Flotsam: 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.

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.

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.

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.