proteanme

One thing I accomplished this year was teaching myself to cut my own hair, a little longer on top and shaved down on the sides and back. Sometimes I cut it better than others, but just doing it is one of my secret pleasures.

I’ve hardly taken any photos this year, except when I went to Palm Springs and then there’s my ongoing obsession with how the sky looks from my front window, but I just uploaded a few to flirckr. I love the one I posted of RU on the boat. She didn’t know I was taking it and she’s hard to get a good photo of. Plus it captured the joy of being on this little boat in the SF bay, heading toward the Golden Gate as the sun was just starting to begin it’s drop.

Sunshine finally came to Portland and the blues skies and long shadows have wiped out the bitterness about the rain, just like that. No lingering bad feelings. If you sent me sunny wishes, thank you. If you’re sweaty and sitting in front of a fan, I still envy you a little. Portland’s pretty sexy in the sunshine. It’s like finally noticing the bookish girl who sat behind you in English class is actually a fox and then you can’t stop thinking about her. RU and I went for an epic walk to savor all that foxiness. Spectacular stuff - the foxiness of sunshine.

I miss summer. We’re just not getting enough of it this year. Please come back. J’taime été. Seriously, je-the- fuck-taime.

From The Different Kinds of People that There Are

Wizards

Assholes with beards who do magic. In modern times, wizards look just like normal people, because they’ve learned to wear tracksuits and tuxedos over their robes. This means that wizards could be anywhere. Can you trust the people you work with not to be wizards?

• this is my heart. it is a good heart.
• Home made haircuts
• css hack for veertical alignment
• Frank Auerbach
• The train from Portland to Eugene
• Making twice made chicken from the Best Reciepes in the the World by Mark Bittman

I saw a line across the sky tonight. This thin and elongated break in the clouds that was so beautiful. I tried to take a picture, but it was more like a painting. Its poignancy could not be captured in the LCD. It’s gone now. It seems like it only lasted for a few minutes but it’s quite possible it was there long before I looked up and noticed.

Gosh, I’m feeling kinda melancholy today. It’s not something dramatic. It’s not something I’m trying to ward off either. It just is what it is. Lots of little things and nothing big really, although I feel I’ve had some big revelations lately. The funny thing is big revelations don’t always lead to big changes or big action, especially when it’s about mostly understanding who I am in the world. If I had to try and say it better, I’d say things change your life, but that doesn’t mean your life changes. I guess I’ve also had some big longings lately that are just longings, at least for the time being . The “just” in there is not meant to minimize their intensity, but to say I can’t make anything solid come of them, anything more solid than lots and lots of words. Frankly, I’m amazed at the amount of words I got inside me. Sometimes when people say what’s going on, I wanna say nothing much except everything, but that sounds kinda corny.

Here I am Saturday night. No plans. No movie rentals, which for the last year have often taken the place of plans. I’m just trying to accept that things are what they are. And right now they might be not be much. Granted, I’ve been on and off the computer lots today, mostly writing, but I rode my bike, did my volunteer thing, ran some errands. I guess what I’m trying to say is I feel ok and I feel this is real and necessary, this stretch of nothing much.

But what made me want to blog again today is that I laughed out loud when I read this post in W4W casual encounters on CL “Hot Fat Woman in a Hurry to Fuck–Women Only” - it just seemed so amusingly precise.

I’m feeling done in and undone at the same time and I’m completely uninterested in embracing this process. Sometimes, I just so sick of it all.  I’d like to just put my heart on ice.

From Pema Chodron: We may doubt that we’re up to being a warrior-in-training. But we can ask ourselves this question: “Do I prefer to grow up and relate to life directly, or do I choose to live and die in fear?”

Some things I do when I’m at home and I’m avoiding getting work done.

• Get out the compressed air and and clean the crumbs out of my keyboard.
• Get up and go into the kitchen, open the cupboards, close the cupboards, open the fridge, close the fridge, then go back and sit down. Repeat in 20 minutes or 10, depending on how deeply I’m trying to avoid the task at hand.
• Search the web for some red Adidas Beckenbauer sneakers.
• Trim my finger nails.
• Read all the Tanque blogs.
• Read a bunch of other blogs I check on a semi regular basis.
• Dust my desk.
• Browse the personals and look at the raunchy photos craigslisters post in casual encounters.
• Trim the cat’s nails.
• Organize my play lists.
• Search the web for old friends who’s last names I can’t remember.
• Walk to the little store around the corner and look at the snack food, which I used to eat a lot more of, Oreos and HoHos being perennial favorites, but since December I’ve been trying to bring a lot more attention to what I’m eating so now I do more looking and less eating.