I said it hurt but I don't think at first she believed me, not really, not the extent to which I was telling the truth. I cried and she said she was sorry but I wasn't crying because she hurt me, just because there were tears in my eyes and they spilled out. I said it hurt and she looked and looked at me, thought about it, examined the data, the broken parts that couldn't heal, the smoke rising from where I'd been scorched. I said it hurt and she said she didn't mean for it to hurt but that didn't make it better. We talked about what to do now, because I had wanted everything to be the way it was but it couldn't be because everything was broken and then I realized that I didn't even want it to be the way it was so much as I just wanted it to not hurt. She said it would take time and I believed her and I went and stood on a beach and watched a storm roll in and at night everything washed over with salt water and every morning I took the pills and waited for the time that it would take for enough time to pass. Because it does pass, time, it's moving in one direction, and if you promise me it's going to stop hurting I believe you though of course I'm always left with the memory of the pain and the fear of repeating it. Today it was supposed to stop hurting, I know it was today because I marked it on the calendar. And she held my face in her hands and looked and looked at me. She said, I didn't realize how far down it went, this pain of yours. She said, I have given you more than anybody could need and you still have this hole, this ache that I could not fill, I am sorry. She said, now I understand why you said it hurt. And I said it did not hurt any more, because it didn't; I have a stone over the hole now and nothing is going to get past that so the hole is just my tiny secret and it doesn't hurt, I swear, not any more.
Category: TODAY
mildly solatic
We were going to go to a Lindy Hop class but we couldn't find the address so then we were going to go to a salsa class but when we went outside it was too beautiful to go back inside so we decided on drinking in a garden instead. The streets full of people as if the whole town had walked out at the same time. Two weeks ago it snowed and now all the restaurants have outdoor seating, though at U Karla they'd spilled out onto the sidewalk even, and we all sat and gazed up and around as the sky turned purple and the stars came out. An Australian, a Brit, an American, and a Czech walked into a bar and they all spoke the same language and the electrician told us the names of the stars except they were airplanes. In the morning I shaved off most of my hair because I wanted the sun on as much skin as possible and I had coffee in the garden and watched a toddler grow a egg out of his skull ("It happens" he said) and then lunch in another place and then more coffee, grinning like an idiot from one place to the next, and then board games which is how I know life continues at a weekly pace. On Friday the clouds were back and my head was so cold it was like an ice cream headache so I chained myself to the desk and hit a deadline and went to Olomouc where all the restaurant tables were reserved in case the atheist patriarch showed up, or I guess more likely his fans, and on the train home I listened to the same two songs over and over because I couldn't imagine another one being better, the small and certain pleasure of already having what you want. I took a taxi from the station because sometimes but only sometimes we must permit ourselves small luxuries and I was cold. I feel grateful and generous and generally good; if I had any idea what you wanted I would probably give it to you, but you don't tell me and I'm tired of guessing so this is me, getting on with it. I have a Monday deadline but I can't focus for beans today so I wrote this instead.
after the dream of falling and calling your name out
people I talked to:
- a group of Czechs who were returning from Rwanda where they were laying the groundwork to make a documentary about a children's circus
- an air-traffic controller victorious from a golf tournament
- sanitary napkin moguls with a precocious six-year-old motormouth, all shouting to be heard
- a consultant for HP who mostly slept but also made great small talk
- some French nuns who were baffled by the visa paperwork so I filled it out for them; with no language in common we merely smiled at each other with fine form-filling fellow feeling
stimulation:
- an oddly Paul Simon-heavy soundtrack broadcast from inside my mind
- the trees, exactly what I expected but more beautiful
- a school of bright blue fish that I almost drowned following; so many, so lovely
things I thought about:
- planes should be divided into sleeping and not-sleeping sections
- Dubai is disturbingly like Vegas while also being its opposite
- how listening is an act of love
- why people think anger is an effective response when it usually isn't
- friendship and its facets, the sparkle and the cut
she sells seashells by the seashore
Without wishing to oversimplify, it does seem pretty simple to me– to be the person you want to be, start being that person. If you want to be different, change. If you can't change, then stop sitting around wishing you could. I don't mean unrealistic things, because it is true that I have not stopped wishing I could have wings and or a tail, but the things that are well within your range — if it bothers you that you aren't a certain way, why aren't you working towards being that way? Or working towards not being bothered?
I want to be a person who clears deadlines, and so… I clear deadlines. I thought that I would like to be a person who can strike up a conversation with a stranger and enjoy it, but after having given it a valiant effort for a few years I concede that I am not that kind of person and it doesn't bother me anymore because anyway they invented podcasts so I do that instead and it's lovely. I sometimes think that I would like to earn more money at my job but then I remember that I had a job that paid me ridiculous piles of money and I loved that job, but when I stopped loving it I had to quit so I know that money is not as important as I thought it was.
I decided a couple years ago that I want to be the kind of person who says YES unless there's a really good reason to say NO. Curiosity killed the cat, but only after she got a good look. Last week, I was asked to go on a trip and I'm going because there was no reason to say no. I cracked my tooth and it got infected and I won't have time to fix it properly before I go so I expect this little adventure will be like an intensive spa — all sunshine and no solid food. See you in 10 days, assuming I can't figure out how to post pictures while I'm gone.
a luscious mix of words and tricks
“One of the cruelest things you can do to another person is pretend you care about them more than you really do.” ― Douglas Coupland
This quote has popped up on my feed a few times in the past week and it baffles me. I can only assume Mr. Coupland, or more accurately the character that Mr. Coupland has express this sentiment, has had an awfully easy life. I think there are lots of things more cruel that you can do. Leaving aside actual physical cruelty I can still think of things that are much worse than pretending to care. You could care and pretend you don't, for example, and isn't that also fairly awful? You can genuinely not care about someone who wants you to care about them even a little, and you could let them know you don't care. You can care and then abruptly stop caring, and not explain. You can explain. You can set the phone down gently on the counter and walk away for a little while instead of just hanging up, you can practice hanging up, you can practice lots of things that are more cruel than pretending you care.
To be clear, I think genuine caring is a lot nicer, but sometimes you want to care but you have a deadline or you know you should care but there's a stone in front of your heart and it's hard to feel much of anything. Sometimes you are swirling in a vat of molasses and tears and the only way to keep yourself afloat is by pretending not only to yourself but to other people that you give a shit about anything at all, and the people who let you pretend to care about them are full life rafts, and sometimes in the middle of pretending to care you realize you can see the shoreline and you have a moment of real caring that you couldn't have gotten to otherwise and I don't think that's cruel to anybody.
And anyway, there are very few places where the emotion behind an act is really all that important. What does caring look like? Cook a meal, change diapers, make tea, show up, listen. Caring is easy; it involves only slightly more effort than watching a television program or reading a book and wondering what happens next. I spent enough of my younger life agonizing because I feared that people didn't really care about me and trying to keep being cared about by the few people who I thought genuinely might, and I'll tell you what I know: caring about other people is a kerjillion times easier than worrying if they care about you. And it feels better; it just does.
I hereby solemnly swear that I shall not ever care about anyone who posts this quote on facebook, just to be on the safe side, though. Because I care too much to be cruel.
Flapper
When I was in my early twenties and falling desperately in love for the second time, we were invited to a 1920s themed party. I went antique shopping and found this amazing flapper-style dress, from the 1960s-era obsession with the 20s. It was short, white, with a white sequined collar and layers of fringe that flew out impressively when I spun around. Oh, I loved that dress.I wore it to that party, I wore it at multiple Halloween parties, it was a lucky charm. I felt so incredibly stylish in it, like I became a more fun person when I put it on.
Over time and kilos, I was unable to get into it any more. But I couldn't let it go. The thing was, even if I wasn't wearing it, just having it still made me feel happy, the memories I associated with times when I had worn it rushing to the surface every time my hand passed over that fringe. There was a twinge of nostalgia, pain from an old wound, the love had after all ended badly and I felt sometimes like the fun person who wore that dress was not still somewhere inside me, but as gone as dead. But mostly I remembered dancing at a Halloween party, brushing against other dancers when I twirled. Laughing.
Last weekend there was a costume ball and a friend of mine was looking for a dress, a flapper dress if she could find one. Heeeeyyyy I said. I could… you could…
She looked great. It made me so happy to see her wearing it, being admired in it; it was almost better than wearing it myself, because when I danced beside her I could delight in the cool swish of fringe against my arm. I feel like I can let the dress go now, because it's found a place to be loved; I can keep the memories now without needing the dress. And this is always so, for me, that I don't have a problem with letting go when I'm sure that what I release will land somewhere better. Pulling that dress out of the cedar was one of the best things I've done so far this year.
o lásce o zradě o světě
In 1995, I was in a pub and the song Darmodej (The Malefactor, maybe, although it's translated as The Wastrel), by Jaromir Nohavica, came on the radio. It was… Leonard Cohen. Early Paul Simon. The strong quiet voice that you cannot ignore. I can't explain it, there's a fine chain between poetry and my heart and I felt the tug even though I didn't understand the words. I remember saying: I can stay in a country where this is what comes on the radio.
My Czech friend and I set about trying to translate all his songs, for the meaning, for the meat, and while I never can seem to catch the poetry and put it into English, I slowly came to feel the rightness of it in Czech in a way that I don't begin to comprehend. He is absolutely a poet, because his words work on the page, but he is even more absolutely a musician, because his words turn to spells when he sings them.
He is loved here, although little is known about him personally; in fact a movie was made about people trying to get at him, to understand his songs by getting close to him (and vice versa) and at the end of the movie we know nothing more than the disappointed fans in the film. (This is another reason I wanted to stay here, that the most beloved musician is loved for his art, rather than his tabloid activity.)
I never expected I'd get to see Nohavica. The man is stadium-level popular, and I didn't want to see him being a tiny ant. I like him singing to me sweetly in my personal ear, and though I would swoon if it were in real life, it does pretty well via headphones.
But on Sunday he played in a basketball gymnasium, a strange little unadvertised thing, and a friend of a friend had tickets and I went. I spent most of the time with tears streaming down my face; it's like I've decided to put all my feelings behind a wall but the art still pierces right through, and I have cried for Matisse and Miro and Monet and now Nohavica, and I'm not sorry (not least because at least we're moving along in the alphabet).
It was amazing. It was perfect. I loved when he talked, I loved when he didn't, I loved when the audience sang along and when he moved us to awestruck silence. I didn't even put it on my "dream" list because I never thought it would be possible, and I am so beyond happy it was.
5ive, 2
How many V-neck or scoop-necked black T-shirts does Anne need?
a. One; it's a staple
b. One of each?
c. MORE! I NEED MORE!
– From the cycle, "Conversations with myself while shopping to replace one lost thing and instead expanding my uniform"
How I can so enjoy the sensation of free-fall, carnival rides, that moment on the swingset hovering before swooping forward or back, and hate it in life. What it would take to embrace it and again feel the excitement of climbing the stairs, anticipation, and then falling, landing, getting up with a laugh and running around to do it again.
Until I was, I think, in my late 20s I thought Joan Miro was a woman. I invented a sort of story about her hanging out with the surrealists and the Cubists, the way you fill in the details of a dream after you wake until it makes sense to you, I mean this was completely invented, her long cigarette holder, her paint-stained shirt, being treated as a peer while happily painting her clearly more feminine stars and swirls. Yeah.
I am now at about 30% gray, meaning still 70% dishwater red. How do I feel about this? Is it time to stop dyeing (… and get busy living? shut up Andy) or do I hold out for 50% like I said I would. Curiosity vs sticking to intentions. Relatedly, a woman told me I looked really good for my age and I forgot to ask how old she thought I was, and this bothers me a great deal a week later. Good for fifty? or good for forty?
This sentence:
[Matisse was not callous.] It's just that he had only one answer to everything, which was to persist in art that could be justified solely by joy.
– from the New Yorker review of the Matisse Cut-Out show
[Matisse was not callous.] It's just that he had only one answer to everything, which was to persist in art that could be justified solely by joy.
– from the New Yorker review of the Matisse Cut-Out show
travel and other meanderings
Dear airports (and airlines), you dole out basic amenities like the Czechs used to dole out toilet paper. Small servings of a thing that I think you could easily include in your overhead costs and are making us pay for as a means of reminding us who is in control. A Czech acquaintance of mine wrote her thesis on gay lifestyle as recorded by one of the toilet guards, as public toilets were one of the places for gays to meet under Communism. Picture some middle-aged woman, tearing off individual squares and recording the various antics she saw in public bathrooms in the eighties; I expect she got more out of it than whatever is being collected while we sit in suspended animation buying four dollar water, ten dollar wine, trading our grandmother's maiden names for five minutes of connection to people we already like in an attempt to avoid conversation with people we won't.
Overheard, while waiting for the plane to Madrid:
Young man: So… are you going to Madrid, too?
Young woman: Yes.
Young woman: Yes.
YM: For vacation or…?
YW: I'm going to study there for a semester.
YM: Wow! So… you speak Italian?
Once while I was disembarking from a plane with young Squire a business suit came to me and said that he had never seen a finer job of parenting than me on a plane. It probably made my year, totally taking credit for what was in fact an incredibly easy kid to travel with. I regret that I was unable to say the exact same thing to the woman seated a row ahead of us yesterday. I was saving it for when we got off the plane, but when I turned she was gone. She was amazing. Not that the kid didn't cry, though he cried very little, but that the parent seemed to so completely enjoy him while not presuming that the rest of the plane shared her feelings and used her enjoyment of him as a means of entertaining him. Anyway, dear lady in 10C, thank you for making my flight better in more ways than one.
Band names that didn't make the "stuff on our table" list of bands: The Plastic Knives. The Gravy Boats. The Sporks.
Acknowledgement of but failure to actually go into the article about band names and which ones use definite articles and what that conveys, because I'm too jet-lagged to look into it.
You guys, I am so tired. But happy to be home. Didja miss me?
Pride and Sensibility
Anne Tuckington had been single for so long that she had despaired of ever finding a match that would be her equal in overthinking and brooding, and had resigned herself to merely hope that perhaps some day she could find a place to put her cold feet at night, for it is a truth universally acknowledged that a woman in possession of cold extremities must be in need of a partner.
And thus she did merrily go far and around the region, visiting L– for the baths and K– for the cheeses and V– for the condescending attitude and confusion that only the birthplace of psychotherapy could have.
And yet it was in her own small town of B– that the most recent occurrence drove our heroine to put fingers to keys and type the story of a time when she found herself almost smitten with a man whose affections were frankly engaged elsewhere, and she found herself flirting outrageously largely on the basis of his upper body strength, which was prodigious. Imagine him lifting heavy things, she sighed to herself, her breath heavy with longing.
One evening, they perambulated the small hall to which they had retreated, having gone there to escape the bitter outdoor chill, not quite arm in (strong!) arm but very close, and he touched her cheek with the back of his warm hand, and she nearly swooned, whereupon he suggested that they might perhaps seat themselves in the smoking room for a time, as he had something he needed to say.
It bears mentioning at this point that our young heroine, while constantly desirous of declarations of affection, has received them so rarely in her life that she has been known to fall in love upon hearing of someone's love for her, and she is wiser now but still she felt her cheeks flush with anticipation. Perhaps his affections were not as engaged elsewhere as she had thought; perhaps there was yet hope. A confession of ardent admiration, maybe, if not love. With shaking fingers she lit a cigarette for something to do, averting her eyes from his steady gaze, trying to figure out how to inhale the smoke and hold her breath at the same time, waiting.
Finally it spilled forth, this story he needed to convey to her. What was the story? I sense that you, too, gentle reader, are on the edge of your seat. I shall therefore proceed apace: dear reader, it was quite possibly the most boring story ever told. It had nothing to do with an unburdening of the heart, no nothing to do with feelings at all, not even feelings of a baser, animal nature. Once before on a tram our lady Anne had overheard a man tell of an encounter in a restaurant, the tale took longer than the encounter, and she thought that that, surely, was the most boring story ever, but this story surpassed it in all aspects except that at least the teller was better looking.
But there she sat, no words of passion were his, nor even of mild interest, and as he spoke she realized that with every word she found him less desirable, until finally at the end of 20 minutes she no longer desired him at all. Well maybe still his arms a little. But otherwise, the small but persistent flame she had cupped in her heart was fully extinguished, blown out not by the winds of reality but the undeniable puff of boredom. And how did this feel? Was it sad? Not at all: it was the kindest, most incredibly wonderful thing that could have happened. So ended her affection; now she was free again. The cold feet are still a problem, but dying of cold feet is a fate much, much less awful than dying of boredom.
tuckova 