Flotsam: December 2008 Archives

It sometimes feels to me as if life has two strands, and that their developmental processes are reversed. The physical strand - the health and strength of the body - deteriorates over time, while the internal life of the mind, spirit, whathaveyou - tends to grow richer over time.

If we're living Twizzlers (or oversized DNA, as I keep picturing it), one of our strands is always in a state of decline, and one is always in a state of growth.

Not sure what to make of that, but I thought I'd put it out there.

My so-called holiday week has been a bit like that. A lot of up-and-down. Spent yesterday and today largely rendered immobile after having hurt my back doing one of those ordinary activities that seem to prey on aging backs like vermicious knids on little orange men.

A friend came over yesterday (as we'd planned weeks ago) for what we were pleased to call our Anti-Christmas. We made cookies. We ate them all. (I finished the last half-dozen by myself, after she'd gone home.)

We watched a really brilliant movie. We drank a velvety, spicy wine (goes great with nutmeg-brandy sugar cookies, by the way). We ate a little of my leftover (but homemade) lentil-tomato soup, as a nod to nutritional value.

We knitted. We posed Spiderman in funny scenes. We texted and sent silly pics to friends in faraway places.

I said, at one point, that if it weren't for the horrible back pain, it'd be a perfect day. And she said, "Ah, but if someone weren't in horrible pain, it wouldn't be us, would it?"

True true.

PS. Reading back over this, I realized there's an error in logic here. It's not as simple as that one thread is always in decline and the other is always improving. In the second half of life, that pretty much describes it. In the first half, physical prowess improves until it reaches a peak, usually in young adulthood. But there's a narrowing of personal possibilities after a certain point in childhood, and then a somewhat stagnant period in young adulthood (I'm sure everyone in the world would argue that point with me, but I think there's some truth in it) before the mind/spirit starts to grow richer again. And it does seem that the body is weakest when the mind is strongest, and vice-versa. I could be completely wrong, of course. Just taking the (raw, unformed) idea out for a spin.

A slow day. The waking out of very quiet sleep (unusual for me; I sleep like a twitchy sentry) to snow on trees and three messages on the answering machine. I'd turned my phone off.

The cat is in full-throated Feed Me Now mode. It's 1:40pm.

I wander around, making coffee (Peruvian - okay, but I preferred the Nicaraguan I had in the last batch - it was sharper), calling people back. Yes, I'm alive, sorry I missed brunch.

My brother and I are meeting at the Met tomorrow. I like the Met, even though I instinctively feel a bit claustrophobic and wrong there. It hasn't nearly enough exits for my taste.

But it reminds me of that movie, where the two teenagers get trapped in a museum overnight and get to sleep in that fancy 17th century bed. I always wanted to have sex in that bed - not the one in the movie, the real one in the Met. Boywich and I used to talk about it. Our first date was at the Met, in fact, and I remember him translating inscriptions in Ancient Greek.

I also remember getting turned on by the armor.

I know, I am fucking weird. But it's a perfect storm for me - anatomically correct, made for individuals who really walked the earth and fought wearing it. And I always have that feeling that I might just as well be one of them. So weird to be a woman, so unfamiliar.

I love my carbon-knuckle gloves because they feel like gauntlets, and I only just realized that that's what they remind me of. A familiar feeling. Bikes resemble horses, and the carbon knucks are gauntlets. Where is my fucking sword, anyway?

The roads are terrible today, uncleared, and I had a vision of what that bridge would be like, and I think I'm going for a walk instead. I hate walking. Slow and unpoetic and not me. Except in woods. Then it's good - the scrambling over roots and leaping of logs.

When Kitwich was little, we lived in a snowy part of the country, and on snow days she used to watch the flakes come down with an expression on her face like, "Mommy, it's raining cat toys!"

Now that she and I are city dwellers, the cat toys don't come down very often, but just a few minutes ago we started to get a few flakes, and now they're fairly pelting down. They're nice big fat ones, too - the kind that always promised a good thick carpet for me to tromp around in later.

Today, though, I'll be riding around in it, as I have places to go and people to see. I always have to get outside and experience the snow - it's one of those things that I love in some primal way that is hard to explain. Or pointless to explain - you either feel the same way about it, or you think of it as purely an inconvenience.

"We are the light that travels into space." - Zero Seven.

I love that line. I've often wondered about the connection between astronomy and metaphysics - or rather, how far off our science is from the deeper truth. No, that's not exactly it. I feel like maybe there's a connection between the kinds of esoteric ideas that advanced astro- and particle physics get into and the kinds of revelations that we usually think of as spiritual in nature.

I really don't want to die, ever, but I am curious about whether I'll find a connection at that point.

Yeah, yeah, Master of the Nonsequitur. Or however the frack you spell that.

No news is boy news, which may be a good thing, considering that I've been bashing my head into that particular brick wall the last few days, but I did have an interesting conversation with a girl who may or may not also have a crush on him. Maybe she and I will end up being friends, and that will be a nice perverse way for things to work out. It's happened before, if I'm not mistaken.

I was gonna wake up "early" today (you know why that's in quotes, don't you?) and dash off in hopes of seeing him. And then there was snow, and fond memories of Miss Kitwich keeping me company on my lap whilst I worked away next to the snowy window with the pine tree.

And now, well, there's a different snowy window, and a different pine tree, and she's on my lap again, head resting on my left arm, front paws folded under her in that beautifully Egyptian way they do, and purring, and cat-smiling at me. Who could rush off, under those circumstances?

Wow. Cold out. Big tiring day. Rode into city, very very gingerly and carefully, and knees only hurt in last five minutes, as if to say, "don't get too comfortable, sweetie."

The skyline was so gorgeous in that clear, cold air that I really wanted to take pics for y'all, but I wasn't exactly certain where my pocketcam had got to. It's either hiding out in the bottom of my bike bag, or I've put it someplace I can't recall.

Must invent that handlebar cam.

Apart from the nervousness about how my body was going to treat me and the fact that my fingers and toes kept going alarmingly numb, it was beautiful to be on the bike, smoothly moving through relatively deserted streets, looking at the twinkly skyscrapers over the bridge and the homier Christmas lights of Brooklyn.

I got home weirdly tired despite not really having put forth much energy, and promptly (okay, after a nice warm shower) fell asleep on the couch, sitting up, with the cat snoozing on my lap putting forth all eight cylinders of her soporific energy.

I'd like to say that there's nothing so bad that brunch with my girls can't cure, but it's not quite true.

It's almost true, though.

I had a great day today, even though I had bouts of grumpyness and frustration, even though the wind nearly blew us into another county, even though I haven't ridden either bicycle in two days and am uncertain about the future of these knees for tomorrow. Okay, wait I'd better not start talking about that - it will send me into a downspin.

So, leaving that aside for the moment. Brunch. Happy happy brunch. My favorite omelette: egg whites, spinach, scallions, made perfectly at a certain place where once there was a very cute French boy who hit upon me by remarking, after I'd given him a Ginger Altoid, that it was very sexual. He meant sensual, of course. By which he meant to imply sexual. It was a whole delicious curly-headed incident, witnessed by Miz Fury, my mom, and my sister. I turned absolutely bright red and wanted to take him there, on the table.

Oh dear.

Where was I?

Oh yes, brunch. No French boys today; they are a rare and timid species, the pretty curly-headed French boys. They only make their appearance on the first springlike day. They pop their sweet flirtatious little heads out, suck your Ginger Altoid, pick up their handsome tips, and then sashay their lithe little behinds away for the rest of the year. No doubt to Paris, or Provence, where it might be warmer than it is here.

But the omelettes are still damn good. And then we did some errands and wandering, and making of silly dirty jokes (which are our forte), and we went and drank grog (arrr, why is all the rum gone?), and knitted, and talked about the difficulty of getting a straight answer from a straight man. And I rolled my eyes a lot, and fixed a couple of stitch mistakes for Special J, which made me feel useful and magical.

And we went yarn shopping. And I picked up two different kinds of crack - I mean Malabrigo - for gift knitting. Glorious purple Silky Merino for mom, and burgundy Chunky Merino for one of the bike boys (not that one, a different, though equally handsome one). The burgundy is much less orange than it looks in the photo - it's a nice dark brick red.

Lord, is there anything that yummy yarn and dear friends can't fix? No, there really, really isn't.

Hello Winter. Nice to see you. Sort of.

Well, actually, I'd been having a crappy week thus far, and so I made myself take the squash and yam, potatoes, leek, carrots, and collard greens in my fridge, and make them into soup.

With the help of:

yellow split peas
red lentils
homemade stock
ginger
dry mustard
hot hot Indian chile powder
fresh thyme
a few celery seeds
cider vinegar
balsamic vinegar
sea salt
a drop of honey

Considering all the angst that went into the soup, it's a miracle it came out tasting so good. And feeling so good as I ate it. It makes me think there's something alchemical about cooking. That when I am really, really upset, I can sometimes cook myself better.

No, it's not (all) about boys, or even lack of boys. It's actually more to do with professional and creative endeavors today.

For good measure I also called Boywich and asked his advice, and it was one of those conversations that make me feel glad we are friends. Glad I thought to call. Glad I actually got the words out when he saw that I'd called and called me back.

Whew.

Anyway. I have a plan now, and that's a good thing. And the soup is just damn delicious, not to mention such pretty colors that it's a pleasure to look at as well as eat.

Maybe that's enough, for now.