This week I have been extremely busy making enough extra money to go meet Avi in Dublin the second weekend in March. I worked nights. I worked weekends. I worked weekend nights. I’ll be working during Thanksgiving break.
But see above: totally, without a shadow of a doubt, worth it.
Ross went to the grocery store today after his discrete mathematics post-midterm-midterm, and brought home a paper bag full of fresh, delicious food. He had to run out the door because he was late for a class, and it fell to me to put these things away. I decided to carefully pour the new brown basmati rice he’d bought from the bulk bins into the bag that contained the remains of our old brown basmati rice, because it had the advantage of being resealable.
In the natural course of events, half a cup full of beautiful tinkly rice grains had soon spilled all over the floor.
On another day I might have sighed over the loss and gone for the vacuum cleaner, but
1) I just cleaned the kitchen on Sunday. The number of hairs on the floor is still minimal. (What? People shed a lot.)
2) I’m Chinese. Every grain of rice is precious.
3) Brown basmati rice is especially precious. It’s not only delicious, but (comparatively) expensive.
4) As I was staring down at the rice on the floor, I half-remembered a fairytale I read a long time ago, about a girl who had to undergo several trials in order to… I don’t know. Get the prince? Escape a dungeon? Win enough points for a new camera? Something like that. And one of the trials involved picking up every single grain of rice (or possibly wheat) that had spilled out of a huge bag, so it was a good thing she’d made friends with the birds (or maybe it was the ants), because they helped her out with their tiny beaks/very large numbers and in the end she snagged the guy/escaped/became a professional portrait photographer. You can see that I basically don’t remember this story at all. But it was a charming enough thought to have flitting about my head as I collected (without the aid of magical animals) each grain of what would someday soon be turned into a sweetly steaming bowl of brown rice to go with our famous dal.
P.S. Happy Birthday, Barb! Kisses to you!
I’ve been wanting to write this post since yesterday, but I accidentally napped all afternoon and boobled around on the internet all evening, so that didn’t work out quite as planned. (Yes, “booble around” is a verb phrase. Why do you ask?) Other things got in the way, too. I made a read four different recipes, then print out none of them and wing it Portuguese cabbage soup with pinto beans and chorizo. I ate my soup, which was fairly successful, all things considered. I had to clean the kitchen. There was coffee to be drunk. I had work to do today (although not the work I thought I would be doing, due to a mix-up which is still frustrating me). And besides all that, I’m having boring meta-journaling woes about why I do this, whether it’s stopping me from doing other things, and sundry not-very-relevant questions.
But I press on, because I know when I am seventy my rapidly swiss-cheesing brain will greedily want to remember what I did on this weekend in November 2007, and since apparently I value my happiness forty-two years from now more than I value my happiness tonight (when I could be reading on the couch while enjoying a second slice of tonight’s pizza), I can but type away and tell you, too. :-)
On Friday, Ross and I went out with Aggie and Jason, who are both infinitely kind and smart and funny and generous and fun. It was pretty great, especially since we began the evening with wasabi-battered fish and chips and my first taste of Delirium Tremens. I’ve been wanting to try that beer for years, now, and it was delicious. Also, it came in a glass with sloshed-looking pink elephants on it, and the pleasure of that can hardly be surpassed.
At the end of the evening I felt a little cross with myself, though, and I wanted to tell you about that because I tell you many other things that are weird or embarrassing or intimate. Sometimes you help me think through them, and sometimes it just helps to look at my strange inside self from the outside for a moment.
So here’s what I was wondering about on Friday night. It had nothing to do with Aggie and Jason, who are among the nicest, coolest pairs of people I have ever met. They are warm, they tell stories, they ask lots of questions, and they laugh a lot. In short, they’re pretty unbeatable company, and this was only the second time I’d met them, so my question was prompted less by that evening than by my own noodlings about Chicago and adulthood and twenty-first century life and all that jibba-jazz. (Um, yes, “noodlings” is a plural gerund. And I’m not even going to touch “jibba-jazz.”)
What I wondered was whether you have to learn a different set of rules for how to form friendships, or anyway friendships that are anywhere near as easy and close and intimate as your friendships from adolescence and young adulthood, when you get to be a fully-fledged grown-up with grown-up jobs and grown-up pursuits. Whether there is a different timeline now, a different alchemy for friendships that start when you don’t live surrounded by broken hearts and first-times and you don’t spend hours every night sitting outside on the cool grass spilling your soul to people you’ve only just met.
And I wondered whether everything is different, too, when you have a partner and you meet the world as a pair, stronger for it but also more closely bound, instead of sharing yourself and only yourself with your words, your gaze, your hugs. What I wanted to know was when in all of this I would dare to be properly open with a new friend, and when they would dare to do the same with me. I wanted to know if late-night blog entries on my computer were truly going to send out little blue threads into the world and tie me to loving hearts as tightly as they should.
Which was all a lot of stuff and nonsense, probably, but I still wondered it.
And so it was most likely a good thing that on Saturday morning we went out with a group of volunteers to help restore the Bobolink Meadow in Jackson Park, and I tired myself out so thoroughly that I could do nothing of note for the rest of the day, let alone have a single absurdly self-indulgent thought.
We spent three hours lopping and sawing at the saplings and trees of a particularly pernicious invasive species , hauling the hewn branches out of the park on our shoulders and suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous thorns as we went. It was an utterly beautiful November day and we did not need our coats. There were about twelve other volunteers; we hardly spoke to each other, but we handed over tools and small trees and worked hard and well and companionably. It was a blissful, satisfying, consuming job that could have gone on forever. When the morning was over we had progressed only a short distance into the meadow and felled a small forest of Buckthorn.
Dogs sniffed at our ankles as their owners jogged past. Geese flew overhead in musically honking formation (twice, three times—a gift). We finished hungry and sweaty and pleased with ourselves. Walking home, we lazily discussed humanity as an invasive species, then stopped in at the Medici Cafe and bought two soft, oily croissants to remind ourselves that even if we do tend to destroy everything we touch, we at least know how to bake better than the other 1.5 million kinds of animals in the world. We washed our comfort down with freshly squeezed orange juice, and then we came home and at some point I lay down in a dark room with my aching calves and lost the rest of the day.
Many famous feet have trod
Sublunary paths, and famous hands have weighed
The strength they have against the strength they need;
And famous lips interrogated God
Concerning franchise in eternity;
And in many differing times and places
Truth was attained (a moment’s harmony);
Yet endless mornings break on endless faces.
Gold surf of the sun, each day
Exhausted through the world, gathers and whips
Irrevocably from eclipse;
The trodden way becomes the untrodden way,
We are born each morning, shelled upon
A sheet of light that paves
The palaces of sight, and brings again
The river shining through the field of graves.
Such renewal argues down
Our unsuccessful legacies of thought,
Annals of men who fought
Untiringly to change their hearts to stone,
Or to a wafer’s poverty,
Or to a flower, but never tried to learn
The difficult triple sanity
Or being wafer, stone and flower in turn.
Turn out your pockets on the tablecloth;
Consider what we know. A silver piece:
That’s life; and, dealing in dichotomies,
This old discoloured copper coin is death.
Turn it about; it is impenetrable.
Reverse and obverse, neither bear
A sign or word remotely legible:
But spin the silver to a sphere.
Look in, and testify. Our mortal state
In turn is twisted in a double warp:
The light is waking and the dark is sleep
And twice a day before their gate
We kneel between them. There is more
Knowledge of sleep than death, and yet
Who knows the nature of our casting there,
Trawled inaccessible pool, or set
A line to haul its logic into speech?
Easier to balance on the hand
The waking that our senses can command,
For jewels are pebbles on a beach
Before this weaving, scattering, winged-and-footed
Privilege, this first, untold
And unrecurring luck that is never completed
Even in distance out of our hands’ hold,
That makes, this waking traffic, this one last,
One paramount division. I declare
Two lineages electrify the air,
That will like pennons from a mast
Fly over sleep and life and death
Till sun is powerless to decoy
A single seed above the earth;
Lineage of sorrow: Lineage of joy;
No longer think them aspects of the same;
Beyond each figured shield I trace
A different ancestry, a different face,
And sorrow must be held to blame
Because I follow it to my own heart
To find it feeding there on all that’s bad:
It is sanctionable and right
Always to be ashamed of being sad.
Ashamed that sorrow’s beckoned in
By each foiled weakness in the almanac
Engendered by the instinct-to-turn back
-Which, if there are sins, should be called a sin-
Instinct that so worships my own face
It would halt time herewith
And put my wishes in its place:
And for this reason has great fear of death.
Because tides wound it;
The scuttling sand; the noose
Of what I have and shall lose,
Or have not and cannot get;
Partings in time or space
Wound it; it weeps sorely;
Holds sorrow before its face,
And all to pretend it is not part of me,
The blind part. I know what it will not know:
All stopping-up of cracks
Against dissolution builds a house of wax,
While years in wingspans go
Across and over our heads. Watch them:
They are flying east. They are flying to the ebb
Of dark. They are making sorrow seem
A spider busy on a forgotten web.
They are calling every fibre of the world
Into rejoicing, a mile-long silken cloth
Of wings moving lightwards out of death:
Lineage of joy into mortality hurled,
Endowing every actual bone
With motionless excitement. If quick feet
Must tread sublunary paths, attest this one:
Perpetual study to defeat
Each slovenly grief; the patience to expose
Untrue desire; assurance that, in sum,
Nothing’s to reach, but something’s to become,
That must be pitched upon the luminous,
Denying rest. Joy has no cause:
Though cut to pieces with a knife,
Cannot keep silence. What else should magnetize
Our drudging, hypocritical, ecstatic life?
I love Philip Larkin because he was terrified as all hell of old age and death and the inexorable passage of time, and he wasn’t afraid to tell you he saw no dignity or wisdom in any of those things. And he rhymed like a beautiful banshee.
My iPod died tonight.
Its expiration was swift, but not without warning. A little more than a week ago it had a little fit of skipping when I had it connected to the speakers playing some music; then, when my new computer came and I connected it for the first time I had to restore it because iTunes couldn’t read the disk. Then it froze while syncing with my computer, and I had to erase the disk entirely with Disk Utility. A few days later, I had to restore it, then erase it, again. Tonight the little white beast finally caused every program associated with it to clench its buttocks and crash, including Disk Utility while it was trying to erase the disk, and iTunes while it was trying to restore the disk. It made everything and everyone sad, and then it started displaying only a sad folder icon with an exclamation point next to it when I powered it on, before immediately whining, clicking, and turning itself off. It had a short senescence, but clearly senility comes on fast in small electronic devices whose designers work from the principle of planned obsolescence.
Still, it lasted a good three years. And a bit. Now it’s on eBay. May it sell well.
The only questions left are,
1) How will I entertain myself while I am cleaning the bathroom? This may mean significantly dirtier floors.
2) How will I educate myself while I am traveling to and fro by bus? This may mean being significantly less well-informed.
I am off to weep silently (see? How fitting.) into my tea and compose a eulogy.
The rest of Atonement, as well as the remains of tonight’s delicious dinner, tempt me away.
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