Sorting

Example: Lower priority, but amusing: While clearing out my e-mail box, I found a political debate that included songs in the e-mails and I thought that it was pretty funny. Higher priority: I have the good or dubious fortune to inhabit a physical vehicle which seems to send me strong signals, based on things like eating habits or reactions to situations or things I've been reading or watching. At this moment, it is directing me to read: a) Healing Yourself with Light, b) The The 7 Healing Chakras c) nothing.

It's a curious world

full of curious people and curious human behavior! Today I listened to Lecture 25 & 26 by this guy. Why can't I read 13 languages. I'm going to listen to more; I hope it will help me sort through all of my old belongings in a more cheerful manner, and that soon I will have reduced the amount of things that own me by at least half if not more than that. I will commit to a number of days. I am sharing this place with a recovering packrat. Maybe I will have a neat freak for the next roommate. No, someone with healthy organized tendencies. This book has wisdom in it. Wouldn't it be nice if it were easy to emulate a book every time you thought it had wisdom in it.

A Sunday...

Backwards and slightly scrambled:
Celestial Soda Pop and "Practicing Emptiness" from soundprint.org on the radio. Nights in White Satin. Nori. Gjestost. Softshell crab. Frozen flies in the freezer. "Goodnight Saigon" from a transistor radio on a chair. Bird watching. A warm chlorinated aqua bath. Remembering the basement of beer and the awful movie "Sliver." Lemonade. Working mothers. "Baby person." Photo ops of gifts and summer dresses. Feeling kind of "society." (Like in those novels.) The "boys'" party = smokes & beer. Someone's job = picture with the Dalai Lama. Lotion & a photo frame holder. The Dalai Lama hugs his nightwatch guy. Infusion of pink rosebuds. Scones and clotted cream. Sandwiches with the crusts cut off. "The News From Lake Woebegone." A decision to wear contact lenses today. A cup of soy milk.

If it gives you a certain feeling...

then keep it. I was not especially entranced with this book when I was younger, but I didn't completely dislike it, either: A Gathering of Days. Immersion in the details of the natural surroundings of "New England"'s environment. Attention to spiritual and moral conduct. Formal, adult children (the person writing it is 13 years old but sounds much older). I will keep it.
It gave me a feeling, like, enjoying sunlight and someone baking bread in an oven made of stones in the woods. Like that would always be the primary picture of reality, even though there would also be times of death and winter, these would be mitigated by the quilts one could huddle under. But when I read this book, maybe I was on the West Coast and it was still the 1980s. Maybe it was around the time when I went clam-digging with my parents (i.e. my mother and her boyfriend) and envied (with overall good humor) a certain triumphant man (as did everyone on the beach) for his ability to extract a geoduck from the sand. (A feat which is impossible but possible.)

Lunchtime choices

While I was out, I thought I'd buy myself something for lunch, like, a berry smoothie. So I went to a smoothie store and when I walked in a BIG group of tall white guys with shaved heads were taking up the whole space. They were bounding around like big, happy, well-exercised puppies. There is nothing wrong with that, in small doses, and I know it might sound wrong, but I decided I just couldn't deal with the vibe, so I left. Next door was a sandwich shop. Women and children and a less homogenous make-up of males were inside of it. I felt more comfortable there. I went in and ordered a small tuna sandwich. I might go back for a berry smoothie later, though.

Where am I at?

I feel like I have to slog through old stuff in order to get on with things. This feeling is magnified by the boxes I keep acquiring. I have moved around a lot and had a sort of fragmented life. I like that, but I need to pull the pieces of it together and figure out what to do with them. The side of me that is more of a dancer/risk-taker still exists, but the internally-focused, seemingly-still one is winning. Maybe it's like when a person dismisses a certain tome, and then suddenly realizes that he or she needs to read and understand it for some reason. I used to look forward to a time when I could sort through all my experiences and make something out of them. But now I find that I miss my younger self, sometimes. Today, Old Home Town was part of my quasi-enjoyable slogging process. Ever since I read in a biography about Rose Wilder Lane complaining that she couldn't write anything significant because she was obligated to work on her mother's "goddamned juvenile"(!) I have entertained an interest in seeing something theatrical about her life.

That other place I lived in for a little while....

If I ever go back there, I will go here to see if an old friend from school still works there (which I suspect). I have not been there since 1999. It doesn't feel like it, but this is proof. I watched a clip of Tobi Vail, after watching this chant at the end of Lounge Act. I watched Bull in Heather.
Sometimes it's weird that this is "old music" now. This is where I went salsa dancing. The last place I lived by was Freeway Park. Also I will go to Twice Sold Tails! (Tales) I want to feel a certain kind of urban environment and see mountains in the distance and walk on sidewalks so steep you could fall off of them. Preferably in the summer or maybe autumn. Also I want to go apple-picking in upstate NY in the autumn, though. Oh well. I don't live in those places at the moment! This hour's accomplishment: buy a pack of paper & replicate pages copied out of my mother's Findhorn Garden book for my friend who runs a community garden project.

Quote to remember...and remember...and remember...

"Like Maechelle Wright Small, author of Behaving As If the God in All Life Mattered (Perelandra, 1987) I believe that physical objects retain the emotional energy of what has occurred in a space." Page 61, Lighten Up!

Processing...

My day would not have been the same without the following messages in my inbox: Bollywood Star in Town, Sorriso, Guinea Pig Contest

Snippet from another old book

Transient Songs is kind of from another era, and it's a little bit of Seattle to me. The poem that is quoted on their site is about staying in motels. The end of it goes: "I am addicted to myself / to my solitude / my own silent reflection in mirrors / scattered / mind caught on a thought / untangled braids and fingers / without a match." I think the price of this book went up 400 percent since I bought it over a decade ago. I have some friends that are from a family with 2 sets of identical twins. I'll have to tell them about this site. I think they'd find it interesting. Wow, it is so early in the morning and there was just a sound almost like a car accident somewhere, with an alarm going off but then it stopped. Good grief, insomnia. Boxes of old stuff. I need liberation from material possessions!

Booksbooksbooksbooksbooks....

I can't escape them! Nor can I escape dog people. I am more of a cat person. I can still like my family's dogs, though. I was even toying with the idea of becoming a dogwalker... Today I acquired more boxes of things to sort through. Chiefly, boxes of books. While listening to Nevermind in the car, I couldn't tell if carting around these old boxes was enhancing the experience of listening to the music or vice versa. It also seemed as though the youth of America were crawling suburbia like zombies from the Thriller video. Especially during Lounge Act and Something In The Way. I thought that perhaps I should switch to The Nautical Chart, which is the book that "called me" on the phone. (Very strange.) I did not locate any old Nancy Drew novels among these boxes. I did find old Herbert Rowbarge. (Which kind of cast a little spell on me.)

This is quite nice

Where Is My Mind. With "Pupperoo." And cat.

A first viewing

It's really very sad that depression can kill people. I just watched In Bloom. That's the first time I've seen it. Look at what I was missing since I was only listening to Led Zepplin and the Beatles! Well the wonders of technology have preserved it, for me and others. Cute cute cute cute cute cute cute.

Oh, it's the Beatles!

This clip from Help! has She's A Woman interspersed with The Night Before. Or maybe it's the other way around. Anyways, I remember listening to the latter a lot when I was 14. Such an optimistic time! I mean, when things weren't all flaky...I was boycotting the station that played Smells Like Teen Spirit at the time...Lots of people wore Doc Martens and faded flannel shirts...I wore an old army jacket with the tags ripped off of it...

Attitude

Wow, that's a word. I'm having a really weird evening. A lot of phone messages. I think I am one of those people who can't decide about introversion vs. extroversion. Should I watch a movie, go to DC, or stay in and do the phone writing group thing. I'm really grateful for libraries, and that I get to go on the internet now, and that I also get to spend long periods of time away from the internet, and that life is progressing everywhere on the planet, and that lately I'm getting the hypercompulsive feeling to eat very healthy food like lettuce, crunchy sprouts, nori, etcetra, all the time again. (Except for the "hypercompulsive feeling" part.) Well, anyway. I think that I am going to attempt to write an acrostic about that word.

To ease a headache...

Eisenhower Interstate System. A strange thought: I'm glad I live here; it's a sunny day. Atomic Gardens. Datura. Old memory: believing the pinging sound (of the fire alarm in the apartment above a health food store) was actually an impish boy playing a clay whistle outside. Older memory: Bird calls, like the sounds of large water drops hitting the surface of a pond. These are actually being made by a person leading the way on a path in the Amazon rainforest. Even older memory: At night, on the side of a rural road in Ollantaytambo, encountering an older woman and a young boy. She turns her back and walks quickly away. What task did we interrupt? (Me and a Japanese girl.) Memory from the island: A roomful of older women, essences in small bottles mixed with brandy. At night, a large view of water, mountains, cityscape and sky. Staring for a long time at the moon.

Today's inbox links...

One of my literary friends sent me an old picture from grad school in which I dressed as a "lovesick poet" and had silver glitter on my face and two red hearts drawn on my cheeks. And wore a beret. I was kind of a cute little 20-something. ;-) Maybe I should add it to the rarely visited myspace or facebook pages which I sort-of-halfway-not-really set up. Another friend sent the article about the World's Oldest Mother. "That is why we call it Mother India." Another friend sent me info about Floris, which is proof that Northern Virginia was not always so NOVAish. She told me that her mom was actually raised by her Dad's sisters, who were "spinsters." I rather like that word. And my sister, who prepared herself to brave moose and bears, met neither, but survived an unexpected encounter with quicksand, sent some links, including lions, birds and the meaning of our surname.Which I had wondered about, but never guessed even though now it looks so obvious. Yay, an edible flower.

Old disappeared paper...

Too bad I no longer have this old paper I wrote my freshman year for my philosophy class. "The moment he stepped into me the woods became alive with myriad beings...I now had pan-pipes in my hands and was aware of shaggy legs and cloven hooves...The numerous birds responded, their songs making an exquisite counterpoint to the music..."(page 119). I got a "C" on it. "When I had almost reached the spot where the experience had started, the heightened awareness began to fade...Approaching the end of the path and the cedar tree, I began to walk sedately, which was just as well since a boy was sitting on the seat nearby. It might have been disconcerting for at least one of us if I had come dancing down the path..." (page 45). I was going for something about having a Dionysian experience.
"You don't mind me walking beside you?
'Not in the least.'
He put his arm round my shoulder. I felt the actual physical contact.
You don't mind if I touch you?
'No.'
You really feel no repulsion or fear?
'None.'
Excellent." (page 109)
It would have been interesting to see what I was trying to get at, even if it was convoluted.
"I asked him where his pan-pipes were. He smiled at the question:
I do have them, you know.
And there he was, holding them between his hands. He began to play a curious melody."
(page 109).
It was my favorite chapter in The Findhorn Garden:
You can just look at a thing, or you can really "see" what you are looking at. -ROC

To eat...

Tonight I ate a vegetarian (vegan?) eggplant dish made with harissa sauce. It was cooked in a tagine and was very delicious.
Later, I reread The Findhorn Garden and I thought these were interesting food quotes from Eileen Caddy:
"It would do you far more good to sit down and eat a handful of raisins and nuts or whatever you really fancy instead of sitting there, pushing down salad because everyone else is doing it...Don't be like a lot of sheep." --page 45
"It's so easy to develop the idea that it is wrong to eat certain kinds of food. For this very reason, one of Peter's favorite stories is about my 'steak and whiskey diet.' He revels in telling it, especially when he knows he's talking to a group of avid vegetarians." --page 47
"What I do is encircle the food with love, I bless it, then I eat it and enjoy it." --page 47

Long car trips can be fun

Especially if I utilize them to listen to music. I think Rich Girl is a good antidote for anyone who ever felt traumatized by Captain Hook. I like how the album's lyrics book reminds me of a Christine de Pizanesque illuminated manuscript. Also heard a fun song, Myriad Harbor, on a college radio station today. Sometimes I listen to foreign language CDs. (Not that I will necessarily really learn the language, but maybe I can at least understand which one people are using.) A lot of Korean is spoken where I live, and it is all over the signs on many of the businesses. I will check that out. For now, I have decided to listen to Cantonese and Mandarin. (Afterall, Olympics are coming up!) Also, a CD of snippets of birds' languages.

Watched some clips

From:
Beyond Rangoon, which a friend of mine showed me a while ago.
Real Women Have Curves
(Who makes our clothes?)
Voices Carry
I don't recall seeing that music video when I was younger. I just heard the song a lot the radio. In Illinois, I used to hear a couple fighting sometimes. The woman did a lot of screaming and crying, later she'd be happy and singing and humming. I finally called the police after they woke me up at 2 am. After that, there were no more disturbing sounds. I kind of imagine their relationship starting out like the one in the music video.
I have to figure out why my computer says I have a low battery even though it's charging. Maybe the electrical tape on the cord isn't working.
The Sweet Escape
Marilyn Monroe

Some readings...

No Way Home
The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox
Two artists, according to wikipedia, don't like to be called "feminist."
Toni Morrison and PJ Harvey

I can think of 3 or 4 children's books

that I would like to own again someday. (Since I didn't take care of them. Sigh.) One is The Mysteries of Harris Burdick by Chris Van Allsburg. To me, it was simultaneously frustrating, creepy and magical. One of my old roommates had the portfolio edition. I also really wish I had The Emerald-Eyed Cat Mystery (#75 Nancy Drew) Preferably from 1984, because I think the later editions have a different cover. I got it for Christmas when I was in 2nd grade and I remember thinking "You expect me to read that?" It was great. Let's see, first she talked to this sketchy Chinese guy and had tea and a meal with him in Chinatown somewhere (in San Francisco maybe?) and possibly saw some New Year Festivities. Then she ended up, somehow, waking up in a room in a mysterious hacienda, either in the Southwest or Mexico. There was an older, forbidding Senora and a cat and a tray with rolls. Oh, the many dark and mysterious rooms of the mansion and the cat! the cat! were so freaking cool. There was a girl named Elena and her boyfriend and they all three had to escape. I wonder who actually wrote it. Also, although I don't care as much about this book, it could be interesting to re-encounter the one that had something to do with her going to France. All I remember is some girl who was the daughter of a famous man told her: "Daddy hated omelettes," there was some kind of crystalline object breaking, and the words "in order to make an omelette you have to break an egg." (In French.) Ouef. And, because it gave me chills when I read it, I would like to find the paperback version of The Kachina Doll Mystery. (Later note: I found that book. It wasn't in French. It was Italian!)

Cositas sobre hoy dia

Today is my little sister's birthday and she's flying to Alaska to see our relatives who live there. I guess she is 27? She was born in 1981. But to me she always seems younger than even people who might be younger than she is, because I'm the older sister. Maybe I should just, like, send her an e-mail, saying, "'oh!' sighed jo, 'it's dreadful to be poor!'" Well, she's into lions, so I will probably get her something lion-ish. I feel a little poor today because I sent in my rent check and finally paid the medical bill for the awful "I feel nauseous and I'm seeing bright lights and now I can't get off the floor" back injury I got back in September, of which my health insurance covered not a cent. Oh well. Happier thoughts! Today I picked some lettuce out of a garden project that my friend co-ordinates, and I went to the bookstore and read some books, and I went to the grocery store and thought about how sometimes going to the grocery store at night in NOVA is about as low stress as making a trip to the airport, and as I drove home I wondered, if I ever wrote, if people would say, either in secret or in public, "your stuff sounds like so-and-so's." I decided I want to check out usgs.gov because my sister said it is a good place to find and identify bird calls.