Happy Wm Had a Headache Day, everyone!

So I've been caught in a swirl of lethargy and forgot about this grand holiday almost completely; hence the no blogvertisements.

BUT this year WHHD went international! Yes, a dedicated group of people headed up by the incomparable Laura and Glen held their celebrations in the great nation of Canada. It can only go up from here!

If you forgot to celebrate last night with plenty of toasts and poetry, there's still time! Have a mimosa for breakfast; have a beer at lunch; have a glass of wine with dinner. Or, since those things probably won't give you a headache now, konk yourself on the noggin with an Acme hammer.

Here's to Wm's longwinded verse! Here's to all the poets who followed and proved themselves better! Here's to Murphy's Irish Red and WHHD celebrations in a South Bend blizzard, where the plows only come out once it's stopped snowing!

i don't care what your political affiliations are, this is funny

Saw it with MP on a trek to Grape Road. We laughed for ten minutes.

Reparation

Given time, desires breathe
their final colored lights and flick
to flakes of gray: white unfruitions
scattered on cement.

Hopes’ betrayals peel
from the pale cores of old loves
that, blown, roll into the cracks
of memory to endure
beyond significance.

So the comfort in yearning
is the anticipation of yearning’s
end, when longings no longer
hurt the lungs, but rest
in a film of wet ash
under the breath.

Inferences at Bedtime

Faucet water from the iron sink
scalds and freezes lather
from the stripped skin of my face.

A rhythmic cry, a half-sung growl
sound a cacophony of wrath or foreplay
down among the cinder blocks.

In the dark I balance on the toilet
and breathe the clean chemical smell
of snow through the rusted screen.

A cat shadows through the yard.
On the other side of the bathroom wall,
the neighbors’ voices sharpen.

(slightly) broader horizons

So, I joined eHarmony today. There's this really logical, well-thought-out-process as to why. Basically I don't meet anyone new, because my work circle is very small, and the things I enjoy doing most don't involve leaving my apartment; so, in the absence of matchmaking friends and neighbors, if I'm to expand my skyline even a little, I should probably look to the online community, where other people are looking for the same thing I am.

Does this mean I'm writing off and ruling out the guys I already know? Absolutely not. Should one of them ask me out, I would almost certainly accept. (I have this policy, you know. A very liberal one. If a guy isn't unwashed or creepy, and if I don't definitely dislike him -- evidenced by my hesitancy to speak to him -- I say yes to at least a first date. Some that have asked, I've liked a lot; some I've barely known; and "you never know until you try.")

But since, for whatever reason, I haven't been asked out in a long time (and for once I'm not throwing rocks -- you won't find me asking anyone out, although I have the justification of a role that traditionally allows me the right to expect pursuit), I'm opting for a slight expansion of my available selection. I'm not stacking all my eggs in the eHarmony basket; but at least with that service, I know that the men I meet there are looking for a relationship themselves, which makes it potentially a little easier to start one, and you can skip the stage of excruciating existential questioning -- Do I like him? Does he like me? Just because he talks to me, does that mean he's interested? Should I play coy? Should I make the first move? Should I just kill the crush and get it over with? Do I wait for him? How long? Will it ruin the friendship? Blah blah blah -- and move right on to Do we date or not?

So we'll see. No guarantees, no grandiose hopes or plans. Just a new way to meet people I otherwise wouldn't. And hopefully a few funny tales along the way.

Ice

I

Oh my heart has
returned to Sister Winter
~Sufjan Stevens

It was fourteen degrees on Wednesday morning. The air was so crisp and dry you could have cracked it with a hammer. I wanted to dance down the crunchy-snow-covered sidewalk on my way to the car, but having awakened disoriented and dizzy (I really can't get away with not sleeping anymore; I'm too far past seventeen), I took it easy on my inner ear and settled for a deep, contented sigh...that set me coughing.

Southern Michigan had an ice storm last weekend, and the drive to work, over the back roads and highways, had me staring arrested out the window so often that it was a good thing those roads are sparsely traveled. The trees glittered like glassworks. All the snow had melted on the ground, so the contrast between the brown-and-yellow stubbled fields and the ice-coated trees limning their edges and covering the low hills almost hurt -- like a good haiku.

Everyone but my parents and sister eyes me like he would a crazy woman for saying I love winter, but it's not a masochistic obsession. I dislike cold toes, wet socks, wind-snatched breath, and icy roads as much as the next person; but what I get from winter more than compensates for the inconveniences and the dangers.

I like that everything hibernates. I like the austerity, the beauty of starkness, the stillness that comes from the snow. It's a time that mandates rest. And it's one of the only times in the turn of the seasons when you can step out anywhere and be truly alone. No one's around, and when you're standing in the middle of a field, or a stand of trees, you're far more alone than you would be in any other season, because nothing around you is growing or dying; everything sleeps. The only active life you might see are a few birds, and their presence underscores the emptiness. It's just you.

So you can walk down the sidewalk, or through a field, or along the river, and soak in the quiet, absorb the stillness of everything around you -- the trees, the snow, the ice, the river. You can be by yourself, and in that solitude you can be yourself.

II

Oh my friends I
apologize

To everything there is a season. The Christmas season this time around was a hard one. Illness, loneliness, a yawning sense of purposelessness all robbed me of the childlike joy that usually takes over me like a sizzle of static. I did a lot of traveling, and I came back tired. The lack of wintery weather hurt me. I didn't feel that sense of magic, and when January wore on without a hint of snow -- with weather so warm you didn't even need a coat most days -- it bogged down my spirits. It wasn't seasonal. It wasn't right.

So I have been glad for the snow and ice. I may need to get up earlier in the morning to allow for time to put on boots and scrape the crystallized precipitation off my car and let the engine warm up so it doesn't stall out, but something about walking into that shock of cold brings me alive.

I love people. I love to be around them; but cyclically I need to be alone (there's a season for that, too), and winter is exactly that call to solitude that I've been missing. It's a time also to process a lot of the things I've refused to deal with from the past year. While life was busy and the landscape was lush I put everything away, like sweaters into a bin, and now that everything is silent I can dig them out and hold them up and look them over.

When spring comes, I'll be glad of that too, but this is the time for things to be still, and I like the stillness to have a blanket of snow. It's cold, and sharp, and beautiful.

And when the trees are stripped of their leaves, you can see them for what they are -- all of them throwing their branches up to the sky. If you pick out one, just one, while you're driving (or riding with someone in the car; that's probably safer) and watch it as you go past, it seems to spin, with its arms thrown up, like a dancer. In praise.

out of control

You know those weeks when you are just really not with it? And how it takes at least two weeks to clean up after them once you start to get back on track? I'm having the aftermath of one of those.

I spend a great deal of my time in a state of comparitive sanity, but every once in awhile everything breaks down and my life skills disintegrate and I find myself completely forgetting simple and important things at work, while my apartment goes to crap and my sleep goes out the window.

So this week I'm playing hard-ball catch-up at work, feeling stressed and stupid and frantic -- how could I have forgotten to record that hearing date? -- but still determinedly optimistic. I'll just work my petutie off all day, and by the end of the week I'll be back on track.

The other fly in my ointment is that the headaches, which have taken a tremendous backseat since the last hospital trip, are resurfacing. Stress, I'm sure. Blargh.

of horses and pieces, or pieces of horses, or horses in pieces, or...no, never mind

Living in the Midwest brings to the mind of a Western Pennsylvanian the odd quirks in her own regional dialect.

Particularly to a girl hailing from Erie -- the land of oxroast, pepperoni balls, and uninflected questions that come out sounding like irritable statements -- the Midwestern speech patterns are nasaly and off-puttingly pleasant. (Don't be offended! It's an all-American dialect here, and I love it.) "College" sounds like "callege," for example. And everyone's speech pattern is so friendly. They actually ASK questions here. And they'll say hello to almost anyone. I'm accustomed to greeting only people I like, and glancing or grunting at strangers and acquaintances.

So some differences already exist; but the idioms are what really intrigue me. I've noticed certain things, certain terms and phrases, that didn't travel from Western Pennsylvania to northern Indiana. "Gum bands" never made it. "Red up the room" died before Ohio. "Run the sweeper" gets you skeptical glances from people imagining brooms hooked up to motors, while "my hair needs cut" or "my room needs cleaned" or "my brakes need fixed" makes English majors from other regions cough.

But these, while a little odd, seldom break down communiation completely. Hearing one of them might require a little more concentration or forbearance on the part of the non-PA-er, but the point goes across the gap and interprets itself well.

The kicker, the one that knocks the neurons all askew and drops an anvil on conversational understanding, appears to be one of the primary phrases of my childhood: "it's a horse apiece."

I've said it indifferently once or twice, once to a friend who was born and raised in Michigan, and once to a friend who's more or less from the East Coast, and both times I received a flat, "What's that mean?"

"You don't know?" I was incredulous (and probably looked insane).

"No. I've never heard that before."

"Oh." I had to pause, and came up with, "Well. It means two things are the same."

A synonymous phrase is "half a dozen of one, six of the other," which to the Western PA mind takes WAY too long to say. So when a friend calls to ask if you'd rather go out for pizza or Chinese, if you don't care either way, you grunt, "horse apiece." Or if someone asks you for advice on which of two courses of action to take, and both options are grim, what do you say? "Horse apiece."

Where does it come from? I have no idea. A quick google search identified some old gambling game called "horse," the rules of which I didn't understand; or trying to select the best of two bad ways to get to one place on horseback, both of which will ruin the horse before you get there. Apparently the phrase was first found in a DARE dictionary in 1980, but related phrases go back to as far as 1846; and none of these references identified a region of origin.

Which leaves me curious: Has anyone else ever heard, or used this phrase? Where? Is it limited to Western PA, or are there pockets of use elsewhere in the U.S.?

In a land where English is one of the most common languages, it's sometimes startling to be brought up short only four hundred or so miles away when someone asks you to translate a childhood phrase you just used.

Another reason why I love my native state. Even if people say our grammar needs fixed.

still waters

Being friends with MP involves, at least once a semester, some insane off-the-cuff epic outing, unpremeditated and fluidly conceptualized. This is one of the perks of being her friend. Also one of the perks of still being twenty-something and able to keep up.

Our most recent epic adventure involved a sudden trip to Pittsburgh with Cousin of MP, tallying twenty hours of driving in the span of two days, to visit the intrepid K. Flanagan and the Gentle Giant Linus, view an art show (featuring K. Flanagan's photography), see a concert by Army of Me and Like Summer -- both fantastic -- and then have the pleasure of listening to Like Summer's From Arlington Heights, with Love all the way home.

As always, a visit to Pittsburgh did the soul good. Something about that city (I call it America's City of Lights -- if you've seen downtown from the top of Mt. Washington at night, you'll know) restores. I like South Bend, I've found a lot of niches and quirky facets to enjoy, but "I miss those hills," and it's always wonderful to go back. Pittsburgh has layers of sooty industrial history which its contemporary culture incorporates and renovates, the most amazing arts scene (original artwork hanging in many bars and restaurants), tons of crunchy little shops, and fantabulous restaurants, from ethnic cuisines to old-fashioned diners.

So we went, we saw, we admired, we left, all in a whirlwind of nonstop activity. As we caught I-70, heading west, I tried to remember what it was I felt like I'd left behind.

And then I remembered. It was Pittsburgh.

small-town working

So the town where I work in southern Michigan is one of those tiny towns. The only main thoroughfare is essentially a few restaurants and small businesses planted on the banks of one of the State Routes to Bigger Places. "Main Street" consists of two antique shops, a couple of churches, and a school. It's just a little too old-industrial to be quaint; a few abandoned factories are working hard at rusting to the ground along the railroad tracks. And yet it's charming.

I grew up in something like a small town, though it was far bigger than where I work. And being here every day, eating out and frequenting the antique shops, is bringing back to mind the hilarious things about small town life. South Bend living is more urban, compact and yet sprawling, and nearly everyone is and remains a stranger. But not here.

Last week I went to my favorite of the antique shops -- a junk shop, really, where there are things like old bedpans and oil cans (still half-full of oil) mixed in with the dressers and chairs, and everything is unpredictable and cheap -- and I was chatting with the owner, as I always do, and telling him about my apartment woes and my plans to move as soon as I find a decent place.

Then Tuesday as I placed my order at Subway, the girl behind the counter asked me, "Have you moved yet?"

Priceless.

Phat Me on the Back (Or, Don't Read This if You Have a Sensitive Stomach)

Well, it took me about three weeks, but I managed it. I made phat thai (or pad thai, as most of us call it) on Sunday.

I love Asian cooking. Doing it myself is a little scary – the ingredients lists in my Thai, Vietnamese, and Japanese cookbooks require their own glossaries. But you get to buy the neatest toys – clay pots, bamboo steamers, woks – and the coolest staples – star anise, dried chilies, fish sauce, shrimp paste, seaweed, jasmine rice, rice noodles – and it makes for an entertaining culinary experience.

I blame the lengthy time to accomplish the making of phat thai on shrimp.

There are some things that take some getting used to. The biggest is raw seafood. Lots of yummy-looking recipes call for clean-your-own whole fish that stare at you while you eat them. I am frustrated because, having scorned fishing as boring and gross in my adolescence, I am now at a loss when it comes to cleaning fish (can anyone teach me?). But I think I could handle it.

Shrimp, now, are another matter entirely.

I’ve only come across one other creature that I had some weird psychological problem with eating. Rabbit. The sauce for my Spanish rabbit stew was exquisite...but the bunny carcass was distressing. It was the same size and roughly the same shape as my cat. Wrong. I couldn’t eat the leftovers, and ended up throwing away the rest of the frozen (and NOT de-boned, might I add) meat.

So I’ve learned that I’m not immune to the occasional revulsion when it comes to food. But I learned that a hundred times over when I bought my own bag of whole ocean shrimp at the Asian market. I thumped them down on the kitchen counter and blithely read the recipe’s deceptively innocuous directions for shelling and cleaning them, then got to work.

It was horrible. The peeling wasn’t so bad, and their little legs come right off in sections with the shell. I could even deal with the eyes. But not the whiskers. You know cat whiskers, right? Long, kind of thick, have a fascinating springiness, but sort of repugnant all the same. Shrimp whiskers = so much worse. Really, really, really thick – the kind you’d expect your bristly aging Aunt Sally to pull out of her chin. Horsehair thick. Longer than your finger. And they stick to EVERYTHING.

So I was already disturbed shelling shrimp with shrimp whiskers clinging to my hands (because they apparently have a goal of detaching from their owners as quickly as possible, and I swear there were way more whiskers in that bag than the number of shrimp could account for). But the deveining and debraining done me in. You have to cut off their heads, and hope you don’t cut it off too close to the end, or this nasty brown semi-liquid the consistency of pus explodes all over the cutting board, and sometimes runs down the mud vein.

I did this sixteen times. Well, a few more than that, since I threw some of the shrimp away as I went, fearing to kill myself with shrimp poisoning from brain matter.

Then I looked at my accomplishment, the little fleshy curlicues of blue-gray rawness snuggled up in the mixing bowl, and covered them and put them away. I made do with chicken soup that night for dinner. My stomach hurt. Then I scraped all the shell and leg and whisker fragments, all the heads and eyes and fluids, into the trash can. I threw the rest of the whole shrimp on top, tied it off, and took it to the trash.

I wound up throwing away the peeled shrimp a few days later.

Once I got over the trauma, using plenty of good, traditional holiday food like cookies and coffee cake, I bought the lovely already-cooked, pink, deveined, headless, eyeless, whiskerless, legless, shell-less frozen cocktail shrimp that the amazing civilization of the West has made possible, and made phat thai with that.

The end result was less saucy then we get at restaurants, but still extremely tasty.

Now I’ve caught the make-lots-of-Asian-food bug.

Seriously. Can anyone teach me how to scale and clean a fish?

adulthood

I was going to tell you all something amazing, something you'd never heard or thought of before, or at least, if you had, and you probably have, not in the words I was going to use. I was going to illuminate for you all some trace of the sublime to tuck in your pocket or hide under your pillow, I was going to pen a phrase so charged with song that it would haunt you for the rest of the week and burn your tearducts when you sat alone in your car, I was going to write the final line of a novel that's never been written, and write the story backwards for you, so that, mesmerized by the end in beginning, you might not have left your computer for hours, forgetting that you're tired and bored, that your back hurts, that your life isn't what you imagined when you were fourteen writing letters to yourself at twenty-four, because when you're fourteen you don't think of bills to pay and pets to feed and apartments to clean and dinners to reheat, or evenings spent curled under the caresses of light and sound waves from the television, or cell phones swallowing their battery power on the coffee table in stillness.

I was going to ease the tension in your eyes by delivering a word of that profound truth most of us can't quit hoping to find, that truth which no genus of doubt or mockery can deny, the truth that kisses faith on the forehead and lays it finally to rest. I was going to do it. I had it all ready.

But that was only what I wanted, and real life is a narrative of a different profundity, and it's time for bed.

on seeing

So I've been thinking about this one Gospel account of Christ's healing. It's fairly unique in the recorded history of his ministry. In Mark 8:22-25, Jesus heals a blind man:

"They came to Bethsaida, and some people brought a blind man and begged Jesus to touch him. He took the blind man by the hand and led him outside the village. When he had spit on the man's eyes and put his hands on him, Jesus asked, 'Do you see anything?'

"He looked up and said, 'I see people; they look like trees walking around.'

"Once more Jesus put his hands on the man's eyes. Then his eyes were opened, and he saw everything clearly."

Weird, isn't it? I don't think there's any other instance in the Gospels where Jesus touched someone twice to heal. It's stuck in my mind since I was little. What did it mean? Did it not work the first time? What was going on?

In Annie Dillard's chapter on seeing in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, she talks about people, blind from a very young age, who received their sight due to advances in medicine. They had a hard time dealing with seeing; their conception of the world had nothing to do with vision, and oftentimes they voluntarily reblinded themselves (through blindfolds, or shutting their eyes) to get around.

Applied to this passage in Mark, the twice-touching indicates something a little different. Not failure to heal the first time, but two different healings entirely. My guess is that the first touch healed the physical aspect of blindness: His eyes worked. But his brain couldn't interpret what he saw. The feedback from the optic nerve was still "blind," so that to him, people looked like trees (leading me to wonder if perhaps the upside-down/right-side-up switcheroo aspect of his vision hadn't been yet corrected, and people's legs, perceived upside-down, looked like tree branches.) So the second touch healed his perception. His brain could make sense of what he saw, preserving him from disorientation and craziness.

Just a thought. I listened to a sermon recently that kind of demonized science, but I've always viewed science as enriching our understanding of Scripture.

And it's awesome to think that Christ's power, and God's healing, go much deeper than redeeming just the physical. The human body, the human brain, the human mind, the human spirit pose no mystery to God.

Stupid boys being stronger than girls. When Phillip carried my writing desk down to the basement by himself to make room for the tree three weeks ago, he made it look like it was a desk constructed of plastic. Light, airy butterfly-wing plastic.

I almost threw my back out carrying it up the stairs today after disposing of the tree. And I'm no Scrawny Sally. In the words of John Myers' dad, I'm a big, strong Pennsylvania working girl. (Not THAT kind of working girl. Perv.)

Oh well. My back will be telling me the whole sad tale tomorrow. But it's nice to have the writing desk back.

Now if I could just find my living room floor...rumor had it there WAS a living room floor...

2006 in review

Job switches: 2
Apartments: 1
Trips to visit family: 3
Visits from family: 3
Pets gained: 1
Traffic accidents: 0
Dates: 3
Boyfriends: 0
Friends lost: 7
Friends gained: 2
Musicians discovered: 7
TV shows discovered: 3
Spiritual awakenings: 1
Domestic skills acquired: 5
Bad habits quit: 1
Pounds lost: 17
Heartbreaks: 2
Old hurts partially resolved: 2
Trips to the hospital: 4
Great ground-breaking works of fiction written: 0
Journals filled: 1

Conclusions: I dislike the number 6. It was a tough year. But it looks like I came out even.