proteanme

A random list of things that some of my friends find hot.

• The uni-brow
• A gap in the front teeth
• Hands
• Hairy legs
• Mustaches on femmes
• Musky body odor
• Goofy social awkwardness
• A book in the back pocket
• Dimples above the butt
• Authentic nerdiness

And a few of my own

• Over bites
• Big noses
• Sitting close and touching legs
• Eye contact
• Painted toe nails pushing through the open toe of shoes with a heel
• Bare skin that is usually covered during colder weather
• Following the proper etiquette for using a fork and knife Continental or European style
• Messy long hair pulled up off the neck onto the back of the head, especially when strand are tucked behind the ear

I cooked up a storm the other day. I roasted beets and roasted chicken with garlic in olive oil. I boiled new potatoes, sauted some fava fresh beans, made a vinaigrette for two heads of lettuce that I cleaned and tore and I simmered a big bunch of collard greens from our garden in white wine and chicken stock. I think I started cooking at 6pm and got done around midnite, although I did stop to eat along the way. Everything turned out super tasty too, which is a relief, because I’ve had a number of mis-steps lately. I’m mentioning all this because spending all that time in the kitchen – twice shelling the favas, marinating chicken, cutting cleaning 40 leaves of collards –  it was like I had my old me back, meaning that for many, many months I’ve been missing some vital part of me that included getting lots of joy and meaning from being ambitious in the kitchen.

Ever since my dad died I thought that the me I was missing had gotten done in from grief, but I’ve come to realize that I was letting my job rob me of that part of myself. So I’m going to try a new approach on the inside, something a little more sane and balanced, I hope. And a new point of view on the outside too, meaning I’m leaving my current job and in short time, I’ll be starting up a  new job at somewhere new. I don’t talk about work much in this forum, a purposeful choice, but it’s a big change – self imposed upheaval – and that process is worth noting and sharing. Especially because it’s a bit of a roller coaster ride which I’ve been trying to notice that, how I move from fear to sadness to excitement, all in the matter of a couple hours and often generated only from whatever I’m mulling over in my head.

Hot. Summer. Sun. Puts me to sleep. I laid in the hammock out back this afternoon, but could not get through more than 3 or 4 paragraphs of  something in my New Yorker without dozing off. I’m not complaining though, just taking note. We’re having a little heat wave here. It’s impressive. I should probably drink more water. This blue sky is like some kind of perfect jewel. I can’t stop staring at it. It’s so amazingly bright out. Shiney even.

Just because it takes a lot to surprise me and I don’t believe in astrology doesn’t mean that’s that I’m a cynical. For a while now I’ve been letting people call me cynical and I’ve really got to stop doing that because what they really mean is I’m skeptical.  And doubt, which I have a fair amount of,  isn’t the same thing as scorn, and me being doubtful doesn’t make me contemptuous or bitter.

If I wanted to add to my credo I’d say that the planets don’t figure into my experience of how the world works. I try to figure the world out by looking at what people do and people do wonderful and horrible things in equal measure.

Also, I’ve had it with snarkiness. I think when people say snarky things they think they’re being witty and clever. But really they’re just being mean.

When art and politics are mixed just right it’s a pretty incredible experience. I’ve not read this poet before, but she sure got my attention with the following verse.

False Documents

They ran the numbers twice for you
giving you the benefit of the doubt
but you knew the computer at the other
end of the officer’s PDA would not find
your brown number in its little black index.
You drove exactly one mile per hour below the speed
limit. You buckled your baby into his car seat according
to instructions. You signaled for exactly three seconds
before you turned left. You wanted to hide the Subway wrappers,
the empty box of Orbitz gum. Evidence of Big Macs.
You wanted to drink the Mountain Dew before it turned toxic
in the hot Phoenix sun as you asked, doesn’t this green
sludge make me American enough? But you didn’t
move because you knew the officer would have taken
that for gun-finding or drug-hiding or some other supposed
Mexican sport. You with your hands at ten and two
wondered how long the bus ride the officer would take you
on would last and whether they would provide any water.
You wondered, as the officer put hand to holster,
how dangerous it would be to down that Mountain
Dew then and there, in the wide-open American air.

Nicole Walker

Uncut pie

Originally uploaded by proteanme

I haven’t made a pie for a couple years. But it’s RU’s birthday and that meant it was time. The crust was the bomb, but the peaches got a little under cooked. Still good though. We’ve been celebrating in one or the other since Friday night tacos. We saw this really wonderful French film this morning while we were waiting for the skies to clear – The Father of My Children. I can’t recommend it enough. So sweet and sad. And all the nuance and beauty that American films don’t trust their viewers to get

I wrote this several years ago and I keep thinking I can user some of it for a poem. It’s about summer when I was a kid.

We spent the rest of the summer in my backyard or Tim’s and when we weren’t there, we were riding our bikes up and down the street with one of the George’s (pet snake) wrapped around our handle bars. We passed rainy days jumping up and down on my bed, singing to Jesus Christ Superstar and the Jackson Five. We found the Playboy magazines our parents had hidden under their mattresses and we swung on the trapeze my father hung in the garage. We wrote a play about saving a tree and staged it on my front porch and charged every kid in the neighborhood a nickel to come see it. We ate Oreo cookies and Space Sticks and cut the crusts off the ham sandwiches we made. We drank Koolaid sitting on the wall of my porch, legs dangling over the side, dropping half melted ice cubes down into the patches of dirt beneath our feet. On muggy evenings my mother took us to Lindners Ice Cream shop. She stayed in the car while we waited in line, waiting our turn to order milkshakes and sundaes with lids on them so we could take back home. On days it was so hot that the pavement burnt our feet, we’d ride over to Butler college a couple blocks away from where we lived. We’d throw our bikes in the grass and chase each other under the rows of sprinklers that rained down on the big lawn in front of the library. The water arced in the sun and cast off halos wherever we looked.

I wanted to add something to my credo post, which is I believe you should try not to do things that cause you to feel pain and humiliation and if you do you should try and forgive yourself as best your can and then try hard not to those things again. Just practicing this could probably take up a lifetime, although if you want to do other things, like go to school  or climb a mountain or read the classics, it shouldn’t be thought of as mutually exclusive endeavor.

Cast a spell

on me
wrap me in

whatever
warp of words

come to
your mouth

until I gulp
them whole

of thought
whatever spin

we enter when
we so imbibe

what neither
had in mind

-Ciaran Carson

I wore a pair of shoes today that I’ve warn exactly twice in the last two years. Once was at my dad’s funeral and once was at Ned and Kristi’s wedding. I don’t know why I thought about that when I looked down at my feet today, but that’s what happened. I was walking down the sidewalk and looking at my feet and remembering how I’d worn these shoes to the funeral and it made me feel sad to think of these shoes as funeral shoes. But then I remembered wearing them to the wedding and it felt like a relief not to have a pair of funeral shoes.