And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.”
. . . . .
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

~T.S. Eliot

Last weekend featured an attempt to watch I'm Not There. While Cate Blanchett's performance particularly impressed me (I played a couple of male roles in college theater and remember learning to walk and move like a man), and I liked the image of the young runaway, on the whole the film was spliced incomprehensibly together in an overly, self-consciously "artsy" fashion that lacked completely the tight and controlled premeditation behind the apparent randomness in Magnolia. We made it through forty minutes before shutting it off in disgust.

My irritation was increased by my own lack of knowledge of Bob Dylan -- a knowledge vital to understanding the film. I don't deal well with pretension and with the pretentious flaunting of knowledge in the face of others' ignorance, and so, cantankerously, I found myself suddenly deeply interested in learning more about Dylan.

(Yes, evidently I'm easily manipulated. I'm not unaware of the irony.)

So I picked up a copy of Rolling Stone's Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews for a couple of dollars the other night and started reading.

So far, of course, I'm loving it. It helps that the book is really nicely bound. I'm hoping some of the interviews were ones that appeared in what little of the film I saw.

I still have no interest in finishing the movie.

Lately I'm tired and completely unmotivated to write. I have a handful of posts which I've half-heartedly begun and then abandoned, and then forgotten that I've abandoned, so that I suddenly realized today that I haven't posted anything on the blog in a really long time.

Life has gone, and continues to go, extraordinarily well. There's lots to do -- hence the tired -- and I finally find myself inundated by human interaction. The miracle of the ordinary keeps blossoming around me, and my current favorite verse leaped out at me from the pages of 1 Thessalonians the other day:

"Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business and to work with your hands, just as we told you, so that your daily life may win the respect of outsides and so that you will not be dependent on anybody" (4:11-12).

Blah today. Not sure whether it's a hormone crash (womanhood essentially means being taken hostage by hormones most of the time and learning to deal reasonably with their insane effects), or tiredness, or what, but today I only wanted to pull the covers up over my head and stay warm and lazy in bed all day drifting into and out of sleep, hibernating.

It's probably a good thing I'm having a Girls' Night at the trailer this evening -- if I can't curl up in bed, the next best thing is company, because conscious alone time in this state of mind usually does me no good.

I'm looking forward to the weekend, though. My weekends these days are always great. And this one boasts the bonus of a visit from my sister!

I find myself thinking today how homesick I am for Meg and Phillip. Probably because it's Friday and my Fridays in the Midwest for two years almost always consisted of a trip to their house to eat good food, fight over who should order the pizza, rile up the dog, play with Josie, make fun of everything and everyone on the entire planet, watch a few episodes of some wonderful geeky TV show, and relax and be thoroughly and completely ourselves without reservation or judgment -- or, simply and more accurately put, without fear.

It's wonderful to be back in Erie. I love my native state and my native city, and I love living in closer proximity to my blood family. But I miss my chosen family, and today I'm feeling it rather sharply.

This week I allowed the slump to carry me along. Next week marks a return to discipline. I think part of my problem is that I'm simply, out of some irritating existential weariness, not doing the things I love most to do -- reading, writing, singing. Time to buckle back down, and time to reinvigorate. It's almost spring.

Oo! I just remembered: Today is my half birthday!

yum.

I felt like inventing something last night. Partly I wanted to test the assertion of a couple of conversations I'd had this week in which people stated that everything tastes better with butter and cream (which I already believe anyway); partly I felt nostalgic for the many evenings I spent at Meg and Phillip's learning to freewheel sauce recipes, the three of us crammed into their long galley kitchen chopping vegetables, stirring onions and fiddling with meat while the Michigan summer breeze brought a piney freshness through the window over the sink.

With those memories unwinding pleasantly in my head, I decided against my usual approach, which runs to the Mexican side of the cuisine spectrum, and went for something more akin to Europe. This is what I came up with:

The Chicken at the Corner of Butter and Cream

1. Prepare frozen boneless skinless chicken breast(s) in a small skillet. Heat butter and olive oil, add chicken breast(s) (they don't need to be thawed) and season with dried basil, dried thyme, dried oregano, ground red pepper and seasoned salt, to taste. Cover skillet, turn heat to low and cook 30-60 minutes until golden-brown and tender. Set aside.

For the sauce:

2. Prepare 1 packet alfredo sauce mix in a small saucepan according to packet instructions. Simmer on low heat 10-20 minutes longer than called for to thicken well. Set aside.

3. In a large skillet (I prefer cast iron), sauté 1 large red onion, chopped, and 1 red bell pepper, seeded and chopped, in plenty of butter and olive oil until onion is soft and translucent.

4. Add 6-8 oz. fresh button mushrooms, sliced, to the onion and red bell pepper and cook over medium heat 1-2 minutes. Reduce heat slightly, add 4-5 cloves garlic, chopped, and cook until softened. Season with dried basil, dried oregano, dried parsley, ground red pepper, seasoned salt, and dried thyme, to taste.

5. Increase heat, add 1 can cream of mushroom soup and stir until blended. Simmer one minute, then add enough white wine to thin the cream of mushroom. Add 1 can black olives, drained.

4. Add alfredo sauce mix and several oz. pesto and stir. Adjust the consistency and the balance of smoothness and sharpness in flavor by adding a combination of white wine, butter, milk and heavy whipping cream, to taste. Add a dash of white wine vinegar, if necessary.

5. Stir in a handful grated Parmesan cheese and adjust seasoning. Serve over pasta (I like bowtie). You can chop the chicken and mix it into the sauce, or serve it whole alongside the pasta and sauce.

This meal is incredibly rich -- a little goes a long way -- but oh, is it yummy. Simon wished he were human last night so that he could try some.

every now and then

This has been a really long, dragging, plodding week, the kind where time moves at a pace so slow you wonder if you stumbled upon the lip of a black hole and yet your mind races past the speed of light making time pass even more slowly. I feel like if I'd planted a sapling on Monday, I could go home after work today and find a towering giant tree all covered in moss. And when weeks like this occur, as tired as they make me I can never sleep. An ever present headache has followed me patiently around like a minion waving a palm frond and my eyes register the surrounding world through a soft-lens glaze.

So today I truly thank God that it's Friday.

I did the grown-up thing this week and finally opened up a savings account; then I went to Borders to change a few money things around and started poking around in the bargain section -- a bad habit of mine which, for once, paid off. I discovered that most of the stuff back there had been reduced to one dollar. So I loaded up, bought $350 worth of goodies for $18, and carted it all home just to open it all up again, peel off stickers and gloat. My couch looked like Christmas and Simon paced around in distress because his self-designated spot next to me on the sofa had been overrun by books and beautiful blank cards and plastic bags.

My favorite purchases: Jamie Oliver's basic cookbook which came as a set with his "flavor shaker" (a nifty modern lazy person's mortar and pestle) (retailed at $60); David McCullough's box set of John Adams, Truman and Mornings on Horseback (retailed at $65); and Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare (retailed at $25, but the point was more holy-crap-Isaac-Asimov-wrote-a-book-on-Shakespeare?! It was like discovering a weight loss program centered around the overconsumption of chocolate and wine -- the best of all possible worlds, the melding of my nerdiness and geekiness into one beautiful though formerly unimagined whole).

Those were the bright spots of my week. So bright that I still have them stacked on the sofa like Christmas, and when I think about them I smile.

Perhaps that sounds horribly materialistic. It is. I love "stuff." (Particularly booksy stuff and antiquey stuff.) I've been really, really good these past couple of years with tighter budgets and beltlines, and I'm fortunate in loving small, fairly inexpensive "stuff" which also happens to be useful (form and function); but I do love to buy things and get to know them well and find their perfect feng shui niche in the organic and eclectic makeup of my home and watch all my other "stuff" accomodate and absorb and complement my new "stuff" (much like Eliot's theory of the Western canon, where not only does the old influence the new, but the new influences the old in a timeless back-and-forth reverberation), and when I can indulge that tendency at such a good bargain that it leaves me walking out the door feeling virtuous it just utterly makes my week.

closer to Harrisburg

It's a long way to heaven
It's closer to Harrisburg
and that's still a long way from
the place where we are
and if evil exists it's a pair of train tracks
and the devil is a railroad car
~Josh Ritter

On the way back from Harrisburg yesterday I sat in the car idly watching the world go by (and nursing a hideous hangover like I haven't had in years; I earned it, though) in its monochromatic tones of sere and amber, and I noticed how many of the green highway signs direct the traveler to places whose names end in "burg."

I started ticking names off through my mind of places in PA and along the East Coast which also end in "burg," and came up with rather a lot. Then I tried to remember how many places in the Midwest ended in "burg," and only came up with a few.

So I wonder if, should this be in fact a trend and not a part of my brain sluggishly wading through toxins and negotiating badly, this stems from the dominance in the East Coast of early settlers from the UK (notably Scotland) and Germany, where lots of places end in "burg" or its phonetic variants. I also wonder if this trend does indeed dissipate as one moves west across the country. And then I wonder why. PA has little 'burgs everywhere. Lots of "villes" too. In the Midwest you have names that stand more alone, like Buchanan, or Mishawaka, or South Bend, or Detroit, or Ann Arbor, or Kalamazoo.

I think it's interesting. Any opinions?