. I want a lover. I mean, a good one. A front-door man, as it were.

I dearly hope I can fit all my bikes in the new place.

Still here. Hang in there. Way too much going on, internally and externally, to talk at any length here.

Kitwich apparently has a phobia about giant stacks of cardboard boxes, so I am having to attend to her a bit more than usual. Which is a baldfaced lie. She would like it if I did that.

In reality, we are both running about a little freaked out. But it's good. I think. I mean, apart from the whole running around freaked-out part.

Um. Yeah. Coffee.

Read the pickles if you need light entertainment. Lizbon's Heavy Shit Show will return at its regularly scheduled place and time. As soon as I figure out what those are.

Oh c'mon, just pretend you're watching Fox and trying to guess when they'll air Firefly.

Oh hurry up, coffee! Hurry up and brew! It's been too long since our last encounter, and I miss you.

Been sleeping too late and too deeply. Having interesting dreams. Yesterday's, for example, was a very lively sex dream. Today's I don't recall, but I'm sure if there had been delicious boys in it I would have.

It appears that I am moving in a matter of weeks. Ack.

Someone came and looked at my apartment, and I was sad. The fellow was totally nice, and I kinda hope he'll take it, because I've been so fond of this space that I want someone nice to be in it after me.

He measured the oven because he likes to bake cookies for himself as a way to unwind after a hard day. See?

Totally my type of human. (Before you get any ideas, he was gay.)

I started up the online dating thing again (no, that profile I posted is not the one that's up), not because I hold out any great hopes, but almost accidentally, in the process of taking a look at a different site that a friend recommended. So far I've been corresponding with two tall blue-eyed boys, and ignoring a small handful of others who appear to be sending me email completely at random. Maybe they have a "let's pester the new girl" boilerplate written out.

We shall see. It's a more earnest effort than in the last few months, simply because I'm ready to be over and done with That Crush. I mean, geez, what's the point?

I'm so scared about work I can barely keep breathing when I think about it. All my forays seem to end in "no." And there's a new apartment to pay for (with rent slightly less than this one, so it's not necessarily a bad idea), and, and, and.... See? Hyperventilating.

I like the nose piercing.

I have to pack.

Anybody got a few hundred cardboard boxes to spare?

I keep wanting to post pretty pictures for you, like these and these, but apparently spring is only coming to Portland this year.

We had greyness and further greyness today, and I was doing laundry, which, while it may be colorful, spinning round and round like one of those cardboard-tube kaleidoscopes, does not especially lend itself to blogtography. Yes, I made up that word. Let's all use it, so I can end up on the Graham Norton show. And more importantly, in the OED.

Anyway, I have enough trouble carrying the damn laundry without the added bonus of a Nikon necklace.

So then I thought, well, the inside of my house is probably more colorful than the world outside at the moment, so let's go foraging. Yep. Blue within blue Fremen curtains, check.

Baskets full of yarn. Check. Sleeping cat, whose colors are admittedly rather subdued, but that's because she's in forest-floor camouflage.

I do so like a stack of clean towels. I didn't take any pics of it, but I'm just sayin'. Mine are all various shades of purple and green, and I arranged them in alternating stripes: lavender, seafoam, violet, jade.

When so many things are up in the air, I find it soothing to focus on the nitty gritty little details of life. Clean towels. Rice. Knitting a mitten. Breathing in and breathing out. I had a conversation earlier that went like this:

"What's going on with that apt? But when will you know? But what will you do if you don't get it?" Shhhhhh.

You're interfering with the flow, dude. I can handle this only by keeping very very still, and looking at the calm surface of the water. Don't tell me about the tsunami over there, because there's nothing I can do about it.

W for M

Short, scrappy, fiery postpunk 40-something teenager seeks kind but also scruffy and incredibly sexy plaything. Must be willing to behave as if committed without having a tendency to fall too terribly madly in love with me. Or if you want to fall madly in love with me, must understand that I may decide it's all too much and shove you away and run off to Brazil with Raoul the carpenter with the nice hands.

But really, I won't. I'll just want to feel like I am reserving the right.

Personalitywise, kind of like a steel-shelled M&M. Delicious, dark and velvety sweet inside with a ferocious and occasionally stubborn exterior. Also, not sure whether I want to let you too far in or not.

Physically, oh just fabulous, but don't think I'm immune to the effects of gravity or anything. I mean, jeez, I'm not from Cali or anything. Well, okay, but I got out before puberty, so they're real.

Things to be aware of: My hands are always scarred. I will most likely be bathed in sweat whenever you see me, even before you've given me a reason to be. Not because I'm so terribly nervous but because my first love is bicycles. Oh right, I did mention the bicycle requirement, didn't I?

Yeah well, you'd better be a cyclist or fagheddaboutit.

No, I don't mean a guy who has a hybrid that he rides on Sundays. I suppose I could deal with a roadie, but not if you're going to view every ride as a training exercise and measure your cadence instead of admiring my ass as I pass you going uphill.

But hey, if you're cute and hot and well-behaved, I might knit you something.

"I hate to bring up our imminent arrest during your crazy time..." - Malcolm Reynolds, to YoSaffBridge, in Trash.

Once when I was giving a reading of a short story, someone came up to me afterwards and wanted to know where I'd gotten such strange ideas. Had something like that happened to me? Did I know someone who actually did that?

No, I said, of course not. It's just fiction. It comes out of my imagination, and I write it down.

Which is true. But it occurs to me that I don't necessarily seek out the quietest and most pleasant of scenarios, either. Among my magical powers appears to be an unerring instinct for weirdness.

I attract the oddest of ducks, and am often attracted to them in turn. "You like eccentric men," said a male friend of mine once, in a musing and amused tone of voice.

Yes. Yes I do.

All of which is to say, wow, that was a weird day. I'm sorry that I can't, of course, give you all the details, but they're private, and weird though the other player in my little Shakespearean comedy may be, he still deserves to have his privacy.

However, I will say this. Perhaps it is the writer in me that dives unerringly straight forward into weirdness, knowing how it's likely to turn out (which is to say, weird, though I never really know the specific shape it will take), and knowing that I will get grrrreat dialogue out of it.

Perhaps not. I might just have an unfortunate penchant for Men with Issues. Bland is boring. I like some spice, even when it burns the shit out of my tongue.