I was essentially cockblocked by my mom this weekend. First, I went to a soccer tournament at which, I am realizing in retrospect with the aid of facebook photos, my hair looked like a clown wig. In a crowded, sweltering bar the night before I received two separate compliments on my hair, which perhaps went to my head.

There is a scene in Gosford Park in which homely Mabel confronts her husband over the affair he is having--she finds a check he extorted out of his rich lover because he has squandered her family fortune--and they have a vicious fight. At the end, just as he is leaving, he snaps at the maid who has seen all this, as she was in the room to help Mabel dress for dinner, "Do try to make her look presentable." Mabel flinches and weeps as he slams the door, but with some solace from the maid, and realizing that she cannot miss dinner without everyone realizing something is wrong, eventually says bravely but sadly, "I suppose there's no harm in trying." There is a complex of emotions contained in her delivery of that sentence. She tells her lifetime of resignation to the disappointing fact of her appearance against the arbitrary rubrics of beauty, the finality of her suppression of her true emotions to satisfy her misguided determination to always present her best face, and her willingness to subjugate herself to the social system that tortures her because she is so far into it that the way out seems nothing less than a terrifying betrayal of her entire morality. This is not how I feel about my hair, but it is what I think about when I am standing in front of the mirror hoping that it has finally become the magic sex mop--telling elegant drape--rich tabard--pixie riot I want and not the hairy rebellious toadstool of the five minutes before I must leave to meet my friends.

The day after I went to the bar, I played soccer all day and then went to a barbecue. My hair did this too, with intentionally minimal intervention on my part. At the barbecue, I met a cusp Aquarian who threw grapes that I caught in my mouth. The tranquil hedgehog on top of his head amused the dyspeptic starfish on mine--we went to meet friends of mine in Wallingford, then we had nowhere else to go. I thought about how it is to have something with valuable benefits that mean nothing to you for years, like, say, a room of one's own, and then when you need it, you find yourself at the exact center of the only two months of living with your mom you will experience for the rest of your life. At one point while he was in the bathroom, I received a not entirely facetious suggestion to take him to a nearby park. Eventually we left to check the schedule for his bus, found we had 20 minutes to wait. We went to the park.

Once there, we swung, and as our momentum gradually drew us out of sync, he periodically paused to realign our arcs. He told me the names of trees. When I remembered to, I looked him in the eye--it is allowed. We saw poorly remembered parts of constellations, and he missed the next two buses.

Dear everyone, we have swine flu. I coughed into an urn and got swine flu. Your airplane slept in your bed and gave you swine flu. Our sirens are useless against it. It was packaged into all the peanut butter. Heads rolled over that. Swine flu filled a city built on top of a lake which was itself already on top of a mountain, so in dedication to our old charade, all the soccer teams continued to play each other in empty stadiums. What?--excuse me, the FBI is at the door. I don't go out any more because of swine flu. Instead I watch TV with my mom, and we bought an air purifier.

If we're still around in a while when it is finally the future and telepathic aliens come to earth, we will greet them only to eventually see them leave, frustrated by their own inability to understand the concept of names, and the human compulsion to name everything. Neither will they understand gossip, the youngest of the contagions. Swine flu might greet them too--they will perhaps understand its purpose better. I wonder if they will like music, and how they will dance. I dance like a stork's mating ritual every time I hear the song Bird Flu. It is only a happy accident that bird is in the title, and that my dance moves are avian. Happcident. Accipy. I just started a company: Accipee. I can see it all now. It's the new Depends. "So you shant your pants any longer." The tagline sounds kind of British, but I guess there are as many old limey poopers as of any other creed. I just hope I'll live long enough to relish my success because this is that fabled day, mortgaged against so much consequence--everything has reversed itself. The bank is excusing your debt, sharecropper. Water fountains pour gin. This is that day; the fire froze, the sphinx blinked, the swine flu.

Jennifer White: 6' 2" lesbian family friend who claims to have once driven through the end of a rainbow on the freeway.

minor obsession with names:
Fairuza Balk
Chauncey Billups
Tenochtitlan
Benazir Bhutto (!!!)
Sta-Puft marshmallow man

so many hangnails

abiding discomfort towards small children, particularly those who sing or dance.

"My Life Would Suck Without You." a song.

"My life would suck without you." what I tell my boyfriend, Food, every time we hang out.

nearsightedness

A list of some sad things:
-walking through the house, turning off lights. CAN ALSO BE LOVING, PARENTAL

-my dad went to wal-mart at christmas and bought some gummy bears. my mom found them in the closet yesterday; she thinks he was ashamed to give them to us because they were from wal-mart. SHAME AND FATHERS: SAD

-flirting on the internet

-being too apathetic and impatient to make the effort to do something interesting SAD: BECAUSE SOME PEOPLE, FOR WHATEVER REASON, NEVER SEEM TO HAVE THIS PROBLEM. AND ALSO BECAUSE IT IS A SELF-IMPOSED PROBLEM.

-misspellings in important documents YOU JUST WANT TO TAKE IT BACK AND YOU CAN'T IT'S TOO LATE. NEVER SAD: UNINTENTIONAL MISUSE OF APOSTROPHES: IRRITATING

-situations where someone is out of their depth and is too intimidated to say so

RETURN TO ORIGINAL THEME

an excellent vocabulary

three dead pets and one living one

I have all these context based jokes that I have no outlet for because I've got nothing going on. Like, for example, the phrase "Jesus, take the wheel." I hesitate to bring it up because, even now, I see the immense potential that could be released with a timely, pithy application of this phrase. But, having nothing to apply it to, it will, as do most things, recede into the old soil at the back of my head. If it is lost there, I will not mind. Amidst the piles of nothing, the brain often thinks to itself that all you have, from day to day, are the things you do and dreams. Sometimes you are not sure which is which. You can't remember where you put it. The alarm is constantly going off, and it might be a bird. You vomit in the street and later, at the lake house, find some on your pants.

I worry that one particular love, met or unmet, can permanently alter the course of your personality. There's no going back over a life. If you--and by you I mean I, as usual--age without it, then you necessarily become a person who has done so. You did not meet him in the smoothness of your youth, and then you can't. You are constantly missing the possibility of shared time. However, what little of myself I have given to those I have met has accomplished little. The strange litany of men I know has not convinced me of very much, either positive or negative. One, a fish-shaped man, confused and mute. Another whose love proved ultimately weaker than his pride. Earlier, a man-shaped fish, who deserved and understood me as much as a single fish does the entirety of the ocean. There was the adolescent lion I intentionally misunderstood until he moved away, and also the more fully-grown animal, lambent in his drunkeness, who I still occasionally run into at night, in the city. And the rest, or maybe there's only one other--there's so much about this short range, heart-based sorcery that I let escape me.

Anyway, I try to be solicitous in my relationships, continue to live this life about I forget what it's about. When I am not occupied having lengthy conversations with myself at work, Bill keeps me sane through the sheer force of his presence. He is the sort of man that, when his family bought a set of cookies each decorated with a different member the Obama family, was given the one with the presidential dog. At lunch, he wondered aloud what it said about him that he got that one. I replied that it means he has the best sense of humor. He said he tries to. How much is it possible to try to have something, rather than just to be the instrument of the expression of your fevers? Bill lacks pretense on every level; what he is and what he tries to be are the same thing. However, he rarely calls anything in the shop by its right name. Instead, there is an untrackable list of diminuitives and nicknames for the things we use every day; they are blankies, not blankets. There is the flatbar which, for no discernible reason, is named Wang Chung; the ratchet called Big Head Todd. I can no more explain the impulse behind this habit than I can explain my own fascination with reversing the order of words in short phrases. What thinks you make that? This is so heavy fucking.

When I am not at work, I feel like the sun itself, if the sun produced sound instead of light. Sometimes those that you know will leave you, they will go farther away. They will remind you of the unbridgeable distance, and you will not always know why.

"I got a text from my dad at midnight that said '220 lbs!' and then I dreamed that I strangled a tiger."

"It's too early for this."

"All you had to do was hear about it. I had to live it."

I had this beautiful moment at the Whole Foods on Denny two days ago. Bill and I delivered many cabinets in the rain and both wanted soup. He bought a thin orange soup. The thickest soup they had appeared to be black bean, so, the consistency of soups being very important to me, I got that one. Didn't disappoint. In the checkout line I noticed, then watched steadily the bagger working at the next line until he suddenly jerked his head up as though at a command and looked straight into my face. I have grown up enough to know that there were two black threads then spoolled out between us, one going each way. Some people you're roped to, to others there's never more than a filament. There's no way to tell which until it has happened. We finished buying our soup from "Leek" who turned out to be the much less vegetable "Lee K" and went to the cafe to eat. We finished and left the store. I trailed behind just keeping my eyes open. Turning my head. Don't dismiss it! It did happen. I had only to look for a few seconds as we passed the checkout lines; the black thread was taut, and I found myself walking the circumference of a large circle, looking through the crowd over my left shoulder, with him walking opposite me on the same circumference, looking over his left shoulder, with all the milling people between. How casual. It did happen. I should stop throwing my heart like an ax.

Lately, my auxiliary attention is occupied by an advertisement. I found it on the computer. In it, a young man is standing in front of an opera house at twilight. Here it is. There goes the ax again. Let's turn upon him the critical eye. He doesn't really seem to know the picture is being taken, or else he has managed the rare and beautiful unselfconsciousness that can make photographs so fascinating. Look at his centurion hair. It is unstylish but not unbecoming. There is a small sideburn creeping in front of his right ear. The shirt is too big--but not really. It fits at the shoulders but bags at the waist, which is not helped by his slight hunch. It seems not to be the hunch of a tall person, but rather one of emotional fatigue. He has been winnowing the pith for a long time now. His stance is only a peel, it can hardly hide anything anymore. And yet--the sideburn, his cheekbones--I still want to give myself over to his reckless derision. We'd sleep on the ground until the satellites all fell. I would warm his thin wrists on my neck. This will satisfy me; it must. I don't think this man will give me anything else, since he has long ago become resigned to the knowledge that, whatever he is looking for, it is probably not in the air above his head and to the left.

As the Queen of Music (self-appointed, self-appointed!) it is my sovereign duty to tell you about these voices which are important to me.

We already know that Tracy Chapman is a small cut on the tip of your liver, and Whitney Houston is a horse dropping stones on brains and also an ambulance.

There are Neko Case's various sharpnesses and elisions, and Rufus Wainwright's slow rope, pulling itself out of his mouth.
Lizz Wright's got the swamp in her voice. That's all I can think to say about that, though she deserves much more. Actually, I'll just let her tell you herself.
The best part about Nina Simone's voice is when she's not singing. She has better silences than anyone. The best of all is the moment in each song right before her voice starts to come out of her mouth and you know that it's open, it's there. It's like sitting on the opposite side of a wall from a dragon. You want to see it but you also don't.
Björk's got a backwards waterfall. When she says "wanderlust" it sounds like she invented the word herself, for her own express use. She can just do that.
And Antony. In "My Juvenile" on Björk's Volta, he says "...but the intentions were pure" and it's like hearing the complicated voice of consciousness itself.
And there are those which are notable for their omission from the list, for which I have no explanation.
Then there's one more. It is the voice saying "Get loved. It is already here. All you must do is open your mouth and claim it." I believe this will happen to you as well because it is beginning to happen to me.

I hate spring. I really can't like it. Small leaves make me impatient, as do all growing things. The winds are ignoble and wet. My immediate plans for the spring include saying goodbye to the old street, it never cared much for me anyway, and moving to a house with picture moldings and doors I can't remember.

Possible Names for House

1) Representative Sexuality House
2) The Sacred Realm (as fake Japanese legend has it, the traditional resting place of the Triforce)
4) There is no future and there is no past, there is only a continuous dance party
4) The Jennifer Kate Hudson Honorary Area
6) A house is to love in

The best thing about hour house is that it is a house. It is a lovely house, not an apartment. I don't remember most of it. I remember the line fo the carper rectrangular where it dives under the tile around the fireplace. The soft old painted wood handles ion the cabinet in the hall. The cramped and twisted concrete stairway into the alley. The hexagonal tiles int he bathroom. Apparently I only walked into the hose and looked down. The scarred softwoods in the bedrooms. There is a distinct possibility that one or more prominent walls have rounded corners. I remember the windows, although only as though I had been looking down on them from a height of about nine feet. I keep thinking that I will always have to crouch to be able to see out of the house, and passersby will only see various crotches walking around inside.


blah blah blah what am I talking aboutttttt. Events continue to happen...excellently? It's all I can ask for, really. Without reservation, I am happier now than I have ever been, reading on a schedule, flying to St. Louis in two days, and flying back here from Boston two weeks after that. I enjoy the company of everyone I am around lately. My plans for the future include putting everything I own into boxes, changing my commute, and taking showers in a new and different shower. I still enjoy my job, most days. I think, in fact, what I will do is land me a man-shaped fish, and then it will be game, set, match life.

I can't decide what to do so I'm drinking chocolate milk. I went to a pretty glacial concert on....Thursday! It felt at first like we weren't going to get in because who knows what those college kids we bought our tickets from over the phone have been smoking, and we got there late (on purpose), and how easy is it to enter ice? Not very. It worked out. Man, it was great. It was a feminist concert. Person, it was great! Something similar to this happened at the concert, actually. The opening act was Scream Club, the #1 lesbian feminist rap funk dance duo group. Grandmothers of the movement. I bought their t-shirt after the concert. It is glamorous and too small. Every member of the audience had experimental hair.

The main act was Mirah.

She's in our collective Top 10. She's the #1 herself. According to what happens when I type "mirah" in the URL bar of Firefox, Mirah has a big homo heart, is modest and deliberate, prefers privacy to invasion and reconciliation to war. Her middle name means good day or holy day in Hebrew. I read somewhere and can't stop remembering that she is "a terrific songwriter when she bothers to finish her songs." I don't care to meet the person, poisonous and frustrated, who said this. But it is true that most of Mirah's songs are very short. 2 minutes, plus or minus.

It was a good concert. Her songs are full of small ironies. Of this I am unsure, not really knowing what I mean by it. I wasn't left wanting. I woke up a couple times. It's possible that I never would have been able to see Mirah in concert, since she has been on hiatus for the last recent while. Instead I saw her concert for $7 on Thursday, and it was terrific. It was just such a glacier, flattening, holding, tinting, teething, falling over.