"Deep Thoughts": January 2008 Archives

Spending time in someone else's house is always a strange thing. One feels rather displaced, as if you're floating just above the ground instead of standing on it. It's weird the way that our material things, no matter how little we may think we need or care about them, seem to anchor us in our daily lives.

It's people who anchor us in our larger lives - family, best friends, pets, and so on. But in the day-to-day geography that settles our psyches into place and makes us feel truly ourselves, I think the things we have accumulated are what comfort us, even though we usually aren't aware of them performing that role.

In my case, the details of my "daily" are those of a ragged, dirty, loud, sometimes confusing and/or confounding city. And yet, I do find it comforting. It feels like my landscape, somehow, which is very weird in one sense because I am a nature-lover. You might not realize it to look at me, all togged up in weird hats and jazzy sneakers, slamming by in a blur of brightly colored handknits, but I've always been fairly outdoorsy. I get calm walking in the woods, and I can charm wild animals into sticking around if I happen upon them in a glade.

Why, then, choose this landscape for myself? I can't really tell you, except that I feel in my bones that it is home. And when I am away from it, I do feel fish-out-of-water, and I look round, gasping slightly and hoping that I'll be able to make it back to my bowl (or my ocean) in one piece fairly soon.

And yet, when my sister tells me that she loves having me here, that it actually makes her feel even more at home than she does otherwise, I am happy to hear it. More than that. Touched. That is the people thing at work. The circumstances of her life, the surroundings, the schedule and the lifestyle are alien, do not fit me at all. But she herself is Big Important People to me. So puttering around in her kitchen also makes sense in some way, wherever her kitchen might be.

I got no conclusion to draw from this, mind. Just noticing.

What is it about opposites that seem to bring out the deepest flavor in one another? In baking, always one adds a little salt to sweet things, and in cooking often a little sugar to salty or savory things. A drop of vanilla in the hot chocolate is what it was missing.

You see this everywhere. In the tiny woman with the 6 ft.-plus man scenario, which I know infuriates tall women everywhere, but is somehow irresistible to both parties. Don't get me wrong, I don't invariably go for tall men (just usually), but when I date guys who are closer to my own height, there is always some other opposite factor about them - usually their personalities.

Sweet and spicy work well together, too, though I am not certain they are opposites, exactly. That particular combination was brought to mind by my having baked a gingerbread tonight for a friend's birthday. It's cooling on the counter right now, making the joint smell like something out of fairy tales. The witch's house in Hansel and Gretel, I expect. Which would make me a witch who eats children? No, I suppose not. I am not so big on meat, these days.

But anyway, that exceedingly spicy gingerbread will be iced with a cloyingly sweet (and brandy-drenched) glaze, and the result, I assure you, sends it into a higher realm of existence.

Yin yang bright dark blonde black old young and yes, I suppose, life death, which may, after all, have something to do with why we are as a species so very drawn to our opposite numbers.

I was watching Harold and Maude tonight. If you've never seen it, well, I can't make you, but I will tell you this: a lot of what I would like to say about life is in that movie, and it comes out of Dame Maude's mouth. In fact, if you add a few decades to me, that is probably approximately what you will get, if I am lucky, and minus her plan for her 80th birthday celebration.

There are a lot of these sorts of juxtapositions in that film, which is itself both bright and dark, and it always gives me to think. And there is one scene that always, but always, makes me cry. See if you can guess which one (hint: it's not the obvious).

Is it wrong to kiss one's camera on its forehead? Some days when I am getting dressed I happen upon a combination of colors or fabrics or textures or shapes (or any combination of these) that makes my heart do a little zing! as I look in the mirror. It's like painting oneself in the most beautiful colors - or becoming a living Bonnard painting.

Today I was all flame-colored, dipped in small suns, or sealing wax. My favorite new orange corduroy pants and an old pale orange t-shirt, and knitting this glorious tawny yellow yarn. Immediately after I woke up and put it all on, I also put on some Clash, and danced around the apartment while my tea was brewing.

Every day should begin like that.

Of course, as the day went on, and I ran, and hurt my other side while doing it, and went to PT, where the therapist practically begged me to hold the running down to one day a week while we're working on building up my strength and flexibility, some of that glow wore off a bit.

He did say I could ride, though, and so I will try to get my needed bike maintenance (tire changes, chain cleaning, new pedals - and yes, I can do all of those by myself, thank you) done by Saturday and give myself an inaugural ride up the west side path. Or in the park. Or something. Maybe the blonde would come with me. He would match the yarn so very well.

Postscript. I think that instead of imitating Cari's fiction fragments, I will do something slightly different that's in a similar spirit. Once a weekish (or whenever I want to) I will put up a little poem or scraplet from my notebook. The rules are these: it will not have appeared anywhere in print, and it will be straight from the first handwritten draft, with little or no messing about. In other words, raw. We'll just see how it works out. I may decide I don't want to put so much of me "out there" and withdraw them. Or people may hate them and I may cave to that (though I doubt it. I am stubborn.). Or it may be a short-lived phenomenon. Or who knows what else. But here is #1.

Sun setting over hot water
The colors melt into the sea

as the girls play marbles on shore
tossing coin after coin
to the giant fish's mouth

He swallows, belches their fortunes
their wide warm futures at them
puffing little clouds above their heads

When the bubbles pop, the girls
are wearing crowns.

copyright 2008 Lizbon Grav. All rights reserved. And furthermore, my flesh-eating intellectual property lawyer ex-boyfriend (no, not Boywich; a different one) will come after you with knives, sticks, and the long arm of the law.

There's a phenomenon among people of my generation that's been described as "tribe formation." In simple terms, it means that people my age (roughly members of Generation X, for those who are wondering) have a tendency to form strong bonds with their friends, and to view them in a way that previous generations might have reserved for biological relatives.

There are plenty of reasons for this, some sociological, some to do with individual personalities. In my case, it's largely a function of my innate longing for solitude, combined with a desire to spend my time mostly with the few humans whom I feel understand me - or at least part of me. It's not so much likeminded souls, as that implies that I only want to be around people who share my opinions on everything, and really, I often find it more interesting when my friends have different ideas, because then we can discuss.

But to put it more succinctly than I have in the past two paragraphs, I have tended to choose friends over family whenever I had a choice. That's changed a bit in recent years, as I've developed different, more interesting, richer relationships with everyone in my immediate family, but I still really, really dig my friends. I choose them carefully, and I tend to have a few close ones rather than a passel of arm's length pals.

Anyway, several things occurred today that put my friends front and center in my mind. And funnily enough, they coincided with a bunch of crazy things happening in my family that are gonna require my immediate attention and a significant expenditure of energy.

#1: (yeah, you knew there was some kind of list coming, didn't you? even though I hadn't necessarily foreseen it myself): This post of Shannon's. Yes, that was me, and it was a secret Rhinebeck gift I'd been sitting on for a few months waiting till I'd finished her friend's cap and finally, finally got to send.

#2: This post of Cari's, which I think is just an incredibly neat idea, and a swell piece of writing to boot. I may have to do that sincerest form of flattery thing at some point and start posting little tidbits of my own, because the concept rocks.

#3: I started some zippity knitting on the Welcome Back scarf (cue the Mr. Kotter theme for those of you who are old enough and/or nerdy enough to remember it; the blonde could sing all the words, I am sure - not so much because he is nerdy [he isn't] but because he has a weird talent for knowing the words to television songs), having realized that Friday is the recipient's birthday, and would be an appropriate time to present her with said present.

#4: I have recently realized that most of my closest friends now live in the city, following several years of diasporic tendencies. This is a very hopeful feeling, especially since one of the things I used to find hard about being here was the random loneliness that would hit and hit hard. It still does, to be honest, but it's less of a strain when there are things like birthday parties and dinners at friends' apts and movie nights and wine nights and so on to look forward to.

#5: My sister needs my help, and I have to go help her. I would honestly rather stay home, but she is scared, and I would be, too. And I love her. So there will be late-night posts from the lavender room in her pretty house.

It's weird, the ways of friends and families, and maybe it doesn't matter where the people who enter your heart come from. It's more important that they're there, isn't it? (That goes for rambunctious, affectionate, darling, demented little cats, too.)

PS. Oh gad, how could I forget today's most important detail! I ordered this for Snow White, and many thanks to Shan (she of #1, above) for lending me her Ravelry account so I could do research! So helpful. And so much frickin' fun that I put myself on the waiting list, at last.

PS2. A couple of longtime readers (bless your hearts; I love you) have asked what happened to my nearly two years' worth of old posts (yikes; time flies and all that). They do still exist (um, I think) somewhere on my messy server, and they will eventually reappear properly archived right here on our stage, but I have to cut-and-paste them all in by hand, for reasons best known to Movable Type and best quietly ignored by the rest of us, lest they waken the sleeping tiger in my breast and I go on rampage against the vagaries of technology and generally just tear up the joint.

PS3. The subtext of items 1 and 2, is, of course, that I have been noticing that some blog friends can turn into real-world ones, and I find that both remarkable and lovely.

His name is (was) Chet, and he was unschooled, melancholic, difficult, frequently impoverished, and a heroin addict. But sometimes his music sounds like the feel of the water I swam through today, which in turn felt like the skin of the blonde (and you wonder why I have trouble not thinking about him?) - soft, so very, very liquid soft.

So we are having an all-Chet day. Contemplative, sad, your basic overdose of longing.

"When I was very young, the world was younger than I - as merry as a carousel."

"All you can count on is [sic] the raindrops that fall on little girl blue."

And yet, despite how that sounds, I'm enjoying it. Boywich would know what I meant; there is a certain languor about sitting there and letting that faint sadness and not-so-faint desire for something just lap at you, again and again, in waves. It's pleasure, but of a different order than the typical urge for fun and candy and cartoons, if you know what I mean.

I would someday like to teach a class - or maybe found a program - in synesthesia. The term is actually a medical condition wherein (there's that word again!) a person's senses get tangled together, so that they see music. I'm not saying I'd necessarily want to be (uncontrollably) miswired like that, but some of the most creative things I've ever done (and thoughts I've ever had) have come from ideas or images or experiences making the leap from one medium to another - just like synapses.

And now some of you are thinking: Whoa, what the hell is this all about? Days and days of silly boytalk and now this? Well, that is how my brain works. It bounces about sometimes like a popcorn popper full of thoughts, some trivial, some erotic, some mystical, some impossible to categorize in the time we have here.

Anyway....I've had a nice organic sort of thinking day, and the cat seems to know that and hasn't been crying hardly at all, as if she's trying not to interrupt the flow. Or maybe it's because I changed her litter last night.

There are times when I am overcome by the loveliness of the everyday objects that surround my little rituals. The process of making cocoa - so pleasurable, and not nearly just because the result is something warm and chocolatey.

There is the whole beauty of warming milk in a little pot on the white stove. There is the mug it goes into - my very favorite, a large, handmade purple one. There are the small, creamy bubbles that appear on the surface.

And then there is the whole blue-and-orange theme that appears in my kitchen in mid-winter when the fruits all run to clementines and oranges. Someone at the Darling Clementine factory is very astute in their packaging design, knowing how beautiful those little tangerines look against that particular, almost-lapis shade of blue. And the lettering is just perfect. I have been caving into my desire for those pretty little crates all winter, even though in previous years I usually chose the cheaper brands of them.

If it sounds like I am in a better, even dreamy mood, well, that is because I had a better, even dreamy day, following on the heels of a wonderful surprise last night. I am going to keep the details to myself for once. I think I need to hug it around my arms the way one does those delicious secrets when one is young.

But please enjoy these photographs of some of my favorite images from daily life. I always look at these things and think that I want to show them to you, and I hardly ever seem to want to draw the camera out and go through the motions of capturing and loading and sizing and so on. Tonight, though, the Nikon just jumped out of its shell and took them for me. Or so it seemed. (Okay, not really, but doesn't it sound more poetic that way?)

Eleventy zillion glasses of champagne, a New Year's Day stroll through Chinatown, an impromptu birthday party, and a solitary sixty-block hike (I needed a walk after all that booze and food) later, here I am with Sex and the City and a floor-sprawling kitty.

It was all pretty fun. I called Boywich all drunk and flirty at about 5 am. I got a very good fortune at a Buddhist temple. I bought some pretty printed silk lipstick cases. I came home and marveled at the fact that, 4 hours later, I am still kind of tipsy. (It was really, really good champagne.)

I have to admit, though, that last night I kept looking around at every tallish male to see if the blonde had walked in. And I was disappointed not to see him.

I guess I miss having a playmate. And this dating thing takes some getting used to. I was talking to Miz Fury about it the other day, and she said she'd felt much the same way when she began dating again after a long absence from it: very up and down. One gets surprisingly discouraged, given that these are people one doesn't really know at all.

And one tends to go on and on about it on one's blog, until one's readers are ready to go off and read anything else: a fashionista blog, a straight-knitting-and-crocheting blog, a news blog. Anything.

So instead I'll tell you about the trees I saw on my walk. I don't think it was just the champagne bubbles still flitting around in my head that made it special...there was a small double-row of naked-limbed trees strung with little white lights (which always look yellow to me, in the dark), and I stood at one end of it, looking into them. I squinted and let my eyes blur, and they became an uneven sea of yellow stars, like sparks jumping out of a campfire.

And then I was looking into a galaxy, and hoping/feeling that maybe this is what I will see when I die. It was lovely, and I was aware of looking, perhaps, like a small poetic figure there on Third Ave., with no one around to see it. I guess what I would like is to have someone around to see those kinds of things. That's all I really want. And a (cholesterol-free) cookie.