"Great tits!" he said. I was standing at the bar waiting to pay for my
liter and half of wine, this is the bar down the street where they have
it on tap and you bring in your empty water bottle and they fill it up.
I wanted a bottle of red, and the tap had run out so the bartender was
in the back hooking up another keg or whatever. A cask, maybe.

I
took a step back and moved my arms out, palms out. "They’re not even
tits, really," he continued. "They’re breasts. Full, round, round
breasts. They’re perfect." I hate this, I hate this so much. I want the
quick retort, the one word. The one that shrivels him, and all I can
think is phrases in English. Spoken like a true gentleman, I
have, and a few sailor’s greetings, but I can’t twist the idioms into
Czech somehow. Come on brain, move. "Of course partly it’s probably
your bra, but it’s also just that you have such big tits. I mean
breasts." I start wanting him to make a move to touch me; the people
around us are starting to watch and I want it to be clear that he went
to touch me and that’s why I had to hit him. I’m looking at a picture
to the right, one of those old cigarette ads, maybe from the 1940s or
maybe made to look that way. It’s framed and I can see his reflection
in it. He’s a lot taller than me, which means I’d have to get him on
the ground before i could smash his head, which is what I want to do,
but he’s drunk enough it wouldn’t even occur to him to block a solid
punch in the belly, and I’ve got rings on.

The bartender comes
back in, sees me being towered over, yells SIT and the man sits down
like the slobbering dog he is and we all turn leisurely away. I pay
four dollars for the wine and go.

It takes every bit of my
effort to focus on the bartender, to focus on the parallel between a
drunk man and a misbehaving dog, both needing to be trained. I do not
believe that in spite of everything people are good at heart but I know
that I am already wildly disinclined to leave the house and that if I
think about any part of this story other than the bits that are funny I
will entirely shut down. Later that night over the wine I explain to
Marcela about space, the assertion of, and detach from the story enough
to tell it.  Laughing because he was, after all, right, although
completely unpoetic and rather smelly besides. And this is how we
re-enter the world.

Who should set their alarms for 6 a.m.: People who intend to get up at 6 a.m.

Who should not set their alarms for 6 a.m.: People who sleep next to insomniacs who are low on sleep to begin with; people who are able to merge the annoying howl of their alarm clocks with a dream about pretty birds for a solid minute; people who are not getting, and have not ever gotten out of bed before 7.
Bonus: people who can’t remember how to turn off the alarm without turning on a light and looking at it even though the clock is some 5 years old. I am looking at you, and this is why you are not allowed to play with my shiny new camera.

I’m in New York hanging with my friend G while Squire Tuck is off doing some grandparent/child bonding thing upstate. I assume our young Squire is having a good time, but I suspect I’m having a better time. During the day, G’s in school and I work on his adorable little laptop (how DO people work on laptops? I feel like I’m used to being the captain of a starship with my giant desk and my wave keyboard and suddenly I’m like trapped in some bitty shuttle craft), which is not a blast, BUT in the evening we whirlwindily do New York Stuff. We walked through Central Park, we went to the Met and looked at marble dudes, we watched a sunset off a pier, we saw Xanadu!, we had very schmancy drinks in an unmarked bar, I smoked a cigarette on a stoop, and I’m not telling you the half of it. I got Squire a t-shirt from the Natural History Museum. I think we’ll keep the fact that I went to the circus just between ourselves, though, okay, or he’ll never let me out of his sight again. I have FUN when I travel, I’m saying.

We were in Washington D.C. for a few days, hanging with family and making sure my tear ducts are fully functional. They are! In addition to Standard Familial Strife, things that made me cry were: watching Barbara Morgan on the live feed, Mr. Rogers’ red sweater, seeing the ghost dance dresses, that giant Calder mobile, and the fact that the Smithsonian is free. Best and worst of America, all right there. I wanted to kiss a flag and burn it at the same time, and even that conflict made me feel more American than I have in a long time, and more at peace with it.

The day before I left I found out somebody had been copying my writing here and passing them off as her own. This caused me quite a bit of –I don’t want to say I was angry, but I certainly was confused. Why would you want to pretend to be someone else, have someone else’s life, in an online journal? It is ever so strange. And it stirred up some stuff for me, like Why Do I Write and What Is This Thing Called Blog and so on. But then I had a plane to catch so I couldn’t really work it out.

Anyway, that’s how we roll. Hope you’re having fun where you are, too.

things I know more about now than I did two weeks ago:

greek almond milkshakes, greek arugula, greek assumptions, greek
balconies, greek boat rides, greek bus rides, greek chinese massages, greek
coffee, greek dances, greek delight, greek dolmades, greek earplugs, greek feta,
greek frolicking and cavorting, greek karaoke hell, greek long island ice teas,
greek monastery, greek naps, greek octopus, greek ouzo, greek passport control,
greek pizza, greek roadside memorials, greek ruins, greek sand, greek second, greek
shade of blue, greek slurpees with alcohol, greek stuffed peppers, greek
sunburn, greek swallows’ nests, greek swimming, greek volcano, greek water, greek
waves, greek wind, greek wine, greek women (old), greek yogurt, greeks singing
se agapo…

Hi, I made some changes to the site, including adding some aliases (aliaii?), updating the "about" page a bit, and changing the colors so we looked less like winter mourning and more like, you know, summer. Sorry if I broke your feed or anything.

Squire Tuck (the boy formerly known as K) is done with school, finally, today, and is celebrating by having a fever. He’d better get better before it’s time to leave for Greece, as I’d hate to leave him behind.

I’m trying to decide which of my Procrastinated Heavy Books I’ll take to Greece. I started "Love in the Time of Cholera" in the waiting room (which is sort of like the beach except no fun at all) and I feel so much more optimistic about finishing it than I did about 100 Years of People with the Same Name, which I finished because at that age I still thought finishing books was a virtue, like cleaning your plate. But now I am old and wise and must watch which words spend time getting into my head.  But I’m going to finish it before we leave, I think, so I must pick something else. Arthur and George? Kavalier and Clay?

Otherwise we’re doing what we generally do. I got all the paperwork in order so that if the house catches fire Friar Tuck (the man formerly known as P) will know which papers to grab. How much do you love these aliases? See what 5 days without a single drop of alcohol does to me? Busy busy busy brain. Gosh, do I need a dreamless sleep ever so badly.

My sister sent me a bathing suit (two, actually: a black one that I
asked for and a blue one that she picked) and it came yesterday. I am
going to hire her to come here and Geranimalize my wardrobe, so that
all the tops match all the bottoms and I will never again be standing
in front of the closet all, does faded black still go with black? and
weeping. The suit she picked is a very vaa-vaa-voom bathing suit; it is
the color of sweet Westley’s eyes, and it makes me look like I don’t
even know what. A forties film star from the neck down. Like someone
who uses a lot of L words. Lounge. Lush. From the neck up I’m the human
embodiment of practical fun. Short hair is awesome because you can get
stuck in a massive rainstorm and be all, flip! and back to normal.
Altogether this bathing suit feels like a reward for managing to stay
in my body this spring. After about three months of pain in one place
or another and more doctors than I’ve seen in ten years total, I think
I’m finally feeling normal. Spring sucked a fair bit of life from me,
but it’s summer now so I am done with the swooning and I am definitely
done with the waiting rooms, I do declare. I noticed yesterday that I
was sitting up straight and my back didn’t hurt, and my body and I
enthusiastically high-fived over it. Basically I feel better, I look
great and you totally wish I was your girlfriend. Sadly (for you) as
Friar Tuck is the first man I’ve lived with who didn’t tell me I’d be really
pretty if I just lost some weight, he’s the one who gets me. However,
you and I can still be great friends, and if you’re really nice to me
I’ll let you touch the hem of my extremely cute bathing skirt.

In other news, we went to a concert (neocekavany dychanek)
last week that was just awesome. I don’t even have words. It was so
much music, and so loud, and yet each one of them (accordion, electric
guitar, flute, drums, sax, clarinet, mandolin, and I think there were
some more) got a turn and they all seemed to be having fun. The female
singer danced like mad whenever she wasn’t playing flute or swinging
around a megaphone (she’s very pregnant and she did
more moving on that stage than an aerobics teacher, it was like
watching Tina Weymouth in "Stop Making Sense"). The accordion player
pogoed!  AND I’ve never seen anyone type as fast
as that clarinet player could move his fingers. The whole thing was
just…
exhilarating. The audience was great, too, like watching deadheads
dancing to punk music, and since I couldn’t understand the words much
because it was too fast and busy, I got to people-watch like mad and
think anne thoughts without feeling like I was missing anything. I was
thinking, for example, that the female singer is beautiful and yet
because she is talented she seems detached from her appearance, which
enables her to make faces like crazy and still seem gorgeous.

And then this weekend, which was coincidentally St. John’s Eve,
we went to the cottage and worked and played super hard and we walked
home through the forest with certain wise people, we stepped over
fireflies instead of over fires, and everything was sparkling and
wonderful, and it seemed as magical as fern seed and perhaps now we
really are invincible. Or invisible. Either way.

on friday we went to see pirates of the caribbean again. i wasn’t sure
i’d want to see it twice but i made up a drinking game in which i pretended that i was drinking every time keira knightley demonstrated her utter inability to act, but i did not
actually drink, which means i
amused myself but did not distress anyone in my vicinity, which
happened when we took literal drinks for the da vinci code and ran
entirely out of beverage before the movie was over. it was the "tom
hanks’ hair is ridiculous" that pushed us over, i think. anyway:
pirates. the first time we saw it my friend commented that for all the
talk of ms. knightley being anorexic, she’s got nice legs. do you know
why? i suspect a body double, as i haven’t seen face/legs/face editing
that choppy since jennifer beals in that frankenstein movie. lucky, lucky faceless
woman that had orlando bloom kissing her leg.

i went to a party on sunday. i hadn’t been to a party in a
while and i had a bit of a meltdown right at the beginning in which i
lost not merely words but sentences and some other key features of
brain function. it wasn’t pretty. i had to sit in a chair mumbling to
self and pinching the insides of my arms while another friend who
hasn’t slept in a month expressed some concern, which made it worse,
and then i opened my mouth and said some stupid shit and died a little
more inside and it was all poor yorick but then it was okay.

i am thinking about how you learn so much when you’re young
and as you get older you don’t gather information in quite the quantity
and so it is really neat to have learned in the last year to peel a
banana from the other side (take THAT kirk cameron) or in the last
month i circumvented the "how to peel a boiled egg without getting
shell all over the damn place" and last night i learned the magic of
cornstarch is not to be underestimated and it’s really just altogether
wonderful to be alive in these interesting times, isn’t it.

oh and also i have a squire tuck snippet, which is this: i was
talking to him about nature vs. nurture and how this is such an
interesting thing because we don’t know which controls a lot of things
about how we are as people. and i asked him, so does he think that
personality is more likely to be determined by environment or by genes,
and he said it’s determined by what you yourself choose, and added that
saying that something is a product of nature or nurture in both cases
takes it out of your hands, which is unfair. and that is why i keep him
around. and also because he smells nice.

the last time i bought a bathing suit i was… uhm. oh, let’s not play
ladies. i was larger than i am now. so and i’m going to greece next
month and i need a bathing suit that will not be wrested from me by
a big wave. so i went to buy a bathing suit.

how to buy a bathing suit:
step 1: DON’T. look life is
short. what do you want with a bathing suit? seriously, go to the
mountains or something instead. while realizing that greece is a dream
you’ve had since you were 12, and that greece has the longest sandiest
beach of ever, and that greece is a mere plane flight away, and that
greece for 12 days is cheaper than a plane ticket to america… dude,
greece is hot. stay home. you could work on the cottage or something.

and also you, with your glow in the dark whitey whiteness, would
be banned from beaches if such banning were legal. the three of you
together are like some milky way constellation. you belong in the sky,
or possibly in some mushroomy cave somewhere. you have no business
being on the beach.
or maybe you should wear a muumuu or something, skip the bathing suit and that irritating note of rising hysteria in your voice.

step
2: okay shut up. you do some internetly clicking which is always fun
because they’re like: this suit covers up a large bust. this suit
covers up a large belly. this suit covers up a large ass. you want the
suit that makes you invisible: where is that suit? the suit you want is
the suit for frolicking in the water with your son without getting sand in your parts. you want the suit that’s for getting drunk on the
beach and stumbling back to the pension (a mere crawl from the beach!)
to play catan. where is that suit? that suit is not available in
stores, and you can’t get it by mail order either. give up the idea of
a suit that suits. you’re thinking: tankini top, and you’ll buy some
boy’s trunks and anybody that looks askance gets poked in the eye.

step 3: go to TESCO. you hate TESCO with the burning hatred of
a thousand suns, but it is somehow connected to target (the only place
you’ve bought a bathing suit that fit) and therefore you think they may
have some reasonable bathing suits. you will be wrong. they have
hideous yellow things covered in what appears to be glitter.  they have
bathing suits that make their mannequins look fat and or badly
proportioned.  they have a bikini top that you actually try on because
you like pain; this bikini top would go well with your drunk on the
beach scenario, as it gives you a shelf upon which to rest several
beers, but it is otherwise really a nightmare and it costs a ridiculous amount. they have mirrors tilted
in at an approximate thirty degree angle, presumably because restocking
is hard and simply not moving the merch is the way that TESCO is
playing its hand. they also have a peeping tom(as) in the dressing
room, which goes well with the mirrors. you feel angry, you feel
filthy, you feel weepy and punchy. you also feel like you will never
find a bathing suit.

step 4: press hand weakly to forehead.
perhaps you could make a victorian bathing suit, although that will
probably get even more askancing, and victorian ladies do not poke eyes
out.

step
5: write in desperation to sister, who has better fashion sense than
you do, and is not driven to tears by shopping but in fact actually
enjoys it. apparently your sister and your mother are happy to spend
your mother’s birthday shopping for a bathing suit for you. you cannot
conceive of a sentence that has happy and shopping in it. you are
probably a changeling. a changeling who is having a bathing suit sent
to her, though!

the thing is, while i’ve bought enough regular clothes to
have gotten over the idea of Transformation, i can count the number of
bathing suits i’ve owned in my adult life (uhm… four), and so some part of me probably is still stuck back at age 16,
all self-loathing and eternal moments. but the thing is: self-loathing
is boring, and no moment lasts forever, whether it’s a knee-melting
kiss or a creep staring through the cracks in the dressing room door.
i’ve got better stuff to do than this. for example, now that my hair’s
short, i can start dyeing it interesting colors again. and i may
require more earrings for my freshly exposed ganesha ears. also: i’m
going to GREECE next month. woot.

things that hurt more than you expect them to:
paper cuts
unrequited flirting
curiosity

things that hurt less than you expect them to:
conking your head on the doorway
walking away
breaking up

things that are right about on target:

the dentist
the word no
saying goodbye

and what brings you here, my pretty?

Ducklings,

I am sorry, I was busy entertaining Awesome Company this past week and describing how much fun I was having would have been like describing a roller coaster ride while you’re on it. Metaphorically speaking: I was preoccupied with screaming and drooling with joy.

I wrote a little culture thing over at Lost in Transit, though, so you don’t go entirely hungry this week.

Returning to normal next week, I expect.