Les Affaires de Coeur: February 2008 Archives

I am lonely a lot lately, which is weird because although I live and work alone, I don't always get the big big pangs for human contact. So I wonder if there is some particular thing I am missing. And if I could even put my finger on it.

I suspect it is love, but I am - well, suspicious of that whole equation - that if one is lonely, one must be wanting someone to love and be loved by. I think that whole cultural concept is flawed, that it's cover for something else. Something less effable (if I may butcher "ineffable" in that manner) and deeper into the core of what humans want, need, and/or seek out and mostly fail to find.

Or maybe I am just shying away from examining my own feelings more closely by trying to make it all about some big universal human need that no one has bothered to properly explore.

A little from column A, a little from column B, I suspect.

Anyhooo. Yes, lonely. Coltrane not helping. Cat asleep (what else is new?) and not helping much when she is awake, though I expect it'd be worse without her. Not wanting to do the work I have in front of me. Feeling semi-motivated to do creative work instead, but once I put that aside to wait until my other work is done, well, you know what happens. The time, she vanishes.

I am also struggling a bit with myself because I am inclined to feel depressed and discouraged by the knee thing, and to be afraid (very afraid) that I have just queered my chances for enjoying my new bike.

Also, a report from some x-rays indicates that my tailbone is not in such good shape after all, and I have to start a new round of PT for that, too. Which also makes me nervous re: bike. I have a lot invested in that bike - much of it emotional (though a not insignificant financial investment), and I really really REALLY need it all to work out, and to be able to ride it and ride it until my lungs turn blue throughout the spring and summer and fall and for the rest of my life ad infinitum.

Please!

I've been thinking lately about love - not so much the state itself as the desire for it. Being in love is very nearly like Lt. Commander Data's description of friendship:

"As I experience certain sensory input patterns, my mental pathways become accustomed to them. The inputs are eventually anticipated, and even missed when absent."

Which is to say, if one spends enough time in close proximity to another human being, one will either end up hating them or loving them.

But the desire for love, the deep yearning for it, may contain any number of things. In my case, a large chunk of it is the desire to be seen, and also to have someone to show things to. I want to be able to point to all of the things that set off a harmonic vibration in my strings during a given day, and say, "Look at that! Look at that! Look at that!"

Of course, having a camera is helpful for that kind of thing, too, and there are certainly other people to whom one can show things. But there is something about being able to have a person who is close to you in that particular way see what you are seeing, or at least see their own interpretation of it, and maybe talk to you about what they see in it, and then the two of you get off onto a tangent having to do with all the pieces of the universe that swim in your respective brains like great shining fish - well, that is love, for me. Or that is what I look for.

I can't say that I've exactly found it, ever.

Bits and pieces, from time to time. Little ends and suggestions and scraps of it. Boywich was more cerebral than that, and too depressed, much of the time, to go all the way there with me. And maybe just not built that way. A few others before him happened on little instances of it, but for the most part those dances were about expectations of each other, and potentials unfulfilled or not even possible.

I am not saying that I expect to find this kind of thing "next," or maybe ever. But I am writing it down as a sort of birthday request unto the universe, in case it might be asking me what I'd like this year.

"I ran to the devil. He was waitin'...I cried 'Power!'" - Sinnerman, Nina Simone

Boywich and I used to have conversations about feeling that we were beings placed out of time, or into the wrong time.

Mostly we would talk about being Renaissance people - built to do a variety of creative things, none of them fitting very well into this century's model for gainful employment. At times, the conversations were also about being built along more Romantic lines (as in Romantic poets, not romantic holidays, which I deplore) than is currently fashionable.

I blame rock n' roll. Rock n' roll made it cool to be, well, cool - detached, devil-may-care, nothing could get a rise out of me. Ever since the 60s, it's been de rigueur to wear a cool, unmoved, unruffled veneer in social (read: romantic) situations.

I don't fit so well into that mold. And yet I try to practice it. And what happens is that: a) my face flushes like beetroot and gives me away and/or; b) there is a disconnect between what I say I am feeling or doing and what I am actually feeling or doing; and c) if the person on the receiving end of that is even halfway awake, they notice a) and/or b) and draw their own conclusions from that.

It's a problem. I really ought to either come to terms with the fact that I am a furnace in a world that values the walk-in fridge or find some other way out of the dilemma.

But I've been so well-schooled - at, well, school - that it's hard to leap into some unknown alternate future in which I display my furnacelike tendencies openly with no fear of being mocked, crushed, or otherwise mauled in emotional vice grips.

Boywich used to chide me for hiding things and letting them "squish out sideways," and I knew he was right, and yet I couldn't help doing it. He's still right. I'm still doing it. I'm trying to be cool. It doesn't work for me. I'm hot. So very, very hot.

* Note: The title of this post is also the title of an excellent live album by Bauhaus, which was not made during the 60s.

I go to my fathers, in whose mighty company I shall not now feel ashamed. - Theoden, King of Rohan, his next-to-final words.
It wouldn't sound strange, perhaps, to a friend who knew me really, really well, but I imagine most people who'd met me casually would be surprised to learn that I identify with soldiers, and that I have a taste for movies about pitched battles.

The man in the bicycle shop I found this weekend might believe me, though. He was a small man himself, built as light and fleet as a dove. Or something thinner - a sparrow, perhaps, but a sparrow made of steel. I liked him right away, especially after he took seriously my assertion that I wanted to build my own bike rather than have them do it. His eyes widened a little and his manner changed when I started talking about horizontal dropouts and bottom brackets and toe overlap, but he hadn't been patronizing even before that, and that is a rarity in a bike shop owner/mechanic. Unfortunately. You girl-bikers will be nodding your heads now.

Are we so used to taking the measure of a person based on their exterior dimensions that we fail to see what real strength looks like when it stands in front of us, no matter how small or tall the container? Yes and yes. And yet, it sometimes shines out so hard from a face that it's a wonder we aren't blinded in the light of it.

I see it in my own eyes in the mirror, every damn day, and every damn day I encounter the people who misjudge it, or gloss over it, or just have their eyes closed to it.

I've been thinking a lot about perception, having recently realized just how generically someone was viewing me: as an interchangeable girl. I am shocked, actually. It seems impossible that anyone, having been that close to me on more than one occasion, could look at me and not at least catch a glimpse of what's behind the eyes.

I've said it before and I'll say it again; the container I inhabit is the least interesting part of me, so I often assume it's the least noticeable. I barely even feel its presence, despite my love for it as a suitable home and my consistent efforts to treat it as well as I can manage.

In case you're wondering (or peering between these lines), I think I'm over the blonde. All of a sudden. Because, all of a sudden, I see that he doesn't see me.
And I think that's the unforgivable sin.

PS. So I spent some time with my boyfriend instead. His name is Nikon, and he - despite being a machine and a lens rather than a being of flesh and biology - seems to understand me. He always knows just what I want to say, and takes seriously his role of helping me in that endeavor. (Click on any pic to see it full-sized.)

Later...Note to self: Do not make grand pronouncement about being magnificently over da blonde in Dietrichesque fashion and then watch movie starring actor who looks just like him. Dumbass.

Today (I call it today until I go to bed, which gives me a little extra leeway) is the annual virtual poetry reading for St. Brigid's Day, and so I am putting up another.

But before that, a few important things that happened today:

I got invited to join Ravelry.

I got my yarn for Snow White (it is perfect).

I went out to brunch and ended up spontaneously spending the whole day out with the girls, meandering from eating place to haircut to eating place to shopping place to eating place. I am now very, very full. Overfull. Ouch.

I have sworn off pursuing boys. I am tired of the fuss and the nebulousness and the frustration. We came up with several good shorthands for this, which I will not at the moment share here, but suffice it to say, I had a moment in Ricky's where I was laughing so hard I was doubled over. And then I looked at a robot t-shirt and bought some sugar scrub. So I can have incredibly soft skin that no boys will get to enjoy. Also, earlier, I bought two more "date tops." Yeah, so that swearing off is going really well for me.

And so to the poem.

Cream, she said, and ran her
eyes into his stars
his legs tangled in a weedy
mess along hers
the dark blanket a forest
for them to chew into

The sudden dearth
his arms gone and then fluttered into birds
So many damn birds
All that's left after a rain
is chatter and flight.

copyright 2008 Lizbon Grav. All rights reserved.