There are a few moments were I entertain a flash forward of sorts.
Someday, I might have a family. And that family might, at some point, include babies and/or small children. And with those babies and/or small children, I intend to have daily dance parties in our family living room. And they will have to like it. They will have to like Sasha Fierce.
Sunday, February 27
Tuesday, February 22
Thursday, February 17
If only one could give the world
I would like the internet to know: how how how much I love and appreciate this woman:
Tuesday, February 15
My teenage dream is over, Katy Perry. Thanks for reminding me
It is fitting that this is my 100th blog post as well as my last post before I join the ranks of individuals everywhere who have lived 2+ decades upon this sweet earth. That change happens in t minus 30 minutes as I write these words.
On my couch this evening I sit in quiet being and do not think about it and then I am twenty. The 15th is a day that I am always writing down on applications and receipts and verification processes so that it has come to associate itself with a specific familiarity.
A specific familiar feeling like that of winter jacket in the summer - you see it hanging in your closet and you remember that a time will come when you will take it up again but now you are bare shouldered and blue-sky eyed.
Does that make sense?
Because I take up this day, and gladly, but there is a sentiment of despair that accompanies it. Is despair too harsh a word? I am sorry. I welcome time. (Or at least, I believe in welcoming time) But while my contemporaries,
counterparts,
and I suck greedily from the cup of years, our ploys and decisive lives are shown for what they really are.
Narratives that will never be stopped of our own accord. Because while the power feels tangible, as Mother Society and Father Government divide and subdivide our rations of political freedoms and civil liberties, (I'm sixteen so I drive; I'm eighteen so I smoke and vote; I'm twenty-one so I'll drink to that) We can't ever choose when to be these things and when to receive. In my nineteenth year I was given experiences based upon my age and everything I had known prior to that. So I ended my first year of college, packing up my things and driving home alone except for a sense of identity and exhaustion. The return of summer showed me forty hour work weeks and how to touch the earth every day. Weddings and sisters. In my nineteenth year I drove to Chicago and became acquainted with my own road. I peed in Lake Michigan and on a rocky beach before the Grand Tetons and inside a Crater of the Moon.
Yes I count those things as achievements.
In my nineteenth year I learned that I will always be arriving and emerging and I don't always have to love the feel of that. But just to love, I think, is what is to be had. Though I've felt my heart turn quiet in a way that makes me scared, I know to seek a murmuring spirit that I suspect might reside inside everyone.
No I do not suspect it; I imagine.
And to imagine is where I've found a sense of peculiar identity. I've found it in my feeling soul, in the roots of the people from whom I come, and a devil's advocate who I know has taken up forever residency within me. If he left now I would feel different. I've found a mole on my cheek, messy hair, and small hands, (Though I don't prescribe to physiognomy).
Despair can only lift once you have named it. With that in mind I feel different as I close this thing and go to sleep. Adam himself must have held the deepest emotions before he started through the line of animals, gently calling: "lion, monkey, hare." But on this couch I sit, and I've let time take its toll from me once again, though I did not choose this bridge. Though something about it all has equalized in the moments between start and finish. So in peace and quiet being once again I listen to the rain etching declivities down my apartment's cheap window panes.
And God willing, here's to the twentieth year.
On my couch this evening I sit in quiet being and do not think about it and then I am twenty. The 15th is a day that I am always writing down on applications and receipts and verification processes so that it has come to associate itself with a specific familiarity.
A specific familiar feeling like that of winter jacket in the summer - you see it hanging in your closet and you remember that a time will come when you will take it up again but now you are bare shouldered and blue-sky eyed.
Does that make sense?
Because I take up this day, and gladly, but there is a sentiment of despair that accompanies it. Is despair too harsh a word? I am sorry. I welcome time. (Or at least, I believe in welcoming time) But while my contemporaries,
counterparts,
and I suck greedily from the cup of years, our ploys and decisive lives are shown for what they really are.
Narratives that will never be stopped of our own accord. Because while the power feels tangible, as Mother Society and Father Government divide and subdivide our rations of political freedoms and civil liberties, (I'm sixteen so I drive; I'm eighteen so I smoke and vote; I'm twenty-one so I'll drink to that) We can't ever choose when to be these things and when to receive. In my nineteenth year I was given experiences based upon my age and everything I had known prior to that. So I ended my first year of college, packing up my things and driving home alone except for a sense of identity and exhaustion. The return of summer showed me forty hour work weeks and how to touch the earth every day. Weddings and sisters. In my nineteenth year I drove to Chicago and became acquainted with my own road. I peed in Lake Michigan and on a rocky beach before the Grand Tetons and inside a Crater of the Moon.
Yes I count those things as achievements.
In my nineteenth year I learned that I will always be arriving and emerging and I don't always have to love the feel of that. But just to love, I think, is what is to be had. Though I've felt my heart turn quiet in a way that makes me scared, I know to seek a murmuring spirit that I suspect might reside inside everyone.
No I do not suspect it; I imagine.
And to imagine is where I've found a sense of peculiar identity. I've found it in my feeling soul, in the roots of the people from whom I come, and a devil's advocate who I know has taken up forever residency within me. If he left now I would feel different. I've found a mole on my cheek, messy hair, and small hands, (Though I don't prescribe to physiognomy).
Despair can only lift once you have named it. With that in mind I feel different as I close this thing and go to sleep. Adam himself must have held the deepest emotions before he started through the line of animals, gently calling: "lion, monkey, hare." But on this couch I sit, and I've let time take its toll from me once again, though I did not choose this bridge. Though something about it all has equalized in the moments between start and finish. So in peace and quiet being once again I listen to the rain etching declivities down my apartment's cheap window panes.
And God willing, here's to the twentieth year.
Thursday, February 10
Pride
okay.
First order of business;
Will someone please tell me where this expansively flat and lulling American accent came from? Maybe this is a testament to Western arrogance but I never really questioned the odorless sound of my American voice until earlier this week. The question occurred to me while I was sitting in class, History 3770: The Modern Middle East. The sweet professor with the shaking hands and a beautiful sense of both narrative and time was speakung about the British occupation of Egypt during the late 19th century. And then my mind began to move. It swept through colonizations of countries to linguistics, surprisingly, until the two trains of thought married on the Atlantic shores of the New World.
If you type in British occupation of into your Google bar, location upon location fills up the trending list. That's really interesting.
Anyways whatever triggered in my brain triggered and I found myself forming a new question. We speak a language derived from Britain, the country with the deepest colonizing roots in American history. Currently the two countries have very different dialects. So, my dearest friends, where did this freaking American accent come from? Did it serve as a planned political negation of the rolling vowels of monarchy, or was it simply the watery distance that consequently bred a new form of the "English" language? Maybe it was immaculately concepted; a virgin birth that would spawn the Midwesterner, the Southern Bell, the Bostonian.
The used-to-be English from South Africa sound almost British. Not almost American.
Obviously I don't know. I'm sure the answer is waiting for me on Wikipedia right now, but at this point I'd rather let the it ferment for a while. The best wine takes time. The best answers are the ones that make chardonnay. Or are answered by a friend. Or something.
In your defense, Oh Fearless Reader, you are probably way beyond my measly intellectual chicken scratches at this point. You probably already covered this concept in your head, somewhere in between eighth grade algebra and ninth grade biology. I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt. Feel free to fill my comment board with proof.
I've been excited and ashamed these last two years at the limits of my garnered knowledge and thought processes. Excited for the doors that are opening, the holes that are sewn up and patched. Ashamed because I thought I knew everything when I was 16, and 17, and 18 and 19.
My poor parents.
At this point I could move into a second order of business. I could relate back to Britain, colonization, and how that whole process has set the stage for the arrogance that I apply in my everyday life. Down to the subtle unquestioned dominance and proliferation of my American accent.
Or I could talk about Bob and his comment on the proliferation of capitalization in christian writing at chapel earlier this week. Too little adherence to grammar, too much obsession with highlighting the nature of God in every word used on a worship powerpoint. Though in all honesty I've been capitalizing in this blog post like an 18th century Brit capitalized on the world's natural resources via colonization.
But really my capitalization has been done in pure respect of the name and sovereign power of nation states. Britain, America, Egypt, Boston.
My dad became frustrated with me once when I failed to capitalize America on a white-board comment I made in our garage. His frustration was fascinating to me. "But why Dad, why?" I asked him as he re-wrote the little swoop into three dignified straight lines.
"Because, daughter, this is our country. We're proud to be Americans. That word represents us, and our pride." I'm paraphrasing him now, we had this conversation in the summer. Lend me a little slack. Because I know above many things my father is proud to be an American. Its right up there with proud to be a father of three crazy girls, and also proud to be a fervent driver of Ford vehicles. (F350, standard shifting.) I didn't push the conversation further, I wasn't particularly emotionally attached to a sentiment in either direction.
Later on I brought up the conversation with Joe. And that was that, until a while later when I received a postcard from Joe at my apartment back in Seattle. My dad's sentiments had struck him deeper than I thought, and in the letter he recapitulated and resumed the conversation. I looked for the letter just now to recount to you the words he used:
"I think your dad has a deeper connection with American than we understand. He has a relationship with it. They have confronted each other, and he has looked America in the eyes. Our generation doesn't have that kind of relationship with this country. At all."
I thought the point extremely prolific. A form of identity emerges and at once is at stake. My dad's identity is married into the word and this emotional adherence to capitalization emerges as a form of pride. Pride in one's existence and one's character. And thats not bad or good. I don't know what to feel, myself. Nationalism is this big scary machine that doesn't seem like it should feel real. But it's seeped into everything about me.
It's been betrothed to my identity on the Pacific Coast of an Old World. And because of this, it has influenced my opinions on most everything. (If I know it. If I don't know it.) It has influenced what I see, it has influenced what I believe, it has sunk into the sound of my voice.
And I haven't looked into the eyes of America.
Yet.
First order of business;
Will someone please tell me where this expansively flat and lulling American accent came from? Maybe this is a testament to Western arrogance but I never really questioned the odorless sound of my American voice until earlier this week. The question occurred to me while I was sitting in class, History 3770: The Modern Middle East. The sweet professor with the shaking hands and a beautiful sense of both narrative and time was speakung about the British occupation of Egypt during the late 19th century. And then my mind began to move. It swept through colonizations of countries to linguistics, surprisingly, until the two trains of thought married on the Atlantic shores of the New World.
If you type in British occupation of into your Google bar, location upon location fills up the trending list. That's really interesting.
Anyways whatever triggered in my brain triggered and I found myself forming a new question. We speak a language derived from Britain, the country with the deepest colonizing roots in American history. Currently the two countries have very different dialects. So, my dearest friends, where did this freaking American accent come from? Did it serve as a planned political negation of the rolling vowels of monarchy, or was it simply the watery distance that consequently bred a new form of the "English" language? Maybe it was immaculately concepted; a virgin birth that would spawn the Midwesterner, the Southern Bell, the Bostonian.
The used-to-be English from South Africa sound almost British. Not almost American.
Obviously I don't know. I'm sure the answer is waiting for me on Wikipedia right now, but at this point I'd rather let the it ferment for a while. The best wine takes time. The best answers are the ones that make chardonnay. Or are answered by a friend. Or something.
In your defense, Oh Fearless Reader, you are probably way beyond my measly intellectual chicken scratches at this point. You probably already covered this concept in your head, somewhere in between eighth grade algebra and ninth grade biology. I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt. Feel free to fill my comment board with proof.
I've been excited and ashamed these last two years at the limits of my garnered knowledge and thought processes. Excited for the doors that are opening, the holes that are sewn up and patched. Ashamed because I thought I knew everything when I was 16, and 17, and 18 and 19.
My poor parents.
At this point I could move into a second order of business. I could relate back to Britain, colonization, and how that whole process has set the stage for the arrogance that I apply in my everyday life. Down to the subtle unquestioned dominance and proliferation of my American accent.
Or I could talk about Bob and his comment on the proliferation of capitalization in christian writing at chapel earlier this week. Too little adherence to grammar, too much obsession with highlighting the nature of God in every word used on a worship powerpoint. Though in all honesty I've been capitalizing in this blog post like an 18th century Brit capitalized on the world's natural resources via colonization.
But really my capitalization has been done in pure respect of the name and sovereign power of nation states. Britain, America, Egypt, Boston.
My dad became frustrated with me once when I failed to capitalize America on a white-board comment I made in our garage. His frustration was fascinating to me. "But why Dad, why?" I asked him as he re-wrote the little swoop into three dignified straight lines.
"Because, daughter, this is our country. We're proud to be Americans. That word represents us, and our pride." I'm paraphrasing him now, we had this conversation in the summer. Lend me a little slack. Because I know above many things my father is proud to be an American. Its right up there with proud to be a father of three crazy girls, and also proud to be a fervent driver of Ford vehicles. (F350, standard shifting.) I didn't push the conversation further, I wasn't particularly emotionally attached to a sentiment in either direction.
Later on I brought up the conversation with Joe. And that was that, until a while later when I received a postcard from Joe at my apartment back in Seattle. My dad's sentiments had struck him deeper than I thought, and in the letter he recapitulated and resumed the conversation. I looked for the letter just now to recount to you the words he used:
"I think your dad has a deeper connection with American than we understand. He has a relationship with it. They have confronted each other, and he has looked America in the eyes. Our generation doesn't have that kind of relationship with this country. At all."
I thought the point extremely prolific. A form of identity emerges and at once is at stake. My dad's identity is married into the word and this emotional adherence to capitalization emerges as a form of pride. Pride in one's existence and one's character. And thats not bad or good. I don't know what to feel, myself. Nationalism is this big scary machine that doesn't seem like it should feel real. But it's seeped into everything about me.
It's been betrothed to my identity on the Pacific Coast of an Old World. And because of this, it has influenced my opinions on most everything. (If I know it. If I don't know it.) It has influenced what I see, it has influenced what I believe, it has sunk into the sound of my voice.
And I haven't looked into the eyes of America.
Yet.
Tuesday, February 8
A Very Short Story - by Ernest Hemmingway
One hot evening in Padua they carried him up onto the roof and he could look out over the top of the town. There were chimney swifts in the sky. After a while it got dark and the searchlights came out. The others went down and took the bottles with them. He and Luz could hear them below on the balcony. Luz sat on the bed. She was cool and fresh in the hot night.
Luz stayed on night duty for three months. They were glad to let her. When they operated on him she prepared him for the operating table; and they had a joke about friend or enema. He went under the anaesthetic holding tight on to himself so he would not blab about anything during the silly, talky time. After he got on crutches he used to take the temperatures so Luz would not have to get up from the bed. There were only a few patients, and they all knew about it. They all liked Luz. As he walked back along the halls he thought of Luz in his bed.
Before he went back to the front they went into the Duomo and prayed. It was dim and quiet, and there were other people praying. They wanted to get married, but there was not enough time for the banns, and neither of them had birth certificates. They felt as though they were married, but they wanted everyone to know about it, and to make it so they could not lose it.
Luz wrote him many letters that he never got until after the armistice. Fifteen came in a bunch to the front and he sorted them by the dates and read them all straight through. They were all about the hospital, and how much she loved him and how it was impossible to get along without him and how terrible it was missing him at night.
After the armistice they agreed he should go home to get a job so they might be married. Luz would not come home until he had a good job and could come to New York to meet her. It was understood he would not drink, and he did not want to see his friends or anyone in the States. Only to get a job and be married. On the train from Padua to Milan they quarreled about her not being willing to come home at once. When they had to say good-bye, in the station at Milan, they kissed good-bye, but were not finished with the quarrel. He felt sick about saying good-bye like that.
He went to America on a boat from Genoa. Luz went back to Pordonone to open a hospital. It was lonely and rainy there, and there was a battalion of arditi quartered in the town. Living in the muddy, rainy town in the winter, the major of the battalion made love to Luz, and she had never known Italians before, and finally wrote to the States that theirs had only been a boy and girl affair. She was sorry, and she knew he would probably not be able to understand, but might some day forgive her, and be grateful to her, and she expected, absolutely unexpectedly, to be married in the spring. She loved him as always, but she realized now it was only a boy and girl love. She hoped he would have a great career, and believed in him absolutely. She knew it was for the best.
The major did not marry her in the spring, or any other time. Luz never got an answer to the letter to Chicago about it. A short time after he contracted gonorrhea from a sales girl in a loop department store while riding in a taxicab through Lincoln Park.
Why, This is Just a Devolution of Thought
My family was here this weekend.
It was a full time, with lots of hither and thither.
Of course I was left feeling like I had so much more to talk about and say to these beautiful people I get to call my own...
When I'm with my family now, time feels really tangible. Like it can be held my hands... and it feels strange. I think that maybe change is the only way I can really put a value to time. Thats why the Greeks had two different words for it; Kairos and Kronos.
(not to be confused with crinosity, which means a state of extreme hairiness...)
Anyways, the latter word is comparative to our english notion of calender time. Its talking about the long term, continuous and revolving circle of life type stuff. Kairos, however, describes the kind of time that becomes that opportune moment; A red-letter day amidst a line of dreary ones.
Not that my winter Seattle days have been dreary...
One could note that Kairos usually can't be observed until looking back into the past. That's when you see the line of days, hours, moments and realize that a certain one was different than all the rest.
It is very rare to have your Kairos and Kronos overlap each other, like sheafs of thin paper.
What I am trying to say is that there is a certain weighted importance added to the family moments that I spend with the Fields lately. It feels like I've been twirling through starry space, but with with a string attached.
And I'm almost out of slack.
It was a full time, with lots of hither and thither.
Of course I was left feeling like I had so much more to talk about and say to these beautiful people I get to call my own...
When I'm with my family now, time feels really tangible. Like it can be held my hands... and it feels strange. I think that maybe change is the only way I can really put a value to time. Thats why the Greeks had two different words for it; Kairos and Kronos.
(not to be confused with crinosity, which means a state of extreme hairiness...)
Anyways, the latter word is comparative to our english notion of calender time. Its talking about the long term, continuous and revolving circle of life type stuff. Kairos, however, describes the kind of time that becomes that opportune moment; A red-letter day amidst a line of dreary ones.
Not that my winter Seattle days have been dreary...
One could note that Kairos usually can't be observed until looking back into the past. That's when you see the line of days, hours, moments and realize that a certain one was different than all the rest.
It is very rare to have your Kairos and Kronos overlap each other, like sheafs of thin paper.
What I am trying to say is that there is a certain weighted importance added to the family moments that I spend with the Fields lately. It feels like I've been twirling through starry space, but with with a string attached.
And I'm almost out of slack.
Saturday, February 5
I just like to drink my coffee from it
She looks up from her coffee cup on the table. She traces her finger around the image of a perplexed-looking cat wearing heels displayed on the side. My kind of morning, the caption reads.
Whoever made that mug is sick, I say. I wish you wouldn't use it all the time. Cats should be cats, without the addition of obscene female attire. Is it supposed to be making a statement? Is it supposed to be ironic? I just don't get it...
I'm standing behind the kitchen chair, my fingers not tracing anything.
Well, She replies; I just like to drink my coffee from it, in the morning. And I guess if it reminds me of anything, it makes me think that somewhere out there, there is a person who is measuring their success cheap cat cup by cheap cat cup. They wake up in the morning, turn off their alarm while the city sunlight leaks through the blinds, and catch the met to their corner office. They set aside the big, empty What If questions for eight hours a day and create something, anything...
And I can look up to that. Its like people who design christmas sweaters. At least when they begin measuring the accomplishments of their lives they can hold on to something tangible. Jingle bells and all.
I grabbed my jacket and she grabbed her keys. Another day, I think as I strap my computer over my shoulder. She walks out first and I close the door behind us. As I pull the door towards me, I notice the coffee mug she has left sitting on the table. The city sunlight pools on the table, illuminating the face of the cat in heels. My kind of morning, the caption reads.
Whoever made that mug is sick, I say. I wish you wouldn't use it all the time. Cats should be cats, without the addition of obscene female attire. Is it supposed to be making a statement? Is it supposed to be ironic? I just don't get it...
I'm standing behind the kitchen chair, my fingers not tracing anything.
Well, She replies; I just like to drink my coffee from it, in the morning. And I guess if it reminds me of anything, it makes me think that somewhere out there, there is a person who is measuring their success cheap cat cup by cheap cat cup. They wake up in the morning, turn off their alarm while the city sunlight leaks through the blinds, and catch the met to their corner office. They set aside the big, empty What If questions for eight hours a day and create something, anything...
And I can look up to that. Its like people who design christmas sweaters. At least when they begin measuring the accomplishments of their lives they can hold on to something tangible. Jingle bells and all.
I grabbed my jacket and she grabbed her keys. Another day, I think as I strap my computer over my shoulder. She walks out first and I close the door behind us. As I pull the door towards me, I notice the coffee mug she has left sitting on the table. The city sunlight pools on the table, illuminating the face of the cat in heels. My kind of morning, the caption reads.
Friday, February 4
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