my week; a recap

I've worn the same earrings all week, and I wonder why I don't just DO that. It's been a nice sort of symbolism.

The other day I found the most lovely compost-related poem ever. Compost. Like decomposing plants and organic materials. I keep re-reading it because it's kind of inspirational.

I've been playing in the pit for a high school musical this week, because I always say yes when someone asks me to. And it's not as if I don't want to. I get paid, y'all. Also, I have this thing where I always totally fall in love with the kids. Even when they're not... they're not that good.... Neither am I, frankly. Or I haven't been lately. My upper register has been hopelessly swoopy because I'm tired and trying to play softly and don't give a damn about breath support.

Here's something new: after a few weeks of experimentation without any dire consequences, I have decided that I don't believe in deodorant. But this is me today. You may want to ask again in July.

I keep making mistakes at work. Skipping pages, ruining files, mistyping numbers. I even had to have a replacement flatbed scanner brought in to my office. Have written more emails of apology this week than I have in the first few months of this year combined. The worst are the times I get the corrective phone call before I catch myself and am caught off guard. Oh good morning to you, too, and yes, that was my fault. I sometimes tell the voice on the other end that I'm sorry, it was my mistake. I say, I'm going through a transitional phase here. Well, aren't I always?

I blame my muddledheadedness on the fact that I've gone straight from my bed to my job to rehearsals to bed all week and this means I've barely even had time to keep up with The Colbert Report. Also, haven't had like ANY time with my man.

Well, aside from yesterday... he was wearing a tux and I was wearing the smell of his skin on my arms and a coating of goosebumps and I was listening to the 1812 Overture from a pew. This is a good defense against the whirl that will be this weekend.

You know, this weekend. With the talks about chemo and talks about moving boxes and talks about how breakable our spirits really are, and all this speckled in between musical performances in a tiny town forty minutes away.

overdue

Today I am
70% sure that all the studying students are

staring

at me

as I push my book cart through the library.

Which is kind of a waste of their energy,
because it was just yesterday afternoon that I
WD-40ed
the crap

out of that sucker's squeaky wheels.

TRUE OR FALSE

Real emeralds are worth more than synthetics
but the only way to tell one from the other
is to heat them to a stated temperature,
then tap. When it's done properly
the real one shatters.
I have no emeralds.
I was told this about them by a woman
who said someone had told her. True or false,
I have held my own palmful of bright breakage
from a truth too late. I sense the principle.

-John Ciardi

acting

I am full to the brim of mental tumors and high school musicals and fog machines and long drives home with the radio cranked up loud. This is one of those weeks that keeps me going every day, all day, and doesn't leave me room to stop and think. I guess I shouldn't complain--thinking, lately, has been getting me nowhere. This week I'll replace thinking with watching a fake governess and a fake captain and a fake family of seven fake fall in love with each other in a scuffed high school auditorium while I sit slouched down in my chair in the pit.

auspicious start

And when I say auspicious, I mean this new year of my life is already well played, because it began an hour ago with beer from the bottom of a pitcher and a gift bag full of peeps and a rendition of the Beatles' birthday song played to me from stage by my boyfriend's band. He looks so good in red.

on a Friday afternoon

I hate it when
pink highlighter forces me to scan in gray
but I love
the bowl of birthday guacamole
(and peeps rolled into sushi)
and the sound of the printer
latching onto a fresh sheet
of purple

malignancy

Why don't I have any ice cream in the house? This would be the perfect evening for ice cream. If I had some I'd probably overdo it, just like I've just smudged nail polish along the sides of my toenails. Because I don't have any restraint today and I don't have a steady hand. Because, oh, this is such a cliche, but it is NOT FAIR, and WHY couldn't it have been ME instead who got the diagnosis of cancer on a beautiful spring morning? It is such an affront, this disease. I am so terribly pissed off that it had to be my mother who caught its bullet in her breast. I barely knew my mom's mother because she died when I was young of this same disease, and this fact offends me even further. I am thinking about time bombs and radiation and the fact that I do not know how to hem my own pants. So this canNOT be the end. It just can't.

love story

THE reason I am smiling as I sit at work on a Monday morning, just hours before my mother undergoes a biopsy on a lump in her right breast that is like a peach pit, an insidious, dark evil peach pit: am remembering yesterday evening, curled up in green and spinning lightly from the rum still in my system, warmly wrapped in a borrowed sweatshirt three sizes too big and arms just the right size, we were kissing and thanking each other for being and I closed my eyes and he licked my eyebrow. ‘What the hell did you just do?’ He did it again. Like the fluffy calico cat had earlier that day to my parents’ dog as we all waited for the Easter ham, he held me down and cleaned my eyebrow with his tongue. He delights me sometimes, so much that I can only make croaking, crooning noises from my throat. Ah, you.

how I am ending the day

I was sitting in the new grass--sort of an inky gray green under the stars--at the top of the hill and I saw a burst of fireworks down in the distance across the valley. For a moment I wished I had someone beside me to back up my eyes with their own, but before I'd even finished that thought I heard proof--the faint echoed bang, a few seconds too late but attached all the same to the bright ball of sparks I'd just seen. And then another, and another. I don't know why someone would set off fireworks late in the evening of Good Friday, but I'm glad they did, because I felt rewarded. Here I am, being really damn selfish but trying to pretend I'm not, being over-tired and under-positive, and despite my disappointment in me there are fireworks in the distance.

I am in an empty house this weekend. I do get used to the way I rattle around when I'm the only one here, but solitude doesn't fit nearly as well with who I am these days than it might have in the past. I am trying to keep my back straight and I am trying to remember how I used to always rely on myself first and not second. It's hard. I have gotten into the habit of leaning and so when times come when there's nothing to lean on, I find myself toppling backwards.

But I will pretend this is my cabin in the woods, and I'll wake up tomorrow morning with the sun streaming in.

aloneliness

It's very easy to stop wanting an empty house the minute you've gotten one.