waiting

The building next door is coming down brick by brick.

gift horses

Today I am updating passwords and breathing peppermint. Cheers. I am not drinking enough water. The weather is lousy, but not threatening, and the rainy wind didn't need to be an excuse to not go pick up my new sneakers or buy fresh fruit, but I let it be. I've been playing with bras that close in the front and eye makeup and have been disliking my hair. You know, Saturday stuff. Later there's a birthday party and a show in a bar and I can drink and smile and move from side to side and admire the boy up on stage.

I'll be married to that boy five weeks from right now. The only bridal shower I've known about in time to anticipate (for good or bad) is going to happen tomorrow--opening presents in front of a room, there should be a class for this. I actually feel GUILTY about it, the positive attention. I know that this is a problem and I know I should get it into my head that I am worth the fuss, and that people like to make a fuss over weddings, so I should let them, and happily. But, lord. There has already been such a fuss, and the big guns have not yet come out! Weddings are such a racket, and I'm surprised by how lavish they can be and how lavishly generous everyone has been to us. Every time a positive RSVP comes in from a great distance I am suffused with wanting to assure them that they don't really have to come if it's an inconvenience. Are they sure I'm worth the trip?!
A wedding seems like a bizarre sort of exemption to the fairness of life. It's not fair to those on the outside. The outside is not fair. Oh, get out of the gift horse's mouth, April. I'm going to need to at least figure out how to act like I deserve all this fooferaw, in a grateful way. I AM grateful, that's the thing. I am so grateful for all the blessings being poured on me but I feel as if the pourers must not really understand what they're doing, who they're showering. It's just me. S and I don't need to be coddled and spoiled and applauded to marry each other. We would anyway.
...This attitude of mine does not gibe well with how often I've been checking our wedding registry site to see if more of the items on our list have been purchased. Heh.

hyperbole

I wish there was a foolproof (fool being me) way to tell the difference between never happened before and never noticed before. It would make things like differentiating between growing pains and dying so much easier.

two seismic events

One: the library shaking on its foundations yesterday, wondering who was drilling into our bedrock. I wished I had a more poetic awakening to the realization that the earth can move under my feet, but it was simple, and I accepted it, and once my jitters stopped, I stood back up as if the earth was once again as sure as eternity.

Two: surprise ambush bridal shower up in the conference room this morning. I was told it was a meeting. It was a fiesta-themed extravaganza in my honor, with a diadem of paper roses and plastic chili peppers, maracas and salsa and the mariachi band of pandora. Someone gave me a George Foreman grill, and hell if the world is not shaking me back down.

grace hole

The air this morning is incredible--fall!, and my office has the best view of the demolition workers razing the building beside us--sparks! dust! cranes reaching seven stories into the sky!, and when I woke this morning I was expecting a sprint and got yoga instead. This is all grace.
Grace yesterday was in my strong legs and strong arms, in clean hair, in the spice filling my eyes at the place sworn to be the best Mexican food in town by S's Mexican buddies who cook in the kitchen of the Greek restaurant. And grace was the way the newly engraved wedding band fits onto my finger, and how well it looks on his. And in the copper colored vest he'll wear (I am all of a sudden in a tizzy about the bliss in the color of copper, and how I want it everywhere), and the hand-in-hand stroll through the furniture store, wondering if one day we'll be able to settle.
How doubly base of me not to choose to turn my face toward all of these things instead of tilting away and wanting more.

asking the bottom of my bag of Cheez-its

Don't you hate when selfishness and self-righteousness collide? Both are me and neither are useful and the combo is sheer angst.

so many from here to theres

I have been thinking a lot about bra sizes, cake flavors, the German language, the bizarreness of love, and inflation. And again this morning (it keeps happening early on a Monday!) I woke at 4:00 and my mind was turned on for the day. I had a semi-nightmare about a bridal shower a few nights ago that woke me up and kept me up, but this time the one that woke me was about graph paper and missing the crucial step Bs in my from here to theres.

I needed to laugh at

cherry juice

Earlier this week I saw a small tabby cat by the side of the road with its face smashed off, and a half mile down the road a snake, filleted and flattened. And when I got home from work in the afternoon a grasshopper jumped out of my hair and onto the kitchen counter. The next day the cat was gone, and left behind was just a dry red puddle, a jagged star-shaped stain. It made me think of the cherry juice that stains my fingers during the summers and it made me want to be held.

no emotional clue

Do you know what I mean when I say sometimes you can be walking down a road every day for a summer and know, kind of, that you've been there before, but then on a Tuesday morning it catches you off guard that you were THERE before. And you can suddenly transpose the today, the walking in this direction down this block to get from point B to point C, over top of what used to be--four years ago, when I lived in that small white and blue house in town, and this was my escape route. I hadn't really thought to myself that even from the other direction, this was the same block. And the side street I turn off onto these days is the one I used to bike past without pedaling after dark, at the base of the long hill I used to fly down with my arms outstretched. I had no emotional clue this was the same place. No emotional clue whatsoever.

Saturday morning

Fresh coffee, imitation radio, flock of sparrows in the back lot, goosebumps, waiting, whole grain English muffins with cheese. Feet in foreground, self in background, sprawled out like this on the couch. We'll trade it for the squashy tan one later, and I'll keep drifting off to sleep on your lap.

not eloping

I am much less inclined to suggest a last minute elopement now that I've had another dress fitting, and oh man. Oh, MAN I think I might rock the limelight when the time comes. I'm relieved. I've been having self-excoriating days lately wherein I cannot find my own beauty. It's nice to catch a sideways glimpse in a mirror every now and then and think, oh hey, perhaps I do deserve a chance to stand up in front of a crowd and announce my love and my intentions publicly. Perhaps I will deserve to be called 'beautiful.'

No predictions yet as to what effect picking up a marriage license this afternoon will have on my itching to just, damnit, elope already. It may bring all that roaring back. WE'LL SEE. Patience and drama do not come naturally to me. And apparently both are part of the last few months before a wedding.

everything

The fact that I can stream NPR on my computer all day is the second best part of this office, next to the kick-ass coworker with whom I share a space. BUT, today NPR keeps using that five-note intro to Radiohead's Everything In Its Right Place to piece together its programs and it is not helping get that hook out of my head, where I think it always has been and always will be. If this sounds like a complaint it shouldn't be. Sometimes I pick up on that theme in the sky early in the morning when I set off for work on foot and I breathe in the air that is starting to smell less and less like summer. That's what this whole day will sound like.

in the library

I am the kind of girl who never says no to stone fruits, and the kind who pencils, 'I am a woman. My power is non-negotiable,' in the margins of a scrap of paper halfway between the second and third floor.

catching up

Well, to catch you up, yesterday my spider blew off. And I spent about two hours Saturday evening, which was of all things, my anniversary, being kind of petulant. But, before both of these things were a hearty German meal and proclamations of love, and before that I got to hold a two day old baby, who is so. tiny. and before that S and I spent an evening eating red and green crackers and talking about our odds for success (I think they're high) with our mentors. But afterwards, on Saturday after my petulance rolled out and the fog rolled in, S and I went up on a hill until late, and watched the clouds fill up the night sky and blot out the moon. We felt like we were on a planet we'd only just then discovered. Yesterday was a fine day, too. Aside from the spider blowing off, or letting go, or who knows. I hope it landed feet down in a welcoming ditch. I kind of feel like that's what I've done.

RESIGNATION

I love you
 because the earth turns round the sun
 because the North wind blows north
   sometimes
 because the Pope is Catholic
   and most Rabbis Jewish
 because winters flow into springs
   and the air clears after a storm
 because only my love for you
   despite the charms of gravity
   keeps me from falling off this Earth
   into another dimension
I love you
 because it is the natural order of things

I love you
 like the habit I picked up in college
   of sleeping through lectures
   or saying I'm sorry
   when I get stopped for speeding
 because I drink a glass of water
   in the morning
   and chain-smoke cigarettes
   all through the day
 because I take my coffee Black
   and my milk with chocolate
 because you keep my feet warm
   though my life a mess
I love you
 because I don't want it
   any other way.

I am helpless
 in my love for you
It makes me so happy
 to hear you call my name
I am amazed you can resist
 locking me in an echo chamber
 where your voice reverberates
 through the four walls
 sending me into spasmatic ecstasy
I love you
 because it's been so good
 for so long
 that if I didn't love you
 I'd have to be born again
 and that is not a theological statement
I am pitiful in my love for you

The Dells tell me Love
 is so simple
 the thought though of you
 sends indescribably delicious multitudinous
 thrills throughout and through-in my body
I love you
 because no two snowflakes are alike
 and it is possible
 if you stand tippy-toe
 to walk between the raindrops
I love you
 because I am afraid of the dark
   and can't sleep in the light
 because I rub my eyes
   when I wake up in the morning
   and find you there
 because you with all your magic powers were
   determined that
I should love you
 because there was nothing for you but that
I would love you

I love you
 because you made me
   want to love you
 more than I love my privacy
   my freedom   my commitments
     and responsibilities
I love you 'cause I changed my life
 to love you
 because you saw me one friday
   afternoon and decided that I would
love you
I love you I love you I love you


~Nikki Giovanni

tick tick

I am behaving as dictated by my emotions this week. I can tell by the way that my eyes keep welling up at the thought of my cousin's brand new baby boy named Julian. It's the name that gets me as much as the image of new life. Julian. Makes me think of the Beatles and I am letting it make me cry.

snazzy

Sometimes, just for kicks (I like to assume), my work computer starts turning black print to neon pink. It is an easy fix, though bewildering. I am usually at least a little tempted to just let it stay. My co-worker is dyeing all of her gray hairs bright pink one by one and I imagine there's a correlation. She supports my computer's free spirit. So do I.

hitchhiker

I spend a lot of time talking to the spider who has for the past few weeks made her home on the web stretched out at the bottom of my car's driver's side mirror. Oh, she sometimes makes me a little frantic with the way she stays on the thin strands in the middle of the air when the car's in motion. Just go sit at the base of the mirror, please! Are you suicidal!? Watch yourself! The web shakes and twists when I accelerate but she holds on and I guess she'd know better than me how much torquing her handiwork can hold. Sometimes at a stop light she'll sidle on up to the mirror and crouch there at the bottom away from the wind all casual like, and I'm just so relieved. I tell her where I'm going and how I'm feeling and most of the time I'm just scolding her for not sitting tight and for making me fret. I'll try to avoid highways.

I'll call it a vigil

I've been up since 4:00. For a change it's a little peaceful.