Flotsam: April 2009 Archives

Yay, it's time for everyone's favorite game - Assorted Contents of Lizbon's Head!

I am having a good day, I've decided. Apart from the long and queasy bus-ride (which sounds like the kind of movie that would make you physically ill - and lo, I am becoming a little ill just thinking about it. So now I'll stop. Thinking about it, that is. And this parenthetical aside, as well).

I got a lot done.

I drank espresso and wished it were cafe au lait and decided that very soon, very soon indeed, it will be cafe au lait, since my unbreakable space-age French press is due to arrive any moment.

In the past week, I have also broken:

1. One side of the male clip on my backpack. This is a very important clip.
2. My bike pump. This is a very important pump.
3. My vow to have no feelings whatsoever, apart from lust, for he-who-shall-remain-nameless.
4. My vow of poverty. Or rather, my vow not to buy anything other than food and shelter for me, and food and shelter for Kitwich.

What did I buy? Well, let me tell you. A big ol' ruby nose-ring, that's what.

Because I don't like the way my current one looks, and I'd simply stared at the ruby so long that my credit card leapt out of its snug little pocket and flung itself into the oncoming SSL transaction.

It'll be here in a couple of weeks; it's being handmade in the UK.

My piercer admonished me to wait a bit longer before changing the jewelry. She never lets me have any fun.

Miss Kitwich loves leaping into and out of cardboard boxes but refuses, absolutely and without hope of parole, to have her photograph taken in one of them. Sorry you have to miss it, folks; it's excruciatingly cute. For those of you who like that sort of thing.

I misbehaved today, in the form of raunchy texting with he-who-shall-not-be-named. But I have an excuse. Goldfrapp made me do it. Don't believe me? Look, just look at this lyric:

Put your dirty angel face
between my legs and knicker lace

Lord.

Okay darlings. Here's the deal.

My head is upside-down. I am avoiding shaking it for fear that it will lose important things like some weird pinata. Maybe it's full of candy and that's why I'm so sweet (ha, I know).

But really, I think the best or only way I can post during this transition time is to rely on my peculiar facility for lists.

So. If you hate my lists, go read somebody else for a few weeks.

If you love my lists, you're in luck.

They will pretty much be in this format: top random things on my mind at present. Hope ya like that.

Anyway, without further ado...

Top Random Things on My Mind

1. Oh drat. I forgot to soak my nose.
2. Should I eat that grapefruit on the counter?
3. I still want a loverboy.
4. Funny story: The other day I was teaching a nice young woman how to change a tube, and she was very appreciative, and she kept telling me about her sweet boyfriend who always ends up just fixing her flats for her, so she hasn't really managed to learn to do it herself, etc. And then she asks me, apropos of nothing very much (except said boyfriend calling her to see how she was getting on), if I have a boyfriend, and I say no. And she looks (or perhaps just radiates) shocked by that. As if it's some kind of unnatural state of affairs to be solo, or maybe to be solo by preference. It's possible that I myself was radiating a degree of horror at the idea of a boyfriend (eeeew! what would I want with one of those?). Who knows? It was just an odd little moment. It made me think about all kinds of things:

a) wow. I really don't want one.
b) weird. She was so shocked by that.
c) do people really think that's the normal state of affairs, that everyone is paired off like some kind of ill-matched Noah's Ark?
d) what kind of boy would make a suitable back-door man?
e) hunh. What a weird conversation.

Back to the main list:

5. Ugh. Boxes.
6. God, the moving process just makes me anxious and ill, from beginning to end.

My head is a whirl. My house the same. And both are only likely to get more like that in the next few weeks.

I think the only way to survive may be to try and focus some of my attention on things outside my own sphere. Like, I was watching this PBS special, The Journey of Man, and, well, it was amazing. It turns out that not only are we theoretically not so different from one another, we are physically all related. All humans on earth have a common ancestor a mere 2,000 generations back.

This team of scientists traced a specific genetic marker on a specific individual man in ancient Africa through the DNA of modern individuals in several far-flung places, and it proves that his descendants migrated from Africa to Australia by way of India, and also to Asia, Europe, and North America.

I am condensing several hours' worth of frankly riveting television into a couple of bare paragraphs, and seriously, if you have any interest at all in this sort of stuff, just see the damn thing. It's available on video and probably being aired several times. It's wonderful.

And it made me think (and apparently the scientist, too, since he said as much about two minutes after I'd been thinking it) that our notion of the Other isn't just wrong in theory; it's biologically false. We are all the same. We are quite literally the human family. And we are African.

I love this. It makes my brain swell in the most delicious way. Yes, it also means that the people who annoy me on the subway are my brothers, but then, that is part of what families do.

In other news, I colored my hair today. I have a headache. A friend of mine has pneumonia and I am a bit worried. It is time for bed. I want a lover. I mean, a good one. A front-door man, as it were.

I dearly hope I can fit all my bikes in the new place.

Still here. Hang in there. Way too much going on, internally and externally, to talk at any length here.

Kitwich apparently has a phobia about giant stacks of cardboard boxes, so I am having to attend to her a bit more than usual. Which is a baldfaced lie. She would like it if I did that.

In reality, we are both running about a little freaked out. But it's good. I think. I mean, apart from the whole running around freaked-out part.

Um. Yeah. Coffee.

Read the pickles if you need light entertainment. Lizbon's Heavy Shit Show will return at its regularly scheduled place and time. As soon as I figure out what those are.

Oh c'mon, just pretend you're watching Fox and trying to guess when they'll air Firefly.

Oh hurry up, coffee! Hurry up and brew! It's been too long since our last encounter, and I miss you.

Been sleeping too late and too deeply. Having interesting dreams. Yesterday's, for example, was a very lively sex dream. Today's I don't recall, but I'm sure if there had been delicious boys in it I would have.

It appears that I am moving in a matter of weeks. Ack.

Someone came and looked at my apartment, and I was sad. The fellow was totally nice, and I kinda hope he'll take it, because I've been so fond of this space that I want someone nice to be in it after me.

He measured the oven because he likes to bake cookies for himself as a way to unwind after a hard day. See?

Totally my type of human. (Before you get any ideas, he was gay.)

I started up the online dating thing again (no, that profile I posted is not the one that's up), not because I hold out any great hopes, but almost accidentally, in the process of taking a look at a different site that a friend recommended. So far I've been corresponding with two tall blue-eyed boys, and ignoring a small handful of others who appear to be sending me email completely at random. Maybe they have a "let's pester the new girl" boilerplate written out.

We shall see. It's a more earnest effort than in the last few months, simply because I'm ready to be over and done with That Crush. I mean, geez, what's the point?

I'm so scared about work I can barely keep breathing when I think about it. All my forays seem to end in "no." And there's a new apartment to pay for (with rent slightly less than this one, so it's not necessarily a bad idea), and, and, and.... See? Hyperventilating.

I like the nose piercing.

I have to pack.

Anybody got a few hundred cardboard boxes to spare?

I keep wanting to post pretty pictures for you, like these and these, but apparently spring is only coming to Portland this year.

We had greyness and further greyness today, and I was doing laundry, which, while it may be colorful, spinning round and round like one of those cardboard-tube kaleidoscopes, does not especially lend itself to blogtography. Yes, I made up that word. Let's all use it, so I can end up on the Graham Norton show. And more importantly, in the OED.

Anyway, I have enough trouble carrying the damn laundry without the added bonus of a Nikon necklace.

So then I thought, well, the inside of my house is probably more colorful than the world outside at the moment, so let's go foraging. Yep. Blue within blue Fremen curtains, check.

Baskets full of yarn. Check. Sleeping cat, whose colors are admittedly rather subdued, but that's because she's in forest-floor camouflage.

I do so like a stack of clean towels. I didn't take any pics of it, but I'm just sayin'. Mine are all various shades of purple and green, and I arranged them in alternating stripes: lavender, seafoam, violet, jade.

When so many things are up in the air, I find it soothing to focus on the nitty gritty little details of life. Clean towels. Rice. Knitting a mitten. Breathing in and breathing out. I had a conversation earlier that went like this:

"What's going on with that apt? But when will you know? But what will you do if you don't get it?" Shhhhhh.

You're interfering with the flow, dude. I can handle this only by keeping very very still, and looking at the calm surface of the water. Don't tell me about the tsunami over there, because there's nothing I can do about it.