Nearly a month ago, I sat at my computer looking for a clip of “June is Bustin’ Out All Over,” from Carousel, to post in my blog.
Sunflower | Click to embiggen
I never found it, as real life and other distractions caused me to give up the search (though I vaguely remember enjoying the process), but it doesn’t matter because June is nearly over – just over a week, and we’ll be into July.
It’s hard to believe that the year is nearly half over, but here we are, a few minutes from the solstice (which, I’m told, happens at 1:04 AM EDT on Friday the 21st (I’m writing this just before midnight CDT on Thursday the 20th. (Don’t you just LOVE nested parentheses?))), and in the morning Summer will be completely here.
I also meant to write a Thursday Thirteen today, but the day slipped away from me, and there are too many negative things that are circling my brain right now:
– the main company I write for has no work for me for at least a month
– a client that I initially wanted to decline disappeared without paying me
– my arm still hurts (though two massages in Mexico have shown me that the pain in my elbow is really radiating from my shoulder)
– the a/c in the car is not working
– I’m cranky and kinda hormonal.
Despite all this, I’m trying to find the positive. Like, not having a ton of contract work (actually none, at the moment) means I can rest my shoulder and elbow, and work on my own writing instead of giving my best hours over to other people’s tasks.
And then, of course, there’s Max and Perry and Teddy, who are the three best dogs ever, and who need me to help them figure out their new pack order.
There’s the sparkling pool in my backyard, and the sunny weather, and the luxury of not having a day job outside the house, so I can swim whenever I want.
So maybe the first couple hours of this summer are tainted by cosmic cruelty, but this all only reinforces what I said in yesterday’s post, and things are aligning the way I need them to be.
I’m not a hard-core believer in horoscopes, because, just as with most forms of prophecy and divination, we use our imaginations to make the predictions self-fulfilling. Mostly, I read them for entertainment.
Once in a while, though, a horoscope will be more than just a neat read. It will be a nudge from the universe, an echo of the smaller, less insistent voice of my own sub-conscious mind.
Today’s LEO advice from one of my favorite syndicated astrologers, Rob Brezny, is one of those cosmic nudges. For the week beginning tomorrow, he writes:
Renowned 20th-century theologian Karl Barth worked on his book Church Dogmatics for 36 years. It was more than 9,000 pages long and contained over six million words. And yet it was incomplete. He had more to say, and wanted to keep going. What’s your biggest undone project, Leo? The coming months will be a good time to concentrate on bringing it to a climax. Ideally, you will do so with a flourish, embracing the challenge of creating an artful ending with the same liveliness you had at the beginning of the process. But even if you have to culminate your work in a plodding, prosaic way, do it! Your next big project will be revealed within weeks after you’ve tied up the last loose end.
I spent a lovely ten days in Mexico, and have been pretty much avoiding the computer since I came home. But my brain and Brezsny’s can’t BOTH be wrong.
In the words of my favorite fictional American president, Jed Bartlet, “Break’s over.”
John Philip Sousa once said, “Jazz will endure just as long as people hear it through their feet instead of their brains.”
I’m not sure if it was jazz or some other beat that inspired the creation of these three curvaceous musicians, found in a plaza a block or so off the Malecon in La Paz, and since the descriptive tablets have either been removed or never existed, I may never know.
What I am certain of, is that the music that inspired this public art had to be the kind you hear, not just with your feet, but with every part of your body.
I imagine the sculptor hearing a street musician play a tune, while another joins in. I imagine a balmy breeze spreading the salt air from the bay throughout the city, and people out and about in the evening, listening to the combined voices of singers, instruments, sea birds, rustling palms, and ocean waves.
My friend Carmi says that this week’s Thematic Photographic theme is “curvaceous.” I’m pretty certain these sculpted musicians played the curviest music in history.
My friend Carmi hosts a photography meme on his blog, and recently (though I think it changed last night, or will change later today) his theme had to do with messiness.
What better mess is there than the one made of cookie crumbs, drips of coffee spilled over the edge of mugs, and crumpled napkins? This mess isn’t the result of a tantrum or a break-in, but is, instead, the natural by-product of good conversation.
It’s evidence of my trip to Mexico to spend time with my mother, who is one of the most generous people ever to populate Planet Earth.
Our adventures, this trip, weren’t terribly grand. We soaked in the sun and sipped lots of espresso, bobbed in her pool, floated in the ocean, and ate several excellent meals in restaurants and at her table.
If I didn’t get a lot of writing done, I came home feeling like my soul was well-rested, and my mind is brim-full of stories I’m getting ready to share.
There’s another kind of messiness, though, the kind that wells up from the place of our deepest emotions. While I was relaxing south of the border, my husband was here, and a skirmish among our dogs ended with the messy reality of putting Miss Cleo to sleep.
This was a decision that would have been made within the year, anyway, but a part of me feels like I failed her for not being here, and failed my husband for making him do it without me.
Human death, too, tainted my trip: My great-aunt Peg died last week. She was nearly 97, and died in familiar surroundings, wrapped in the arms of people who loved her, and comforted by her strong faith in God.
Oddly, that knowledge means that while I feel her loss, I’m less emotional about it than I am about my dog.
But all those tangled emotions, joy and sadness, grief and solace, pleasure and pain, are part of the Mess of simply Being Human. And, just as in improv, where there are no wrong answers, just high and low percentage choices, in life, there are no wrong feelings, just wrong actions people sometimes take in reaction to them.
My own mind is messier than usual right now – too much time, and too little being required of me, I think. I’ll be working, these next few weeks, to reorganize mentally as well as physically.
But not completely, because sometimes I think it’s the messes we make that keep us interesting.
Reflection Through a Bugle by Mark Coffee via iStockPhoto.com – Click to embiggen
Tomorrow is Memorial Day. Earlier this week, I found out that a good writing buddy lost his battle to cancer a few months ago. He was a veteran, and an amazing writer, and so I talked a lot about him.
Excerpt:
Fading light dims the sight,
And a star gems the sky, gleaming bright.
From afar drawing nigh — Falls the night.
Like many people, however, especially those of us with family, friends, or loved ones serving in the military, “Taps” has a more emotional context. It’s the bugle call you hear at funerals, and once you’ve heard it in that setting you never lost that connection. For me, the tears come, mostly for my grandfather, but for a string of others as well, from the very first note.
This weekend, Memorial Day Weekend, “Taps” is playing on an infinite loop in my head.
Why? Because I found out recently that a dear friend, a military veteran who survived a tour in Afghanistan with the U.S. Army, then a year in Kabul with the National Guard, lost his last battle, one with that insidious enemy we call “cancer,” in February.
His name was Mike Greene, but I knew him best by the handle he used on OpenDiary (an early blogging platform that existed before LiveJournal or Blogger): WarriorPoet.
I was watching Julie & Julia again yesterday because I didn’t feel well and wanted something comforting to watch, and Meryl Streep does such a great job of playing Julie Powell’s version of Julia Child that the film is worth re-watching.
Also, I’ve been reading a memoir about a woman’s adventures with the different sweet shops in Paris (and New York) and since I couldn’t convince Fuzzy to go buy me a chocolate croissant, watching people enthuse about amazing food was almost as good.
(Fuzzy threatened to take away the book if I didn’t stop whining about croissants. Then he offered to get some from the grocery store. GROCERY STORE CROISSANTS? UGH!!!!!)
But then the soundtrack to the film captured my attention, and I realized that one of my favorite entries from the Great American Songbook is in it: “Time After Time.”
Shirley Bassey does not sing it in the movie.
But she did sing it.
And just as there’s no such thing as too much butter, there’s also no such thing as too much Bassey.
There are days when I wake up in the morning and am disgustingly perky, bouncing in and out of the bathroom, dancing my way to the kitchen, making coffee because I want it, and not because I need it.
Then there are the days like today, when I woke up aching from head to toe, feeling like my brain was wrapped in gauze, and that every movement required me to swim through pudding. I have these days about once a month, but this one snuck up on me, although, in retrospect it explains the meltdown I had via email with two good friends. Hormones are SO much fun!
Fortunately, today was a day where I had no deadlines, so I was able to take myself off to bed as soon as I’d finished wrangling the dogs (the three older ones have to be fed before the puppy can be let out in the morning, or no one eats the right food, and since the four dogs have three different types of very expensive grain-free dog food, this is an important part of my mornings).
I had every intention of doing some writing, but my brain and body joined forces and dragged me into sleep, and so, I spent most of the day curled up on the bed with a stack of books remaining largely ignored, the computers all turned off, and three of the four dogs curled up near me.
Around five, I began to feel slightly more human. Or at least, I felt hungry, so I had a tuna sandwich and part of a ginger ale, took a shower, read magazines for a while, and ran to the grocery store, though I still had that pudding-feeling.
The house is devoid of chocolate (with the exception of chocolate protein shake mix), and I made a point of NOT buying any at the store, but when we got home, I brewed some lovely Kusmi tea which had come in my last Birchbox. The flavor was called “euphoria” and was roasted mate with chocolate and orange. I added a level teaspoon of turbinado sugar, and while I didn’t feel euphoric after drinking it, I did feel a bit more grounded and centered.
Another mug of tea followed about an hour later, along with a cup of strawberry Chobani yogurt, and a ton of water.
And now? Now it’s just after midnight, and while several layers of the brain-gauze have been lifted, I’m still tired and sore, so I’m taking myself back to bed.
It was grey and damp over the weekend, which meant it was the perfect weather for Saturday’s International Tabletop Day board game party, and the rain returned Monday night and is still going on as I write this on Wednesday night. Rain and I have a special relationship, so this week’s list is all about that.
1) I grew up on A. A. Milne’s children’s books. Most people know him as the creator of Winnie the Pooh, but my favorite of his works is the book that was published right after Now We Are Six. It’s called A Gallery of Children, and it’s comprised of short stories that are all character studies of different children. My favorite is “A Voyage to India.” Here’s an excerpt:
To-day was the day. To-morrow will be too late. Perhaps even now if it cleared up – but each time she has said this, down has come another cloud. She tried shutting her eyes; she did try that. She tried shutting her eyes and saying, “One, two, three, four – I’ll count twenty and then I’ll open them, and please, will you let the rain stop by then, please, because it’s too terribly important, you know why.” Yes, she counted twenty; quickly, up to twelve, and then more slowly to fifteen, and then sixteen…seventeen…eighteen…nine-…teen…and then, so slowly that it wasn’t really fair, but she wanted to make it easier for God, twe…twe…twe…TWENTY!
But it went on raining.
2) On rainy days, I prefer tea to coffee. I love the way the sugar hisses as it falls into the tea (I don’t typically sweeten coffee). I love the way the rain hisses as it falls into my swimming pool.
3) When there is no actual rain outside, on really hot, dry days, I have movie marathons of weather disasters. A typical choice would be a double feature of The Perfect Storm and The Day After Tomorrow.
4) When I was a kid, I had no idea what a rain barrel was. When my friends and I sang, “Say, Say, My Playmate,” we would sing “Slide down my rainbow,” instead of the original line. (How do you slide down a rain barrel, anyway?)
5) Langston Hughes on rain:
Let the rain kiss you. Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops. Let the rain sing you a lullaby.
6) My idea of the perfect afternoon is a pot of tea, a stack of books, and a driving rainstorm. A fire in the fireplace is nice, but not necessary.
7) My ability to willfully suspend disbelief is so well-honed that if we see a movie with significant weather, I expect it the actual weather to be the same when we leave the theater. This is especially true for movies where there’s a lot of rain.
8) Despite the above, I actually have a very low threshold for movies where people are tired, hungry, cold, dirty, and wet for long periods of time.
9) A significant part of my childhood was spent in Colorado, where, during the summer, it rains every day, but only for about fifteen minutes. There is NOTHING like a Rocky Mountain rainstorm.
10) I didn’t start getting storm-related migraines until I moved to Texas eight years ago, but the funky purple-grey-green light that comes with storms has always made my eyes hurt. I don’t wear sunglasses at night, but I do wear them on rainy days.
11) I’m not a fan of power-outages, but on dark, dreary rainy days, I like to enhance the mood by keeping the lights dim and lighting candles. There’s something so magical about flickering flames inside and flashing lightning outside, and the combined scents of ozone and candle wax.
12) For my Sunday Brunch post at All Things Girl on March 31st, I wrote about rain. Read about My Romance with Rain.
13) On rainy days, my musical tastes run to instrumental jazz or classical music, rather than anything with lyrics, but my favorite rain-related song ever is Vienna Teng’s “Lullaby for a Stormy Night.” Here’s the video:
I woke up this morning with my right elbow throbbing with pain. It hurts to bend it, and if I try to lift anything heavier than my iPhone, tears spring to my eyes.
Icy Hot Balm, ibuprofen, and a single, leftover flexeril got me through the day, mainly because I logged off everything and spent the day doing laundry, reading, watching comfort television (currently Season 3 of Gilmore Girls) and napping. Max was so worried about me (possibly because he hit my sore elbow causing me to send a glass of cranberry juice flying across the kitchen) that licking my face clear of tears wasn’t enough; he curled up on Fuzzy’s side of the bed, under the covers, and let me rest my sore arm on his warm, soft back.
Dogs make everything better.
Even when you essentially have one hand tied behind your back.
In preparation for the annual summer lightening of my hair color, I’m allowed to use hot water to wash my hair again (my usual technicolored dyes require tepid-water washing) and I’m also once again able to use mint shampoo (mint strips moisture and color).
My current minty fresh hair products of choice? Organix Mint and Tea Tree Oil, which come in curvy green bottles, and smell almost exactly like Girl Scout Cookies…Thin Mint Girl Scout Cookies, to be specific.
The Dove body-wash I’m currently using, is made with pomegranate but smells like raspberry Zingers.
