I’m sick. Grumble grumble. It amazes me that some tiny little creature could cause so much havoc in my body. It’s quite rude, really; tiny or no, it received no invitation from me. Even vampires have to be invited into your home before they can walk through the door. Is one parasite really so unlike another? Where is your decorum, little bug?
I pulled 24 bobby pins out of my bun last night and let my hair loose after a long weekend at the theatre.
“Why is it,” Shawn asks, “that we work towards something for so long and so hard and when it finally arrives we’re terrified of it and the completely relieved when it’s over?” Good question. I think it’s a little like running a marathon. Not that I’ve ever run a marathon, but bear with me. You work and you train and you finally catch your goal when you cross that finish line. It feels good to be done.
The sound of the curtain pulling open to the audience sounds like the tick-tick-tick of that anticipatory pull up slope at the beginning of a roller coaster. I may have mentioned this before. It strikes me as new every time.
Welcome to Mars.
“Kick front – drop – change – kick front – in – back – change – rock step. It’s really not that hard. Once you get the hang of it, this will be your breather step.”Shawn and I looked at our instructor and down at our tangled feet and then incredulously at each other. Right....Except that he was right. We were learning the Charleston, which seemed dreadfully complicated at the time, but now I don’t even think about it. It’s something Shawn leads in a fast song when we need to breathe for a second or two.
I recently tried out a crochet pattern for a circlet of flowers that I picked up over at Anticraft. A fun little project, though you’ll have to forgive me if I didn’t initiate my new costume piece as the pattern recommends, dancing skyclad under the full moon in the shade of a hawthorne tree. I don’t know of any hawthorne trees around here and my neighbors think I’m weird enough already.
So here it is. I’m 30. Just one day older than yesterday. Recently, over trough-sized margaritas at a restaurant bar, a friend said, “What if the numbering system we adopted had had an extra digit between 1 and 10. Then this year wouldn’t mean anything.” Totally arbitrary. Point taken. Another acquaintance said this: "’Day’ is a vestigial mode of time measurement based on solar cycles. It's not applicable.... I didn't get you anything.”
This morning a public works truck pulled up to street lamp in front of our house. A man in an orange vest hopped into a bucket that was raised up to the level of the light to change the bulb. Luke and I rushed to put on shoes and jackets to go watch. The orange-vested man waved to my son who waved back frantically until his little arm was like to pop out of its socket. I think he’s found his destiny. Nothing pleases this child more than going up or turning on lights so hanging out on top of cranes as a caretaker for a city’s worth of street lamps is clearly a dream occupation.
On a Saturday night, I found myself in the living room in front of a fire with friends. Shawn was playing Hotel California on his guitar, trying to lull our toddler to sleep. Ana sang along while holding a skein of yarn apart on her hands. Cheryl stood before her carefully winding the yarn into a ball. I sat on the floor watching my crochet hook catch the firelight as I moved along on a project. The coffee table had four glasses of wine on it.
Just like old times, I thought.
A colleague and I are working together to design a geographic information system for a client. Not the hardware and software – we did that too, of course, but that’s easy-peasy. Now we’re into the real fun of plotting out the database templates with projection specifications and metadata protocols. I love this stuff. I love this nitty gritty business of file naming structures and data classified by originator and geography and type. It’s like the satisfaction one acquires when solving a rubik’s cube. I bring order to chaos. Entropy is beaten back for one more day.
