Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk

+I could get used to this. Sitting in the bookstore cafe on campus, drinking coffee, with a laptop literally on my lap, working. The office is under construction and so I am escaping the banging and drilling and manly heave-hoe-ing sounds that are coming from the other side of the wall that will soon be torn down. And my work can all be accomplished on this little traveling machine: email, MS Access, and the web. Lovely.

+Aaron and I watched The Fountain last night. Brilliant. Beautiful. Breathtaking.

+Happy Anniversary, my love. Ten years of sweetness.

For the Anniversary of My Death

by W. S. Merwin

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveler
Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what

I am

To be immortally this. This life, this self, reaching into eternity. Yes, death is a blessing. She voiced a hope that reincarnation is real. A hope that this is not the end, each individual's spark of life reaching out in continued exploration and perfection. But I would reincarnate backward. Take me back to mammal, bird, amphibia, reptile, down down the branches to lowly invertebrate. Consciousness and self-awareness far from reach. To be free of self. To be. He said it perfectly when he said "I am." Way Truth Life. No need for explanation for those words are mystery and unexplainable. No way to look at the thing itself but by way of parable, story and symbol. I am. I exist. I am water, wine and living bread.

In the next life, let's be furry mammals together. Wrapped in only ourselves for warmth in our den. Living only for the sake of existence.

My name is Gladiator

At my signal, unleash hell!

You little brat..

At my aunt's daycare, where my daughter spends half the day, there is a little girl who bugs me. Most of the time I like kids (in small doses when they aren't related to me) but not this one. The second day I dropped Maddie off, she said to me "You were wearing those clothes yesterday." She is only four. This morning she said to me, "Why do you always wear those shoes?"

It really irritated me but I didn't say anything. Later I caught myself running through possible responses for the next time she strikes:

Because I have better things to think about than my shoes
A lot of people only have one pair of shoes, or maybe none at all
I do not, I wore the black ones yesterday!! So ha!

I really shouldn't have cared at all. But I think it took me back to middle school when I got "pulled over by the fashion police" (two older girls) for wearing high tops. Some things you just don't get over...

Peas to Particles

Tonight I quite accidentally created a little masterpiece. I didn't feel up to cooking, but I didn't think Aaron would feel up to another night of just salad. From years of experience in the kitchen, I know that the tastiest, most satisfying "quick-meal" is a stir-fry. So I proceeded to gather my bounty, harvested earlier in the week from the Farmer's Market: kale, onion, tomato, cilantro, and fresh peas (in the pod, so quaint). I felt like Anne of Green Gables shelling those deliciously old-fashioned peas. I heated spices and onion: coriander, ginger, tumeric, cumin, salt, garlic, chilies. In twenty minutes I had stirred up a lovely veggie curry and then realized I would be enjoying it alone. I'd forgotten that he would be home late. I took my one-pot wonder, poured over a bed of fluffy basmati rice, to the front-porch, along with a home brew.

I knew I would be blogging about this, so I got the camera and snapped some pictures before I even had the first bite. While I ate, I mulled over how I would describe the dish, what interesting words would I use. These thoughts ran in the front of my mind, but lurking behind--a sort of metathought--was the notion of framing an experience in words as it is happening. The act of thinking about how I would tell the simple event actually changed the experience of the event. Like in quantum physics when a particle is altered the moment it is observed. No matter how I tried to stay in the moment, relish the flavors of my masterpiece, my fingers were itching for a pen...or the keyboard.

Kangaroo or Rabbit?

+The Daily News reported on a 6 foot tall kangaroo that was captured Monday after a weekend of hopping around rural central Indiana. My favorite part of the story was this bit from local man Jim Greiner, 53, who saw the kangaroo hopping towards his son's graduation party: "We thought it was a large rabbit."

+Other items in nature: the Planet Earth 5-disc series is a must see. Hands down, the most beautifully filmed nature documentary. The production team used state-of-the-art cameras to capture breathtaking aerial shots of some of the most remote places on earth. Rent it today.

Riding the bus

I decided to conduct a social experiment yesterday: taking the bus. For someone who's never ridden Muncie's public transportation, who's always had a car or access to one, this experiment was shrouded in an illusion of romance. Romance in a daring, slumming for fun kind of way. I also thought it would be a noble deed for the planet, doing my part for global warming. But mostly I was bored. The experiment began a little too well when I arrived at the bus stop three blocks from my house, the bus pulling up right as I reached the corner. A quiet little jaunt downtown. But then I got gutsy (stupid). I loaded myself and my daughter (in her stroller) on a random route that I assumed would go past at least one convenience store so I could run my insignificant errand. Little did I know that forty YMCA day-campers were about to board my bus. I was soon to learn that this bus ran the route from hell, zig-zagging through random neighborhoods, people boarding and exiting but never the kids. They stayed. All of us at standing room only, me holding the stroller with a death grip. And no CVS in sight. Nor Walgreens. The bus finally squealed to a halt at the park, and we got off, and I walked and walked and walked because I was stupid not to bring a schedule or a watch or my fucking car.

Spring...oh wait, Summer

I heard this on the Writer's Almanac this morning. I know it's summer already, but Spring is still in my mind. A poem by Louise Erdrich and a little picture of a spring chick.

Spring Evening on Blind Mountain

I won't drink wine tonight
I want to hear what is going on
not in my own head
but all around me.
I sit for hours
outside our house on Blind Mountain.
Below this scrap of yard
across the ragged old pasture,
two horses move
pulling grass into their mouths, tearing up
wildflowers by the roots.
They graze shoulder to shoulder.
Every night they lean together in sleep.
Up here, there is no one
for me to fail.
You are gone.
Our children are sleeping.
I don't even have to write this down.