"Deep Thoughts": January 2009 Archives

A friend of mine said today that she could feel that I was unhappy this week, even though I hadn't told her. I hadn't seen her or talked to her, or IMed with her, and at least twelve hours went by before I remembered she'd texted me last night and I hadn't responded yet.

I suppose the lack of communication is a clue, but I have the feeling she'd known even without that.

I don't know why, but sometimes the couple of people who are my very closest friends seem to know without being told when I am feeling like shit.

I love them for that, of course, though I still feel like shit anyway.

It's a complicated thing, the reason that I feel like shit, and I don't want to talk about it, tangled as it is with various shades of green and flavors of jam and some yarn that looks just like black hair and is really just impossible to count stitches for a gauge swatch on.

There's this cat sitting at my elbow washing so loudly I can hardly think straight, and I drank some warm milk with the avowed intention of putting myself to sleep with it, but really just because I wanted to taste something sweet and mild.

Kitwich knew what it was, and meowed for her cut. I'd already finished it off, but laid the mug on the floor so she could pull out the dregs with her paw. She is so clever. I have to think that most cats would try futilely to shove their big heads inside the mug. She merely sniffs, assesses the situation, and uses her foot.

It may be that I am doing the big-head-inside-mug thing myself, but I cannot stop, because, well, I simply don't want to. And all the thinking in the world isn't going to make me feel differently than I feel. In fact, it just gives me a headache.

I bought the wrong coffee and cried over it. I need a haircut again, though I swear I just had one two weeks ago. All my laundry is always dirty because I can't seem to get my back operational. I never did put all those millions of knitted gifts in the mail, and they are stacked in my house, awaiting wrapping paper and large envelopes and a trip to the post office which I never want to make.

I think of taking a bath but then remember that I never have the patience to see one through. Most of all, I want what I want, and I want above all to feel that I deserve to have what I want. Whether or not I have to actually get what I want in order to feel that I deserve it is a question that's yet to be answered.

I know that's a lot of openwork sentence structure to wade through up there. But that is the gist.

All his hands are in flower form. But still he sinks. - uh, me, actually. written yesterday.

Welcome to the new year. Feels a lot like the old year, if you ask me. Knee still hurts. Back still messed up (and I'm an hour late for taking my Naproxen so I'm feelin' it).

This was my first cup of coffee of the new year, and it looked so fetching that I took a picture of it. I then decided that taking pictures was what I wanted to do with my remaining daylight, so Nikon and I went for a nice walk together.

I mean, it was cold, and I just missed Golden Hour, so the light was fading fast, and my back hurt just carrying that little camera, but still and all it was good to get out and look and think.

I realized, as I was walking along, that I don't get into those deep thought processes when I'm riding my bike, which is weird at first glance, because you'd think there'd be something meditative about all that pedal-turning. And there is.

It just doesn't bring on thoughts about much else other than the bike itself. And the meditative bit only happens at night, when I start to focus on the sounds of motion.

Of course, there's a very good reason for this - during the day, or earlier evening, the streets are a very real, and deadly, videogame. And if my mind were wandering away from me even a tiny bit, I'd be paint on somebody's bumper. You need your wits about you in this joint.

I watch, sometimes, one of my faster, more nimble friends threading his or her way through traffic and am amazed at the physics of it. In the spectrum of cyclists, I am quite cautious, and lately, very slow.

When I was less injured and it was warmer out (knees like warmer), I had gotten a bit faster, and I remember going for a ride with one of my friends with whom I hadn't ridden in a long time, and he, after turning to wait for me and finding that I'd kept up, exclaimed, "Hey, you got fast! I turned to see where you were, and you were right there. That's so cool."

And it was such a happy, perfect moment.

I hadn't even realized what a good, good summer I had until it was gone. And now, I am not sure of course, but I suspect I am having kind of a bad winter, with one thing and another.

Funny how you can never see just where you are when you are in it. As if we've always just come up from underground and stand here, blindly looking around, trying to get our bearings.

Wow. Didn't mean to be a downer today; that just seems to be where the stream led.

Enjoy the pics anyway. I think the blog's been a bit Nikon-starved for a while.

There is something heartbreaking about the squeak of a guitar string on a recorded piece of music. Likewise, the faintly discernible sound of someone breaking a glass in the background on the recording of Charlie Parker that Kitwich and I are listening to now.

As a New Year's present to her, I let her choose the First Music.

First Music of the day is always an important thing; it's how you enter (or, I guess, re-enter, though somehow it always feels new to me) the world. And by that logic, I suppose first music of the first day of the year might have added weight, though it honestly doesn't feel portentous - just nice.

This particular album starts out vibrant and jumpy and settles itself gradually into a gently vibrating pool of molasses that carries you along with it in the most delicious way. I adore it, and it's the kitten's favorite. You can tell by her body language whenever I put it on.

Of course, that may have something to do with the fact that she's a birder, and - well, you know his nickname, don't you?

But getting back to that guitar string theory (see what I did there?), I think the reason why it always sends me a little when I hear those kinds of noises in an otherwise seamless recording is that it's a little jolt of reality. There is a live human playing this beautiful thing, and ohmygod it's real.

I had that same feeling about a conversation I had, more than a week ago (but it's still thrumming around in my bones), with the boy I like.

It wasn't the kind of conversation where you instantly agree with everything each other is saying. It was much better than that.

It was the kind of conversation that gives one furiously to think, and the kind where I looked across at him, and felt the guitar-string jolt. He's real.

You may read that and think, duh. But - how can I explain this? There's a mad difference between constructing an image of someone and falling in love with it, and interacting with a living, breathing, substantial, complicated, warm-blooded, differently impassioned human being. As a young person, I might have chosen the former.

As I am now, give me the hot, messy, complicated, challenging, beating heart of a solid human any day.