I took some pictures of our recent trip stateside. If anybody wants stories, I will tell them. I am currently wondering why people tell stories in general, and am too obsessed with that train of thought to launch into one of my own, unprompted. Anyway. It was a good trip. I hope our suitcases show up soon.

I was explaining the suffix -er and how it's a comparative, and then thought it best to mention how the suffix can also mean "one who" since a teacher is obviously not "more teach". Then I thought about the suffix -est and the suffix -ist and started on a riff about how when -ist means "the one who" it is a one who maybe does a superlative job or makes superlative money. A typist is obviously more professional than a typer. A chemist makes more than… uh. And then I was in a chemistry lab and I hadn't done the prep work for the experiment. And then I woke up.

Dear brain, how can you entertain me with such varied things on a Saturday morning and yet forget for a full half-hour that I drank beet juice Sunday night before bed? I do not like my Monday morning to feature panic. That is okay brain I like you anyway.

Yes thank you I am perfectly aware that one is supposed to separate the act from the person and say "that thing that you did is disgusting" and not "you are disgusting" but you know what? YOU pull a handful of weeks-old bread crumbs and mealworms from your twelve-year-old's backpack and you tell me owning your words is at the top of your list.

I found awesome waterproof mascara that becomes waterproof upon contact with skin. This means that I can weep it off with the same amazing speed that I weep off all other make-up, and then I get these puddles under my eyes that will not come off without elbow grease, special pads, under-eye make-up remover, and scrubbing.

I spent nearly an hour re-reading old love letters today. I was looking for a specific one but I fell down a hole in which I had shouted "I love you" over and over again and 20 years later it was still echoing around. Very weird, that young woman who was very much me, with the same humor and the same way of unfolding thoughts, and also so… naked with her feelings.

The cat snores. That's unusual, right?

1. One thing I'm not writing about because I've said all I can say.
2. One thing I'm not writing about because I feel like it makes me angrier to talk about it.
3. One thing I'm not writing about because I don't know what I think, and I tend to not discuss feelings until I've made up my mind.

The result of this being that every time I sit down to write, these things are uppermost in my head. Yay.

Squire left for "school in nature" this morning; Friar and I fought last night over who got to make his sandwich for the bus because we totally aren't going to miss him at all.

It is raining and cold again today. The petunias are falling apart.

I do
not suggest reading about Harry Harlow's experiments on rhesus monkeys
as it opens a very unpleasant door in the brain and continues opening
more, and yet you do not learn much that you didn't already know.I suggest that you skip ahead in the thought and just hug some people that you like. I  would hug you right now, if I could.

We had company.

ONE
It's a white room, I think it's white, and I think that either all the edges are perfectly squared off or maybe they're all slightly rounded since the devil hides in corners. There is nothing in the room but a bed, and the bed is very comfortable and the sheets are cool and crisp at first and then soft around your body. The pillow is perfect. The room is room temperature. There are no pictures, no furniture besides the bed. There is a window in the ceiling so you can see the sky and get natural light if you want, and there are perfect shutters if you decide you don't want natural light. There are no windows in the walls so there is nothing to see when you look straight ahead but the walls that are perfectly square or maybe rounded. There's a door with a slot and through that door come three bland but nutritious meals a day, and they come and you eat them or don't sometime before the next meal comes. I haven't worked out the bathroom yet because this is imaginary but on the fly I'm going to say there's a small room off to the side and there is a shower that runs hot water as long as you want, but no bath because baths are ultimately unsatisfying. There is soap that doesn't smell like anything really. There is absolutely nothing to do but sleep, shower, and eat. The most important part of this room is that outside the room, time has come to a perfect standstill; you are missing absolutely nothing. You can stay in the room as long as you want. Sometimes it is all I can think about.

TWO
Sometimes I think any story I tell is basically like this video, which is amazing and disturbing. The story starts off all "here's this thing" and then about three minutes in I am so moved by my own emotion that I start crying.

THREE
Weeping through the story that I told only because I thought there was nobody listening is another thing I have in common with Prufrock. That and the growing old. Eliot was only 27 when he wrote Prufrock; if he'd stayed in America he would have had to kill himself like a proper rock star. I had a baby which is how I got out of choking on my own vomit or a shotgun muzzle or whatever else does you in at 27. I think my masterwork is pretty awesome.

So the metaphor this week is definitely bees. Friar talks me to sleep every night about solitary bees, making home for bees, the wonder of it all. I shaved my head and thought maybe if I dyed my hair black and yellow like the guy from General Public I would seem like the kind of thing you want in your garden, but there is nothing mellifluous about me. I'm mostly bumping against glass next to the open window, dive bombing flower reflections in pools of water and drowning in my errors, and likely to sting anybody who tries to help.

Here are some photos.

This is kind of lame, but hey! Here is a list I wrote in January (It's nearly Earth Day! I'm all about reusing and recycling!)

1. I regularly crave vinegar and salt and will eat them by the
   spoonful if I can't think of something better to put them on.
2. I am disappointed in myself for not typing with a dvorak
   layout.
3. I cannot imagine not having a "wave" keyboard and
   would rather not type than use a regular keyboard.
4. I am so angry so often that it frightens me sometimes.
5. I hate talking to strangers.
6. I still think it's a big deal when someone compliments my
   Czech.
7. I had an iPod for a year before I figured out how to use it.
8. I am extremely uninterested in how things work.
9. I like learning about how people work, though.
10. I have the rocking chair that my mother rocked my sister in.
    It used to be orange.
11. I do addition on my fingers but I usually hide them in my
    lap so people can't tell.
12. I used to fingerspell out everything people said while they
    said it, and I still spell in my head sometimes. It helps me pay attention.
13. I like the Neutrogena face massaging anti-wrinkle thingie,
    not because I have wrinkles but because it makes me sneeze convulsively.
14. I am currently persuaded that I have had a headache for two
    weeks now. I anyway am pretty sure I have taken ibuprofen every day for two
    weeks.
15. I greatly dislike questions about "favorite"
    anything, though I sometimes ask them for lack of another topic.
16. I can't sing but I know all the words.
17. I can carry a grudge longer than anybody I know.
18. I paid off my college loans in one year by living in Japan
    and not buying anything except food and kerosene for that year.
19. I would rather go back to teaching than live in debt, but
    that is only because death is not an option.
20. I don't think I have made this many "I" statements
    before in my life and she thinks she should have done it in third person.
21. When I was little, my teeth were so crooked that I could put
    my thumb between my two front teeth.
22. At one point in a particularly dissociative insomniatic
    burst, I persuaded myself that all the people I "knew" on the
    internet were actually just this one person who was messing with me. Claudia,
    whose writing skills are such that she could probably pull it off.
23. I love the numbers 23, 42, and multiples of nine up to 90. I
    like the first two because they are heroes in books that I like, and the nines
    because of the fingertrick. Oh, and I like 6 because it's Bert's favorite
    number and 1x2x3 = 1+2+3.
24. My favorite game when I was little was to pretend I was on a
    train being pursued by…somebody… and people would come to the door of the
    carriage and I would have to disguise my appearance and voice using only the
    materials in the carriage and persuade them that I was not the person they were
    looking for. This was before Jedis.
25. Sometimes I am blown away by how old I am.

So many things. This alternating incredible irritation and then delight and joy and all things good.

How
one day can be thrown like bad dice because the weather is variable and
all I can do is lay on the floor trying not to sit up with my ambitions
because I will surely pass out, and the ambulance screams up the street
so I can't even count dust motes in peace, or the doorbell rings and
it's door-to-door sales instead of packages and I have the parquet
pressed in the side of my face, and then this simple translation that
I'd said I'd do as a favor turns out to be exactly the kind of writing
I hate to read, and why, why. I should have a cave somewhere.

And then how
I can be thrown into bliss because my friend sent me a funny e-mail in
the morning and work went well and the sun is still up at 6 pm and I go
to the wine bar to meet Friar while Squire is home writing a paper on
Einstein and Dusan comes in and says hey, and then this woman I know
b/c her daughter went to 1st grade with Squire and she buys a liter of
wine in the bottle of water I just watched her drink outside and we do
the smile nod where maybe she doesn't know where she knows me from,
quite. And then we go home and Friar makes fish and peppers and then we
play cards, and then board games.

On Monday Squire got dressed in his winter coat and I said no maybe it
was time for a jacket so he put on his jacket but it was tight.
Sometimes I put on clothes from last year only to realize that My How
You've Grown continues even into your forties. His reaction was about
the same as mine: OH NOES. Then he started crying because he looked
like a "dork pencil". I remember the story about my cousin who didn't
want to go to school one day because he had a giant zit on the end of
his generous nose.I let Squire stay home.

I thought I wouldn't recognize puberty, that we would be too caught up
in everything else and that I might mistake the symptoms of one thing
for another, but if you are crying because you look like a dork pencil
then that is actually totally recognizable to me. All I can say is that
first of all, at least it is not pink satin Miss Piggy sneakers that
seemed so cool when you bought them, before they got spit on. And also:
screw them, you know? Those shoes were cool. Being awesome is
simultaneously tempered and built by people too stupid to understand
who you are.

And who you are, if you're lucky, will be a person whose greatest
irritations in life are people who don't know the difference between
"it's" and "its" and don't know why that's a good thing to know; and
whose greatest pleasures in life are watching people grow into adults,
and seventies television references, and the last cigarette before bed,
and more than can be summarized in words like these.

And then Saturday the little grocery store was in fact re-opened, with
eggplants so pretty they couldn't be real, and we bought some and
traded eggplant recipes, and also bought onions the size of your brain,
and some bizarre nut thingies from Israel. And she said she was
stocking up, that this time they're really going to have everything,
even the foul unfiltered things that Friar (she called him "your man")
smokes. So that's nice.

And we go to the video store and they say that they've ordered
Mission:Impossible because we asked for it, and we go to the wine store
and they're like heartbroken to be out of veltlin, but they have some
chardonnay that might do the fruity white thing right for me, because I
need wine that tastes like spring these days, and oh! I forgot to
mention that on the way out in the morning our next door neighbor was
telling about her son the doctor.

On the way home we walk past an old woman who is prone on the sidewalk
but there are three people around her already and one has a cell phone
so we just keep walking.

And at the pharmacy the Slovak pharmacist has the prescription ready,
and I want to tell him how I am much more foreign than him, and how
it's not his accent that trips me up, but my own stupidity, but I
decide to be happy he remembers us and give him The Big Smile and we
take the box and go.

I can't live in a village, really. I need movie theaters and a ballet
and a train station and an awareness, at the very least, that other
cultures exist. Yet what is most terrifying about a city is that the
anonymity becomes too much, that you feel swallowed. And in the winter
I maybe forgot that that there are people here who watch me because
they are watching out for me, just as I am for them. That I live in a
city that is just a collection of villages. That it is a privilege to
walk to the store to buy arugula and walk past the pizza shop, where I
don't know his name but we're practically ty-kating, and buy pizza with
"Indian chicken" that I can eat on the way home.

1. Possession of a musical instrument, no matter how beautiful and/or pricey the instrument, does not immediately convey upon one the
ability to make music with said instrument.

2. In the past
week, every time I've lost my temper it's been to do with somebody
getting all up in my space or even just threatening to. My hatred of
people is not to be underestimated. That said, I really do miss you
terribly.

3. The decision as a parent whether to arm your kids or let them learn
to fight their own battles barehanded is the hardest for me. What
metaphor, what myth, where in the past is this grounded and how can I
cut us free. Or maybe it's a good one to return to, a good wound to
lick.

4. Every time I think of the story it becomes more complicated, to the
point that I can't imagine I'll ever write it down without making it
simpler, except every complexity makes me love the story more, to the
point where it becomes cheating to leave anything out.

5. I hab a colb. I neeb somb tissues ad a nap.