March 2010 Archives

I wonder if everyone has a personal music - a particular artist, song, or album that gives them chills when they hear it alone, that seems to effuse something of their own soul into the air.

For me, it's absolutely Nina Simone. No contest. And in particular (at the moment) it's the A side of an anthology put together from her Colpix recordings. No Good Man, Gin House Blues (sung slow and deep), and Work Song, those three songs together in a row, oh my god.

It's exactly what I want to say right now, or to show someone.

I've been going back and forth a bit trying to decide how much I want to show a particular someone. Sometimes I think, hmm, what would be wrong with it? But then I hesitate. I think I know what the hesitation is about.

In the last few years I've been trying not to question too much. If I want to do something, I try to just do it.

In this case, I'm not so sure - or rather, I'm uncertain whether my hesitation has to do with an instinct, or whether my rational concerns are heading me off from having some fun.

If that sounds like the kind of overanalyzing I've just said I try not to do, well, that may be the case. I had a bad time of it, with one thing and another, with last summer's liaison (even though it was fun to have a liaison), and so maybe I am leery of putting myself in a situation that might end up similarly.

Come on back, Jack, hey Jack c'mon c'mon back. When I told you I was through, and I told you to move on, I didn't know I would miss you so.

Oh woman save your breath, hey woman save your breath.

I need those crazy kisses. Those nights without your love, they ain't worth thinking of.

Apparently Nina has other ideas.

Tony Bourdain, talking about Provence, says that everyone, including rich people, has a fantasy of living the simple but beautiful existence of French peasants, minus the hard work. We all want to live in a Mediterranean climate, surrounded by blue water and equally blue skies, to walk in fields of lavender, and to eat those sharply flavored foods - aoli made in a stone mortar, fish caught a mile below the house, vegetables so intensely colored they seem to vibrate.

At the end of the same show, he concludes that even more than eating the beautiful, unique, handmade cheeses, he enjoys shopping for them. Kibbitzing with the lady in the apron, being recognized by the little terrier dog.

He says it's really the little details of life there that make it special.

I don't doubt that he's right, and more than that, I think that's true of anyplace.

And I wonder if part of the trick to finding happiness in a real, daily way is simply identifying what your own personal magic pieces are.

I'm not saying that these are necessarily my definitive pieces, but here are a few little bits from the last few days.

I was at a picnic. It was a little cold. There were funny stories. I wished I had a frisbee.

I was at a party. We sat outside on a deck. It was crowded, and yet, this time, I wasn't angry with the crowd.

I wanted to see a particular young man, and it happened.

Easily, and not the way I expected. I find that I like to have a crush on someone, and it may not matter all that much whether anything comes of it. I like to have to guess. Is it mutual? Does he think I'm too old?

I found a crate of clementines for only $5.99. I've been waiting all winter, wanting them, but they've been $8.99, and I haven't bought them. I bought these, and they are fat and perfect.

I am listening to a documentary on Helen of Troy. It's a woman in a plummy accent telling a racy love story, only it's history. Torchlight, and they dance naked until dawn.

I'm gonna keep this brief and random because a) my ass hurts, b) my knee hurts, and c) there is compelling scifi television looming.

random item #1 - everyone here is talking about how beautiful it is out, and I have to say, I hardly notice the difference. It seems to make more difference to me that there are more people whom I have to dodge and avoid and ding the bell at, and this makes my rides a lot less pleasurable, despite (or just next to) the fact that it's warm enough to ride around with uncovered knees.

ri#2: I am poised on the cusp of being ready for a boyfriend, and I hate that. The cusp feeling. Not-quite-yet, but so almost that I'm getting frustrated by it.

ri#3: you know it's spring when all the cute boys are out, and they've broken up with their girlfriends, and we race around telling dirty jokes. Hey, it's my idiom.

ri#4: both my kitten and my eyeballs get very high maintenance in spring. Yowling, clingyness, and dry eyes.

ri#5: a big shout out to my darling girl Special J. It was lovely to see you.

ri#6: In the classic freelance nightmare scenario, I went from having not nearly enough to do to having 423 projects competing for my attention. Most of which are work to try and get more work, but at least things are moving.

ri#7: sadly, ri#6 means that I am really lacking in sleep.

ri#8: I am thirsty and I wish I had a dishes fairy.

8 minutes until Star Trek 8 minutes until Star Trek 8 minutes until Star Trek 7 minutes until Star Trek.

I was out riding with Da Boys tonight, and mentioned my recent 3rd-worst-date-ever, and they wanted to know why. What made it the 3rd-worst? (for one, there was his disdain for TNG. I mean, c'mon, it's Jean-Luc frickin' Picard.) And what was the all-time worst? And why on earth had I gone on a date that night instead of riding laps with them?

One of them (the very cutest one) said when he'd gotten my text about it being just a first date, he'd really wanted to text back, saying If it's just a first date, blow it off. Ride with us instead.

Dudes, I so should have.

So tonight when I got the LAPS TONIGHT text, there was no question. And the fact that I got to spend most of the night riding formation right next to the very cutest one didn't hurt matters. I mean, it's just riding, but oh the lovely scenery. And I don't mean the woods and starry sky, though there were those, too.

Shit, 3 minutes until Star Trek.

Last week I had the sort of bad date that makes me angry. Not at the young man; he was just being himself - it wasn't his fault that he was completely unattractive to me and a bit creepy to boot.

I didn't even realize that it had made me angry until I was standing in the jam-packed hallway of an overcrowded party last night wishing fervently that I'd stayed home and finished watching that movie instead.

I have a friend who's also single and not having any better dating luck than I am, and she was trying to cheer me up. She said something like, well maybe your guy just isn't at these kinds of parties. And I said, oh, I never look for that at parties. And anyway, I'm not looking for the guy. I don't want the guy right now. Just a guy. You know, someone nice and fun to hang around with and have sex with.

The trouble is, I'm beginning to think there isn't even a guy for me in this city. Someone was telling me about another city that's got reverse proportions: lots of cute, nice, outdoorsy, straight men, and not enough cute, nice, outdoorsy, straight women.

It seems silly to move to another state just to get laid, but I moved to another borough for that, and it briefly seemed like it might pan out, before it petered out instead. Yes, there's a literary pun in there (also a sexual one, but I'm more fond of the literary one, so let's leave it there).

I remember talking to an editor I was working with shortly after Boywich and I had split up. She always seemed so down about men and dating. She was hopeless about the prospect of "finding someone at her age" (she was 40-something). I thought at the time that it was a poor attitude to have, that her very hopelessness about it would be a deterrent, because she'd project that.

I also thought, well, that won't affect me because I'm -er- me. People always think I'm ten or fifteen years younger than I am, and in many ways I look better than many younger women do. Plus, I'm all delightful and stuff.

Now I'm not so sure. I don't think all those good things matter as much as they ought to, at least in this specific dating culture, in this time/place/online/offline space.

Sure, I meet a fair number of people, and young men flirt with me, and so on. But it never amounts to anything, not even anything casual. And of course, I'm generally disinclined toward meaningless sex, because, well, it's meaningless, and I'm not.

It may be a matter of culture. The dating culture in this city leans toward high gloss - spit, polish, and heavy waxing. High heels, taxicabs, little black dresses, tittering, cleavage, false fronts, padded pushups, and above all, youth.

Women in this city are disposable, by and large. There are so many, and they are all so perfect-looking, that I suppose men are tempted to think of them as interchangeable.

I am not perfect-looking, nor do I have much of a desire to be. It's not that I'm a cosmetics-free zone (as I used to be when I was younger); I'll wear a little of that mineral stuff, and a little of this because it's the same color as my cheeks naturally are when I've just stepped off the bike.

But I'm not going to lay down my grocery money to have some girl yank out my body hair. And I have scars. And. Well, you get the picture.

I want to work in a think-tank. I want to make a lot of art and a lot of creative pieces that defy categorization. I want to tell improvised stories for an adult audience. I want to make dirty versions of Dr. Seuss stories.

I want to have the kind of sex that is a learning experience, an in- and out-of-body experience, that partakes of both the tangible and the divine. The kind that feels like a William Blake illustration.

Where do I belong? In a tent, with light coming through the walls. On a forest floor of moss. On a mountaintop, and in the ocean, floating, floating, waiting for dolphins.

In an apartment looking down on a dirty wet street with a barbed-wire fence across the way?

Someone offered me a ride home tonight (in a car, with space for my bike in the back), and I said no, though it was rainy and cold and I was on the fence.

Then I got on the bike and had the most glorious time. Well, maybe glorious is too strong a word. But I heard myself say, at the foot of the bridge, "Oh it's lovely out." I wasn't talking to anyone in particular - just the imaginary companion who hears all my best stuff. Maybe I was talking to my bike. I do that a lot, and I know I'm not the only one because I once ran into a fellow who was arriving by bicycle from British Columbia.

I felt so lucky to run into him. I got to ask him about his journey. I've wanted to do bicycle touring for quite some time, and I haven't managed to get out there yet, and he was encouraging and open about it.

He asked how long a trip I was planning, and I said 5 days, and he said that was the perfect length for a first journey. His exact words were something like, "It's just the right amount of time to have no one but the bike to talk to."

I loved that. I remember, too, that when I said I'd been looking forward all winter to the reward of summer weather (which we got very little of that year - it rained a lot), he said, "No, winter's the real reward."

In the brief little spell of mild sunny weather we had last week, I remembered again the curse of spring cycling: crowds.

The streets were suddenly clogged with fair-weather riders. The pedestrians were out in foolish droves, jumping out in front of me and waving their arms as if they thought that was a game. Drivers were distracted by the promise of summer, and perhaps by the fact that short skirts had suddenly resurfaced on some of the pedestrians.

And then it turned rainy and cold, and once again I had my privacy. A small handful of cyclists on one bridge, and a lone cyclist towing a trailer on the other.

I really did feel that it was a beautiful evening. The rain was refreshing on my face. It was quiet for a Friday night. I like the sound of tires, theirs (4) and mine (2), on wet pavement. I like the way everything shines.

And then I like being finally warm and dry and having the cat come over to curl and purr.

PS. Yes, those are bike wrenches weighing down the yarn. I had unraveled a project I wasn't happy with and then washed the skeins to straighten out the ripples. I was so tickled by the usefulness of tools from one love/obsession for another that I took a pic.

Okay, okay, okay. I'm doing that thing again where I start writing a post, get distracted before I finish, and it never goes up. So I swear that tonight, whatever happens, I will post whatever comes of this. Kitwich may set the house on fire (she's been playing with matches), and I will still post photos of burning cinders for you.

I might as well; there's shit on TV.

Just to be on the safe side, I think I'd better resort to list format. Because, you know, that is the best way to present a random series of thoughts that aren't likely to lead anywhere except yawnsville.

Okay, so.

1. I watched the Oscars last night, and as always it was about the dresses. And as usual, I spent my time mentally redressing them in what they ought to have worn instead of what their apparently hallucinating stylists put them in. I can just hear those stylists, between snorts of cocaine laced with peyote, in Edna Mode's voice: "But you look FABulous dahling. No, you must believe me. It is chic."

2. My hair is growing at an astonishingly slow rate, now that I've been trying to grow it into a different shape, and I'm on the point of racing into the salon and begging my darling gay stylist (dahling) to shear it all off into its usual form. Somebody pass the peyote-laced barrette.

3. Hmmn, I'm hungry.

4. I'd planned to take advantage of the not-snowing, not-frigid weather to ride to my favorite bike-accessible beach this weekend but blew my wad on Saturday, sprinting about town, and hadn't the legs for a 40-miler on Sunday. Alas.

5. I've been knitting as if it's going out of style - which, given that spring is almost upon us, it basically is. For those who haven't been reading very long (or don't bother remembering such trivia), I lose the knitting muse completely every summer. Some years I make a flimsy gesture in the neighborhood of a bamboo bikini top or something, but it never comes to anything.

6. I am dying for a new nose stud, but to say that I am too broke to afford the one I want doesn't even begin to cover it.

7. Still hungry, and damn I wish my hair would just grow itself into the desired length and shape, pronto!

8. Kissed a boy on the way home, and no, I'm not going to give you further details. It was just a kiss. Some days that's exactly right.

9. Found myself out in a very photogenic neighborhood yesterday just at the right hour when the sun is slanting low and golden, pulled over, dug in my bag, and realized...I'd left the camera at home. Damn. There was good graffiti, too.

10. I had a funny dream about looking through an exotic wardrobe for an outfit to dance in, and all I could find that I wanted to try on were hats. They were marvelous hats.

[Note: I wrote this a couple of days ago and delayed posting because I was trying to track down the name of the tribe so I could link you to it, but since the Internets have failed us thus far, here's the - slightly vague - story.]

I'm in quite a state lately. Boywich was telling me about an aspect of the language of a particular Aboriginal tribe in Australia, which describes a state of becoming, and for which there is no exact English equivalent.

We were talking about the degree to which our language reflects and reinforces the way we experience time. We may talk about the future, but we imagine it as a static point in time. We only ever think of the now. Current events, new, modern, 2.0.

It's not that we don't care what happens next; we just can't conceive of the flow of time. And it's no surprise, perhaps, that for many of us things seem to happen suddenly. We wake up one day and look in the mirror and exclaim, "I'm old!" Death seems to be sudden, even when someone's been ill for a long time.

Because of this, we don't really experience change. We notice its effects but it's hard for us to feel it happening. Or when we do feel it, it's excruciatingly uncomfortable. It makes us feel that nothing is stable, nothing is permanent, we can't rely on anything, and it makes us nervous.

But that's what I'm doing right now; I'm becoming. I'm in a state of tidal change, and boy does it feel strange.

I'm trying to remind myself of all the things I love doing that are states of flow, of motion, of being neither here nor there.

Or rather, of being always in the moment that flows into another one, smoothly and naturally. Bicycling, traveling on a train, knitting.

It's not quite the same as the tribe's perception of time, but it will have to do.

There are days when I feel exceptionally beautiful. They don't come often, and I always feel just a tiny bit guilty for saying anything about them, for having the audacity to claim beauty.

But I also suspect that it's on those days that I come closer to seeing myself truly than at any other time.

Most other days my judgment is clouded by a lifetime of hanging back, of not wanting to be upfront about what I can do, what I know. It seemed always as if for me to step forward someone else had to step back, as if acknowledging that I have beauty, or talent, or grace, meant that someone else was going to suffer.

It's indoctrination, I know. It's not uncommon among women. It's also a crock of shit. This I know intellectually, but not with conviction.

I have this persistent belief that I can't be great and nice at the same time. And by great, I mean Great. As in, possessed of greatness. Special.

"Everybody's special, Dash." -Helen
"Which is another way of saying no one is." -Dashiell

It reminds me of The Incredibles, where the supers (as in superheroes) were forced to go underground, to hide their powers and masquerade as ordinary citizens, not just in between acts of saving the world, but all the time. Basically they were told that they had to sit on their gifts, not show who they were, because who they were made the non-supers feel uncomfortably less-than.

Have you ever watched the way kids treat the geniuses among them? It's not pretty. And I think it used to be worse.

These days there's at least some lip service to the idea that it's cool to be a geek, though I don't know how far down it trickles, chronologically. And there are still differences between chic geeks and real live nerds.

I'm one of the latter. I don't look it, but I am.

Tonight I spontaneously solved an engineering problem - quite by accident. Then I threw my arms up in the air and exclaimed, "I'm brilliant!" After which I felt abashed.

One is not supposed to exult in oneself. One is supposed, above all, to fit neatly into some acceptable pigeonhole, within which one may exhibit a high level of competence without threatening other people, because it's confined to a limited sphere.

One is not, for example, supposed to be both an artist and a writer, and also to be good at science. One should not understand astrophysics. One should certainly not be able to immediately and intuitively arrive at the solution for a complex engineering problem that's taken a team of scientists years to unravel.

Man, I am so busted.

And worse, I was proud of it. I still am proud of it. It was a moment of gleeful insight, and those give me great pleasure.

I know for a certainty that some of the people I've dated have trailed away from me because I was simply Too Much. Too big, too much energy, too passionate in all senses of the word, too fast, too funny, too intense, too serious. Always leaving them behind. Not even trying to. Trying to be kind, to bring them with me, to invite them to play.

On the way home tonight I saw all these things I wanted to show you. An art installation of colored lights that created, as a byproduct, two long beams of reflected color on the river. Like a more cheerful version of the 9/11 memorial.

A driver was kind to me. She (I like to think it was a she) waited for me to get over, when I was expecting to have to wait for her. I was surprised, and turned around while we were stopped at the light to mouth "thank you."

I'd like to do a PSA campaign telling drivers that it's good luck to be nice to cyclists, in the same way that chimney sweeps were considered good luck in Mary Poppins's London.