Reading a book flap...and later...and later...

"In 1974 Annie Dillard published Pilgrim At Tinker Creek, a mystical excursion into the natural world that established her among the first rank of American writers. Her book received the Pulitzer Prize, and the critics compared her writing to Herman Melville. In 1975 Dillard took up residence on an island in the Puget Sound..."
Later--Reading passages in Holy the Firm and feeling high amounts of anxiety, such as one might feel as a teenager on drugs, & a sense of some kind of collective memory about religious persecution of women. Staring at a large insect and watching it crawl under the bed and into the closet.
Later--Looking over the book and not re-experiencing that anxiety at all. Instead, just wanting to remember the waitress at "Casa Del Sol" on the waterfront, who walked out at low tide in the evening and set down a plate of food for the seagulls.

Song experiences

Oooo, cool, I just found this song my sister put on a C.D. for me a while back and I listened to it while coming home. It kind of drew away the cobwebs of the scullery maidish feeling I was feeling. Full Moon.

Song experiences

23 is the kind of song you might listen to on a road trip. After stopping and getting entranced with a gigantic bumble bee feeding on a flower, but at the same time feeling a little bit weirded out by it, you might notice a person who looks a little ill out of the corner of your eye, and feel a strange sense of concern for the person, who is completely dressed in white and just for some reason looks like he's not feeling well. But then you'd end up driving away in the car anyways. While listening to the song, the car would begin to vibrate and feel very unsteady. You'd end up pulling over to the edge of the road, running into the woods twice, feeling really weird again, looking at the shredded tire, feeling kind of like your heart was just gouged out, talking in a very disoriented fashion on the dying cell phone (which would make the tow truck guy quite grouchy with you), trying to ignore the safety warning in French on the visor, reading a magazine to be calm, feeling very quiet in the tow truck, getting a new tire in a gas station, the tow truck driver beams at you with the good news, you hand over the credit card, later you stare at some signs for "Heartbreak Kid" and "Why Did I Get Married" (movies). As you drive away, you'd begin to feel really mad but try to put an almost half fun spin on the whole situation by imagining a shoot out between two people in a saloon in a comedy. You would no longer be listening to "23."

Other components

Another component of my day off was encountering a young man on the sidewalk who told me the story of a girl who survived being attacked by soldiers who lay in wait for her when she went to draw water from a well and is now being helped by the organization he represented, which was CARE. It sounded like a good thing to give money to, and I told him so, but unfortunately I only could give about $5 cash and he was looking for $30 by credit card and could not accept cash. Another component was, I went to my stepfather's house to clear out some of my books and things, and then we watched the military channel. Him: Ranger School makes this stuff look like a piece of cake. Me: Do you know where that is? Him: Yeah, that's Parris Island. Me: Oh yeah...(I sang a few lyrics from "Goodnight Saigon" but he gave me a weird look and I don't think he recognized it.) Me: So, were you there? Him: These are Marines! Me: Well, I don't know these things. Him: Father and stepfather went to West Point and you don't know jack-diddle. (But saying it good-naturedly.) So how's the job search going? You have to be careful, you're losing your edge, and that's scary because you're a good employee! (Me: in thought only--well, look at this stuff we're watching, maybe I'm losing my edge because I didn't go to boot camp, and I should have signed up when they called me in college instead of giving them a haughty reply about how having parents in the military was enough. And, you just laughed when the women were doing the boot camp exercises because it looks cooler when men do them.) Another component, even though it happened much later, was I got an accidental but kind of fascinating (to me, anyway) voicemail recording of his book on tape. "Coy discovered... literary or life phases, call them what you will, are never neatly closed...ghosts...ships, sunken treasure...the sea is unchanging...despite all the lucidity...watching...the woman with the freckled skin affixing a balloon of Spanish gold to the wooden mast...he had gone to the window hoping for a breeze from the ocean...and was hunting her own white ghosts...he had never dreamed...until the last port, he remembered before falling asleep, we all live tangled in the line of a whale hook...there is a direction connection that comes between the voyage...and the expulsion...it was sunny...breakfast of hot bread, cocoa, coffee and orange juice...pigeons in the plaza...Coy was eating half a roll...staring...the belltower of a church--end of message." Don't know the book.

Otra dia

I have been checking out way too many books from the library. One of them was What Makes You Not A Buddhist by the monk/film-maker from Bhutan. I had the day off, so after I read some it, I went to the folklife festival. Right next to a Bhutanese temple which emanated monotone chanting, some Texans were playing Cielito Lindo in a music tent. (And I think that version with Pavarotti and Enrique Iglesias is kind of a riot.)

On the way to the festival

I half-listened to some people on the radio discussing political memos & use of language & classified information. I thought, even though I have a low-paying job and I'm in too much debt, I'm glad I'm just on my way to a festival and not to that, which is probably going on a few blocks away, or something. I'd found my favorite "I am pretending I can understand French" learning tool and listened to it.
"L'une des siens"
Je suis une des lettres de l'ecriture d'une femme
un des echos de la voix d'elle, l'une des siens,
l'une des siens, l'un des siennes,
un chien, une sirene
un lien de sa ligne, une delie de ses pleins,
quelqu'un d'elle
Tamanasse an des'yeux ca
"Petite homme"
une main un vol d'oiseaux balayant le coucher
balayant le coucher coucher
balayant le coucher coucher
"A l'arene des audacieux"
et j'ai danse la maloya avec l'espoir
escape from my boredom!
"Au cabaret sauvage"
C'etaient de grands battages
a s'aiguiser les mains pour toutes les luttes
c'etait de grands battages des nerfs,
des orpheons de questions.

Dreams and categorization

A dream that I had this morning, of a girl running away at the sight of a blue pen I was holding and me saying "It's just a pen!" to her would be a scared-little-girl-running-away dream. It's very different from one that I had on Sunday. Martin Luther King was in my dream. I feel it's safe to say I've never before seen him in any of my dreams. He was a big, round, smiling soul. I said to him, "It is a great honor to shake your hand." I thought he had Jesus energy. He kind of smiled at me very quietly and nicely. Maybe he said thank you. I feel like the communication got more dreamy at this point. "It's a collective thing," he told me. "Oh, is it?" I said. He looked a bit confused, as if we weren't quite communicating, but then I kind of started to agree with him. He said, "Thank you for being willing." And another smile-smile. I almost said something to him about Thoreau, but instead I tried to tell him that my sister lived where he had lived, but he looked confused again. I could tell he was about to go. I didn't want him to go away. The dream ended strangely with me holding onto his thumb. As I was waking up, I heard a certain bird call outside my window. It seemed to be saying "Whose there, whose there..." I kind of wished I could stay in that mystical state, but shortly after I woke up I noticed I was not feeling that way anymore. It would be nice to have more of those kinds of mystical dreams. The bird songs really kind of added that element to it. I don't know if I can identify them. I also heard doves, but they were different from doves. (Who sometimes have also made me feel mystical, in certain settings.)

Yesterday was...

Sunday Morning!
I think maybe they should play that song at church services. Just in case someone in the congregation is secretly muttering "Our Mother Who Art In Heaven..." After that, they could watch The Whale Rider.

A few songs

A cote du paradis (improperly typed, sung in a language I don't quite know, even though I was able to pass a translation exam in it) is by Lo'Jo. Oh Conquering Internet, where are the videos or lyrics to L'une des siens? To Au caberet sauvage? Or Petit homme? Or Le "Poème de Japonais", which is in "Amazigh", I was told. That's harder to find on the internet.
However, Tricky is easier to find. ;-) And Tricky is cool...
Christiansands, Tricky Kid, Broken Homes, Makes Me Wanna Die

Food thoughts

This morning I lay in bed and looked at myself through little snapshots of my life. A lot of them were food-related for some reason.
1) I'm fourteen and in the back of a car that my friend's father is driving and the friend and I are giggling hysterically over the ripeness of some tomatoes in a brown paper bag that he just bought at the farmer's market. He looks at us weirdly, as though we are on some kind of substance. We are, but it doesn't really matter, because he regularly smokes up with his daughter.
2)I'm fifteen and I'm in a new, shiny rich kids public high school with almost no official friends. I don't seem to fit into any clique. Every lunch period, I buy muffins out of the vending machine and hide in a study carrel in the library, where I eat them carefully, trying not to make too much noise with the cellophane wrapper, and I look at art books.
3)I'm sixteen and two guys I met through a new friend at school are coming over to my parent's house. I just got out of a yoga class. When they arrive, they tell me that Kurt Cobain just died. Even though in Seattle, all I ever did was listen to "old" music from the 60s and 70s, I have been just been listening to In Utero. My heart is broke / but I have some glue / help me inhale / and mend it with you / we'll float around / and hang out on clouds / then we'll come down / and have a hangover. They take off their baseball caps and eat hamburgers at the dining room table and talk about how we can't believe he just died.
4) I'm twenty and I'm in a cafe called Dulce Espera in the rainforest and my boyfriend is snapping his fingers and calling out "Amigo" to the waiters.
5) I'm twenty, in a restaurant in the Andes mountains. After I thoughtlessly seat myself in a chair directly across from the one that my boyfriend has pulled out for me to sit down in, he scowls at me and says "The American boys are not very nice to the American girls."
6) I'm twenty-nine and I'm on a "date" and the date feeds me food from a fork and I go along with it. Later I will tell my friends about how awkward it felt to go along with it. By the end of it, I'm saying "I'm not really into dating right now" and he says "you're really hard to read." A few weeks later he text messages me after he gets back from Europe and I type "I hope you had a nice trip." Twenty minutes later: "It was great! When can I see you again?" I stare at the message and decide not to write anything back and feel like I'm kind of being a jerk.
7) I'm twenty nine and I've been lying on the linoleum floor on top of my jacket in a hospital emergency room for the past hour. The morning breakfast cart rolls around and the guy wheeling looks in the room and I try to read the expression on his face. I decide that he can see suffering and stress, but then again, he probably sees it all the time.
8) I'm twenty and I'm trying a bite of one of the non-vegetarian and delicious "papa rellenas" which a woman has come aboard a bus to sell to us.
9) Yesterday I tried "Synergy," which is "Kombucha" which is either really revitalizing and delicious or just a little weird and vinegary. It comes in a very cheerful bottle with rainbows on the wrapper. It kind of reminds me of either umbrella-shaped rainbow popsicles or riding in the back of a station wagon with kids. Which reminds me of walking on the playground of a campground at age six, singing Sweet Dreams Are Made Of This.

To keep or donate?

Books I like, but I wonder if I need to own them?
All My Patients Are Under The Bed
Walking A Sacred Path

After this I'll read the Wireless Adapter manual and contemplete becoming a technical writer

If I habitually read/write and this post is a room, and it has this one certain quote from a book about Thoreau and Emerson, which I just can't find because I still haven't unpacked all my boxes from moving yet...
then there is just so much cool in this room.
If I hear snippets of conversation that go sort of like this...
support vegans and eaters of squid and guinea pigs
be compassionate and understanding of alcoholism, self mutiliation, PTSD, thieves, spies, computer hackers, people who have what it takes to complete their oeuvre and support liking what you like
and 12-step-programs for those who may wedge nails into tires (and then feel sorry they did it afterwards--empathy empathy empathy!)
"Finally I said, Mami, and they both looked back, already knowing what was happening."
"the hamster knows it was good because it cannot easily remember / whose idea it was"
there is just so much cool in this room
"As Shibbudada settled down in our drawing room, I would look nervously through a window and see what I knew I would see, Taiji advancing alond Number 7's red gravel driveway. My stomach would knot up in a state of highest anxiety. I could barely get the tea down my throat." Page 123 Climbing the Mango Trees
there is so much cool in this room
"He gaped at himself a moment, through her eyes and through the eyes of each family he'd plodded past. What a crushing feeling it was." Page 36 Heaven Lake
there is so much cool in this room

Finished recently

Climbing the Mango Trees by Madhur Jeffrey
Heaven Lake by John Dalton
I think that book could make a very interesting movie.

Recovery

Dear body--way to catch the worst cold/bronchial ailment right in the middle of a heatwave, just after you've moved into a dusty basement apartment, so that indoors feels like a 19th century drama, and out of doors feels like a horrible tropical fever. I ended up taking some green and lavender capsules of antibiotic in addition to using flower essences. I was a little disappointed that I couldn't just cure it with essences (at least, not very fast). But after I found out that a girl I work with is on her second round of antibiotics and might have pneumonia, I thought, maybe they helped after all. And I was even able to deal with a rowdy night at work yesterday. At one point, I was checking I.D.s since the bouncer had to deal with a recalcitrant patron (are you whipper-snappers born in 1987 really old enough to drink now?) Then the guy came up front and started yelling either at me or his girlfriend (actually I think it was her). The bouncer came back and my boss waved me inside. As the tempers outside escalated, I was surprised to feel, for a brief moment, a few tears coming to my eyes. Cute in a song or story can be less cute in real life, although sometimes these things do make you live in the moment, for better or worse, and naturally there is always a crowd who will enjoy the show. Much of the time I can be entertained easily. However, these kinds of books are really the only thing I can bear to look at when I'm really sick. Anyways, I now have a newfound appreciation of the human respiratory system.

Various sides of moi today

Coughing, hacking and consuming (a bit belatedly) Air Armor (Trader Joe's knockoff of Airbourne). Not letting my annoyance about my health insurance take over my brain. Reading various lit/blogger types of things, like this from May 29. Imagining working pithy commentary into stories about the muses of a master of ornate ceramic toilet bowl handles, followed by thoughts tinged with either compassion (the more noble emotion) or pity (which is less noble, but more likely after an indulgence in sarcasm). Enjoying looking at library books on the culinary arts of India and the history of Latin and, perversely, enjoying being sick because of being able to look at those. Thinking, is it possible I went to school to study something that is maybe only about 20% of my personality? Women dervishes (another video I checked out in Illinois.) Perelandra flower essences. E-mailing friend about a book fair...what is this addiction? Recently, I decided I need to get rid of about three quarters of my books. Libraries exist for a reason.

Art-O-Matic

Jesus at Artomatic and Finding Christ Through Cookies.

Tunes!

Mrs. Robinson
America
Sound of Silence
American Tune
El Condor Pasa