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Showing posts from December, 2009

Replenishing

I can tell that I need to take the rest of the week to re-charge. My life is usually pretty social and filled with people. It's hard not to be when you live with four other people. But I think I need to take advantage of the kids being with their father and some friends being out of town and just kind of retreat and take some time to replenish. I woke up today feeling a little spent, like I've been giving out too many bits of myself without  making sure I have reserves. I can tell that I need some time alone because I keep thinking about getting back in bed. I don't need a nap. I need time to myself. So, I think I'm going to shut off my chat programs and retreat a little bit.

This doesn't happen to me every day (on Facebook)

It's not uncommon for me to wake up to a new friend request. Particularly from someone I don't know, but has friends in common with me. Hazard of small town life. This morning, the friend we had in common is a fake identify (the doll of a friend's daughter-- don't ask), so I wondered if this might be too. Within a half hour, I had this in my Inbox: Hi Between  You  and Names have been stripped to protect the innocent December 30 at 12:25pm Thanx for accepting my frindship request,are u married,do u live alone,where are u from.whats the age... Sent via  Facebook Mobile Dude. I didn't think my profile picture was that good.  _________________________________________________________ Edited to add:  Haha, I blogged this too soon.  Got this in reply: " Oh thats nice thank god for u.well dont u have anybody so beautiful like u for me?doesnt matter age..." Hmmm... maybe I should just go for it?

Out of the Body Travel

And once when I rose from her body it was like water I looked into water I had held. -- Stanley Plumly

Thailand

Bangkok, my friend writes, is evil and she is going to save it from Buddha and Nirvana. Sundays, I like to read gossip and drink coffee when I should be in church. I fell my friend that I am chaste and devout as lilacs because she asks, because she wants me to be because she is in Bangkok. Yesterday, I forgot my coat. Bangkok, she writes, is hot. It clings to her, mosquito net, tangled in the dark.

On relationships

I have been thinking a lot lately about relationships, desire, stimulation, connections, boredom, interests, and how all of these things come together. I have long believed that you can know something intellectually long before you know it emotionally. And sometimes, at least in my case, until you know it emotionally, it doesn’t really resonate or click. Intellectual knowledge is pretty limited: A judge who doesn’t have children can’t possibly understand the terror involved in a custody battle, the fear of not being able to wake in the same house as your children every morning. And so it is with things that I learn emotionally either through thinking about them for a long time or having new experiences that teach me. There are probably a number of these things, thought and experience, at play in the conversation I have had with myself. All of your life, you hear that you can’t really rely on anyone but yourself, that you can’t really know another person. That mostly what we know...
Facebook just recommended that I friend someone. The name seemed familiar, but I was a little startled when I saw our mutual friends and realized that it is my brother's birthmother. I just hit the X. Not really ready to do that.

"Dude, did you lose a ton of weight?"-- Missy

[re-post from Facebook because I know some of you (okay, just one, Liza) are not on Facebook and missed this. I posted before and after pictures of myself from the past 7 months to illustrate just that: Yes, Missy, my size has changed. I'm hedging about how much weight I've lost because I don't know. I am afraid to step on the scale because that is always depressing-- but I do know that Between August 17 and August 29th, I lost ten pounds. I was at my parents' house and weighing myself during that brief period. Because I have continued to lose inches this Fall, I can safely assume it's more than ten pounds. It's funny-- people always want to know why and how someone loses weight, but we don't ask (and why would we?) why and how people GAIN weight. Because we know why, right? We gain weight by eating too much, right? And we lose it by restricting our food intake and exercising, right? That's what I thought for the past 7 years. But I couldn't...

Yahweh-Sammah

Tonight I sit on my couch and watch for you and I can see the light of the moon on the street. I picture you in your car, Sitting in darkness with music, the night all around you, headlights and moon on the road. What is the strength of a vision? Maybe you are not in your car, coming back to me, Missouri from Kentucky. Neils Bohr saw electrons in the laboratory and said our cosmos depends on observation: If you have a vision, you will see it. Even Ezekiel saw the destruction of the Temple years before it began. He started mourning so when Judah really fell he was ready to live again. So I sit here on the couch, eyes closed, and I am with you, unseen, in your car, and will it so. We are pushed and pulled each day by contradictory forces, standing up against gravity and drawn always toward the center of the earth its moltenous, destructional core. Is that why we seek the cold loveliness of the moon? Her constant presence, changing, shape. Tonight I feel b...

Fa la la la la

Yesterday, I am not sure I moved from one spot for... hmmm... it was a long time. I probably got up to go to the bathroom. I half a bagel before I went outside, and took coffee with me, which cooled every time I tried to get a new cuppa going, before I could drink it. At some point, my friend John brought me a mocha. About ten minutes after he left, Jeremy showed up with some Red Bull (which he consumed eventually, 9 hours later, when I had left it untouched). I admit that I was chainsmoking. In fact, I would periodically reach for my cigarette, discover that none were lit, and light another one. And so it went. Actually submitting a federal grant is something else. Weeks ahead of time, you have to register with the granting agency. Then, you have to get all kinds of confidential numbers and passwords from your university saying that you are, in fact, allowed to submit grants on their behalf. Fortunately, I did all that weeks ago. In fact, I scared a few people in the business offi...

Alive and Dead

For some reason, I always seem to have a much more intense need to write when I am under the gun of a big grant deadline, as I am now. This morning, I was thinking about it when I ran out to the grocery store to get the lancets they forgot to include with Christian's prescriptions yesterday. There are plenty of other things in the house I could use to make him bleed, but I am fairly certain the AMA and AAP would frown on the use of a well-sterilized thumb tack. (Although, really, look at the word "thumb tack." Perhaps they were invented for blood sugar testing. Probably not.) Back to the need to write paired with an intense deadline. My ex-husband always liked to tell a story about a young student who came from a small, rural area (this is a folklore story, by the way, or as my ex used to ask at the beginning of such tales, "Is this a Polish student?"). He amazed his professors and excelled in philosophy, English, psychology, sociology, anthropology. And wh...

The Artist Clayton Merrell

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Clay and I were friends when we were at Brigham Young University together. He and my friend Valerie (his wife) also ended up living in Kirksville (where we live) for two years while he taught here. She and I had babies within a couple of months of each other (her first, my third).
At The Foot of the Stairs

The Cat who sat in the Puddle

Anne Lamott told a story in Operating Instructions about a cat that a friend had that was sick and lying in a puddle. Concerned people worried for the cat. “Shouldn’t we take it to the vet?” But one smart person prevailed: “No. If you attempt to move the cat, it will die. It is doing what it needs to do. Just let it lay in the puddle.” I feel like last year I just had to lie in the puddle. And maybe now I’m starting to take care of myself again and come out of the puddle. It’s nice and safe in the puddle though. There is comfort in just lying on John’s dirty kitchen floor too drunk to move. I am starting to understand, for the first time, Heather’s fear of success—and of even trying for fear of failure. Inertia is such a powerful, evil thing.

Miracles

In the twenties, Niels Bohr performed experiments with electrons: He fired electrons through two small slats in a wall; depending on which opening, upper or lower, that the electrons passed through, they hit the upper or lower part of the final wall that stopped them. So: can you picture a machine that fires electrons, fired through two slats in one wall, to travel through a space, and then stop at a second wall? Next, he closed the bottom slat; the electrons went through the upper slat and hit the upper portion of the wall. Next, close the upper slat, and see the electrons pass through the bottom slat, to hit the lower portion of the wall. Then, just for fun, he fired the electrons through both slats, and after they had passed through the slats, he closed the upper slat. There is no way for the electrons to have known this. Yet, they hit the lower portion of the wall. He tried it again, by closing the lower slat AFTER the electrons had passed. Again. Again. Again. He determined that o...

Learning how to Learn

My freshman year of college, I took a life-changing course called Learning How to Learn, or something very close to that. It was an Honors Colloquium which combined the disciplines of English, math, science, and psychology for freshmen. I remember being shocked by some of the things they gave us to read about evolution, about the nature of truth… It seemed to me that our professors were deliberately giving us materials that would lead us away from the church—or at least make us question it thoroughly. I still do not know if that was their objective, but I do know, after teaching a freshman class myself, that critical thinking is a Dangerous course to teach because it can definitely lead to little revolutions. Even now, with a Masters in English and three years of university teaching behind me, I can see how distinctly unique this class was. And later I realized that the critical thinking skills I obtained in this class, the connections I learned to make, eventually assisted me in t...

Baptisms for the Dead

Before I went to the temple in Washington D. C. with my family to be sealed for time and all eternity, I went to the temple with a youth trip. The LDS Church’s mission is to spread the gospel of Jesus Christ to everyone who has ever lived. Perhaps you know that if you want to do geneaology, the place to do it is in Salt Lake City. Well, there is a reason for this. In order to spread the gospel, it is important first to identify every person who has ever lived. And this occurs through geneaology. For every relative a member of the church identifies, a name is submitted to the temple. In the temple, work is done for the living and the dead. The LDS teach that work can be done by proxy for the dead. So, LDS people are commanded to go often to the temple. The only time you do work for living is the first time you go, and you do it for yourself. Before any additional work can be done, a person has to be baptized. And because the adults are busy doing work for adults (there are sacr...

Premonition

Months ago they cupped their hands around one lighter and the tip of his cigarette burned her right middle knuckle The small white scar an emblem of desire that scalds her now, scalds her now.

Birth in a Denver Hospital

It's been at least thirty years since I saw her if I saw her then at all. I don't know how it was that day: Her hair was brown or blonde, long, it swept her shoulders, short, it got pushed back. Her eyes were blue. She was awake or asleep, she saw me or she did not. It doesn't much matter to me, now does it? The lights were probably bright, the room busy and cold. She was probably in pain. The only thing I really know is this: I was there before I left. I was naked and small, and her blood was all over me.

Gaps

Your wife, thirty-seven years, had all of her teeth pulled out. She stayed with her mother, another town, her mouth open in gaps. The next day she went back. Twenty- eight straight white teeth will not take off weight, nine of your children, years of marriage. They will change her whole face. She will smile more, laugh more, She will feel more. She will want you to respond to this. She wants you to take her in your arms, kiss her shiny new teeth, run your husband tongue all over them.

Dust in its Infinite Lightness

Dust, in its Infinite Lightness, can double the weight of a mattress in ten years. You stand at the foot of the bed. The sheet, a blue canopy, hovers and rests for a moment on dust or air, inertia, the energy of its own rise before it falls. Physics tells you a feather will fall at the same speed as a brick, but the sheet wafts down unevenly, rests and settles, wrinkled on the bed for you to straighten. You can think of these things, physics and weight, ten years of accumulated dust, the cleaning and the straightening and the crawling into bed, or remember how the breeze lifts the curtain and the sun catches dust in a stream of light while you stand, arms raised, attached to the sheet that billows out before you on the air.
The Thinnes s 1 The day he was born he drew milk from her so fiercely what should have been teaspoon spilled out of her by late evening. Her body opened: milk bood baby water on the same day. Those were the things she wondered what her body could do. 2 It was years before she knew it could claim her closing her one cell at the time. 3 The son can still see her waiting for him on the top step on the front porch hair pulled back in thin strings. She sits, a wisp, with her cigarette smoke curled round her, then into thin air: Thumb and forefinger the width of her wrist her skin white in the porch light doesn't pinch from the bone. She can feel her own thinness, paraffin, leafmark on the back of her hand. ______________________________________________ Remember this? Placenta It is all song: voice of hands Here we are fire and steam, we dance the absence without loss Body knows the drum- beat is all time Fall down music dance head and arms in the womb We are all drums: bongoes, kettle, ...
I have survived the weekend. Just barely.