soul like a spider

I am sitting in this parking lot several years later for very different reasons. The Borders is...

Thu, 17 May 2012 21:05:10 -0400

I am sitting in this parking lot several years later for very different reasons.

The Borders is closed. The Starbucks, where I had my first date has changed its interior at least three times.

I’m sitting here doing very adult things like waiting in our only car (because mine is in the shop from being in two accidents) reading until my husband gets off work, and anticipating grocery shopping.

One of my major memories here was when it was cold outside. It was about four years ago when my husband first asked to date me. I was nervous, he was nervous, and I had a reason I was going to say no but as soon as I sat down across from him at their ridiculously small tables, it all melted away and I knew the only answer that could be was yes.

Going even further back was my first date here with a boy who moved far away. I thought I could handle a black coffee—how bad could it be?—but no. I barely sipped it between grimaces and eye-lash-batting. I like black coffee now from most places, but Starbucks’ house brew is still too bitter. (Which might be apropos.)

The bookstore where I took all the boys is closed. The table where I first sat, trying to focus on writing an anti-abortion letter to the governor (oh I was so young and stupid) while holding hands with a twitchy/hyper, but marvelously handsome boy is gone.

And then I went there with the coffee guy, who named himself after the split names of two famous authors (and I after a mythological beast) but I don’t remember if we bought anything.

I went with my husband on multiple occasions. On our first date (after eating and Chili’s where I was so nervous I didn’t order for the first half hour), on many dates thereafter, and we met there in the blinding sunlight where I hid behind a shelf to reconvene (and makeup) after our breakup.

Borders and Starbucks were always a part of the journey; rarely were they the destination. I was always coming and going from somewhere else, but I always stopped for sweet lattes and flirting between bookshelves along the way. Maybe dinner at Steak ‘N Shake with the coffee boy (and later “Lady in the Water”), or meeting up with old classmates in the winter, reuniting with lost friends, and so many other times that were just as important that I can’t recall.

Borders is closed. Starbucks is not really the same. Mountain Jack’s is closed. The Caribou where I used to do Algebra homework and sit for long hours and talk about theology is closed too. (No more math problems, no more diagrams of time and space.) Steak ‘N Shake isn’t 24 hour anymore. And yet, here I am in the same parking lot, where I will be for years to come for very different reasons than I am now.

This must be what it feels like to grow up.

12minds: I bought my first piece of art a couple of months ago....

Tue, 08 May 2012 01:01:26 -0400

12minds:

I bought my first piece of art a couple of months ago. It’s a small thing, but it’s beautiful, it speaks to me, and only one exists in the world. It shows the back of a nude woman with her knees curled up against her chest and her arms enclosing into herself. The blue hues are accented with such strong, heavy brushstrokes that the paint itself looks as if it it’s reaching out in some kind of stormy-ocean-toned supplication. Aren’t we made of waves, after all? “Life is the just the progression toward, and then a recession from, one phrase—‘I love you,’” or so says Fitzgerald.

Art matters to me a great deal because it begets a conversation. I appreciate people who strive to not only see the world from a different angle, but to convey that message—people who try to re-examine truths and tell the story in a way for you and I to understand and to feel. And that causes us to think about what we feel and why, and just like that we’re not the same as we were a moment ago. Now we have awareness. Fiat lux, and all that jazz. Be it polka or hip-hop, a Picasso or Klimt, Hamlet or Hunger Games. You end up different and I love that.

But more importantly, it means that we’re always in a process of change and evolution. Maybe it’s a process of refinement, or maybe we really are waves in the ocean—tides moving toward and away—trying to reach beyond the shore but never quite making it. It means that the us of today will be distinctly different from the us of tomorrow or 10 years from now and that life is one conversation in which we’re all trying to find our voices. I believe that there’s grace and beauty in that.

But seriously, that piece is going to look amazing once it’s framed.

This is how I feel.

Sun, 06 May 2012 18:11:07 -0400

This is how I feel.

portraitparty: 63/365 Self Triumph I don’t know what it...

Sun, 06 May 2012 18:01:05 -0400

portraitparty:

63/365

Self

Triumph

I don’t know what it is… But something about this really speaks to me. I mean… WOW. I love this.

Maybe she’ll sell prints in her Etsy shop!

"The world is so exquisite, with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive..."

Sat, 05 May 2012 17:21:52 -0400

“The world is so exquisite, with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there’s little good evidence. Far better, it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look Death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.”

- Carl Sagan, “Billions and Billions” (via aprettywar)

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Sat, 05 May 2012 17:13:57 -0400

poetsandwriters: Mary Karr, from “Mary Karr: The Art of Memoir...

Sat, 05 May 2012 17:11:53 -0400

poetsandwriters:

Mary Karr, from “Mary Karr: The Art of Memoir No. 1,” Paris Review, Winter 2009

"And when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight — isn’t that a strange thing?..."

Sat, 05 May 2012 17:11:13 -0400

““And when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight — isn’t that a strange thing? That absolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and you’re less fearful and less anxious and generally stronger as a result: isn’t it amazing that a completely invisible thing in your head can feel realer than anything you’ve experienced before? You see things more clearly and you know that you’re seeing them more clearly. And it comes to you that this is what it means to love life, this is all anybody who talks seriously about God is ever talking about. Moments like this.””

- Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections (via aprettywar)

"There were phrases of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony that still made Coe cry. He always thought it..."

Tue, 01 May 2012 18:14:29 -0400

“There were phrases of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony that still made Coe cry. He always thought it had to do with the circumstances of the composition itself. He imagined Beethoven deaf and soul-sick, his heart broken, scribbling furiously while Death stood in the doorway, clipping his nails. Still, Coe thought, it might have been living in the country that was making him cry. It was killing him with its silence and loneliness, making everything ordinary too beautiful to bear.”

- “The Man with the Miniature Orchestra,” by Dave Algonquin.

Nine Out of Ten Dentists Agree I Am Not an Octopus

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 15:27:00 -0400

“I think I am an octopus.
Nine out of ten dentists agree
that I am not an octopus.
Still, eight eight eight eight
eight eight eight eight thoughts
before bed, eight eight eight
eight eight eight eight eight
kisses in a cave of black mist.
Having three hearts, holy fuck.
I filled you & then hid my three
hearts behind a rock that looked
like me, just stonier. Sad, I know,
the way my hands bleed rooms.
I think I am a salmon. Hello, upstream.
Nine out of ten dentists agree
that salmon are so brave.
Grizzly bears don’t need to be brave,?
they just lean over running faucets.
I didn’t notice that tree before.
This damselfly, these Google Alerts.
Mom, did you see them say
those words? I didn’t turn
wine into less wine but I brought
her home & she wanted to stay.
Her is you & you are midwestern’s
winter, soon midwestern’s spring,
my never midwestern’s forgotten.”

-Gregory Sherl

U.S. Logged The Most Measles Cases It's Had In 15 Years (And In A Twist, Anti-Vaccination Parents Are NOT The Culprit)

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 15:29:55 -0400

U.S. Logged The Most Measles Cases It's Had In 15 Years (And In A Twist, Anti-Vaccination Parents Are NOT The Culprit):

thedaddycomplex:

The number of measles cases nearly quadrupled in 2011 from the yearly median of 60, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). This story in the L.A. Times states most cases took place in a handful of outbreaks after the virus was brought in by travelers from overseas. The CDC chalks up the outbreaks to the lower vaccination rate among children, but the reason those kids aren’t vaccinated has changed:

Until recent years, many parents sought exemptions because they feared — without foundation — that the vaccine is dangerous and could produce autism. More recently, according to Dr. Anne Schuchat, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Infectious Diseases, many harried parents simply sign the exemption application because that is easier than actually procuring the immunization.

I don’t know what’s worse — parents putting their child at risk because they’ve been fed junk science or parents putting their child at risk because they’re lazy.

"Life’s Tragedy It may be misery not to sing at all, And to go silent through the brimming..."

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 09:16:00 -0400

“

Life’s Tragedy

It may be misery not to sing at all,
And to go silent through the brimming day;
It may be misery never to be loved,
But deeper griefs than these beset the way.

To sing the perfect song,
And by a half-tone lost the key,
There the potent sorrow, there the grief,
The pale, sad staring of Life’s Tragedy.

To have come near to the perfect love,
Not the hot passion of untempered youth,
But that which lies aside its vanity,
And gives, for thy trusting worship, truth.

This, this indeed is to be accursed,
For if we mortals love, or if we sing,
We count our joys not by what we have,
But by what kept us from that perfect thing.

”

- Paul Laurence Dunbar

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Sun, 15 Apr 2012 18:12:22 -0400

sandylion88: “Everybody has beauty, but not everybody sees it.”...

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 18:03:48 -0400

sandylion88:

“Everybody has beauty, but not everybody sees it.” -Confucius

Tonight, I'm worried about failing.

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 00:07:22 -0400

There is a huge project I’m finishing up. I was really happy at the beginning, but now I worry that I did everything wrong going into it, that it won’t be interesting or that people won’t find it useful or informative. Maybe I shouldn’t have bothered.

I know how I would make it more perfect next time, but it’s too late to go back for that now.

Maybe I will fail. Maybe it will be okay. Maybe it will turn out better than I expect. I just never know.

There was a piece recently that I almost didn’t post on my blog because I thought it would be too weird or that it was a little bit too open for people. But then that was the post that got numerous responses.

I just need to quiet my self-chattering. Get through today. Get through this week. And maybe it will be okay.

I kind of want to be like these people when I grow up.

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 10:00:57 -0400

I kind of want to be like these people when I grow up.

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Sat, 07 Apr 2012 01:45:45 -0400

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