Category: TODAY

medium roast in a medium town

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One thing I kind of love about living in a medium-sized town is that there's always something going on. It's never so little that you're at a loss for ideas, and never so much that you can't manage to find what you want to do or choose (though sometimes choosing can be a bit tricky). When I was little I wrote a porquoi story about an earthworm that wanted to be at two parties at the same time, which is funny because my understanding of myself is pretty consistently that I want to be where I am. This indicates that even as a young storyteller I was working on developing empathy for characters quite different from myself.

Another thing that I love is that if there's a thing you want that doesn't exist, you can create it without too much difficulty. Imagine starting a theater in a small town or a big city. In one, you'd be hard pressed to generate enough interest to keep it afloat. In the other, the competition would be overwhelming. A nice medium-sized town and boom, in six years you've done twelve plays despite a pandemic, and each show is on some level better than the last.

One thing I'm struggling with a bit is that competition, which I have never understood, feels pretty personal on this scale. I don't mind if things are created that are different, but I don't like the unnecessary introduction of conflict. I'm not even talking about people who compete with the things that I'm doing, though obviously that's uppermost in my mind. But there are three hairdressers on my block. Within a few blocks of my apartment, there are at least five cafes, not including the hairdressers, which also serve coffee. I like a hairdresser. I like a cafe. And if the market can support it, I guess those are fine businesses to have. But I don't see a lot of difference between the hairdressers (in fact, they seem to all be one big business in three different storefronts) and I don't see much difference between the cafes, either, though I imagine I'm just not cool enough. How did the hipster burn his mouth? He drank his coffee before it was cool. I wish that there was more diversity and less competition. I wish that one of them would be, I don't know, a fancy cocktail bar or something. I wish people would imagine things that aren't in my neighborhood yet and then put them here.

One year I decided to go to a different place for a massage every month until I figured out what I liked and didn't like about massages. Maybe I should start going to all the cafes around until I figure out what makes them different. And maybe in the course of that I'll think of something else I want and either will it into existence or make it myself, whatever it is. I'm not changing hairdressers though. One shouldn't mess with perfection too much.

see what I mean

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I guess several newspapers (notably The Guardian) ran articles in the last few weeks about aphantasia, the inability to picture things in your mind. It affects, they conjectured, about four percent of people, though I don't know how they determined that. Three people in the span of two weeks told me they had it, therefore establishing it in my mind as the new ADHD or autism. It's not actually a disability, it's just an inability. I listened to people telling me this and thought "Okay, and?" and then I thought "Can I picture things?" I'm not really sure. I don't know that I need to. 
 
When I was in university we used to talk about things like this all the time, what was reality and how we perceived reality and what that perception might mean, how it might affect how we feel about it. Are we all seeing the same blue? Then I guess I started thinking about other things. When people tell me "picture this" I understand it as "I'm setting a scene for you" but not as something I'm actually expected to visualize until it comes to life. I understand that I'm expected to imagine something and I sort of do, but it's not, like, an image. It's a shared metaphor, or at least I thought so. Dunno. It's not a medical diagnosis (I'm not even sure it can be diagnosed — parts of your brain would fire up, I guess?). 
 
I have monopsia, meaning that I only look out of one eye at a time, and therefore only see things as two-dimensional. I didn't realize this was a thing (I thought everybody saw what I saw) until those "magic eye" books became trendy, early 90s I guess. I had a moment where I realized that quite probably a lot of things that I thought were a "personality" for me (like "not liking sports") were just the result of not seeing distances (so, for example, being unable to track a ball well enough to catch it or hit it or whatever I was expected to do). Also, a dread of uneven walking surfaces, such as stairs. It didn't really bother me until 3D movies were everywhere. Suddenly people were grabbing at the air in the theater, which was annoying, and the movies all looked out of focus to me. 
 
I think it's cool that, partly through the magic of the internet, we are able to learn things about ourselves without too much effort. I used to go to libraries more (I believe that I learned that I was only seeing out of one eye in my 20s, before computers were standard, though how common this was and what it might have affected came later and probably from the comfort of my own lilypad jumps across screens). I do worry at the amount of self-diagnosis that goes on, and more importantly the amount of conclusions that get reached. If I've made it this far seeing out of one eye and seeing very little in my mind, does it matter particularly? Not to me. Probably not.
 
I do note that I get a little impatient with some of the self-diagnosis going around, which is not particularly nice of me because empathy and patience really take so little effort. But I feel like sometimes we use these things to excuse us from doing things we might not particularly want to do, rather than as a reason that those things might be difficult and we might take a little longer to learn how to deal in a society set up for people to not have those challenges. Like being left-handed or something I guess. Less visible.
 
I thought I'd have more to say if I let this marinate but it has a ways to go. I'll put it here to remember that I was pondering ability and disability and inability in April 2024. 

birds of a feather

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The birds came back to start roosting in the trees in the courtyard behind the apartment. There are several large trees and by the middle of summer every branch will be heavy with them, I don't think they're supposed to be there but they are. They fly around the city during the day and I'm sure it causes actual problems, but for me personally it's just the noise. When they return in the evening the sky is Hitchcockian, the sound of wings beating, the blockage of light, the sense of something impending. They start calling to each other at the first light of day so in the summer it's a full cacophony by 5 a.m. A few of the neighbors have strung shiny paper across their balconies, I assume to keep the birds out, though it's also quite pretty, the flashes in the light. The weather keeps going back and forth between winter and spring, like it is also not quite ready to put away its jacket even while it is definitely longing for the sun. Everything resonates to me with the cusp of change. Two of the trees in the courtyard are in full bloom, white petals. Others are still bare from winter. The building next door is having the facade repaired and the workers all took a long-cut through the courtyard to get to the back rather than go through the building's own doors, so there's a slippery mud slope now where grass might have grown. They were pretty tidy about it, though, considering. Our facade was freshly redone right before we moved in, which means 23 years ago I think; it now looks pretty worn down, though less than most buildings did when I moved here and fell in love with the crumbling beauty of this town, which looked like a black and white photograph, filled with implied meaning where it lacked color. Someone yesterday said that our moving to this neighborhood was gentrification which while I am very gentrified is not, I think, what that word means. The neighborhood I'd been in before translates as Kingsfield, although no kings were present. The neighborhood I've lived in since was filled with students living four to a room and with lots of old people who had lived here through it all, the Velvet Divorce, revolution, before that Communists, Nazis, one woman in our building even before that. There are marks on the walls in the cellar from when they hid from Allied bombs, when they were occupied. But then one of the old people died, and his widow found the place too big for one person and she sold it and we moved in. When we fixed the broken holes in the floor we found newspaper scraps from when it was built. An article about talkies and whether they might replace regular movies. And now we have lived here for decades, longer than I've lived anywhere. I recognize that it is very funny that I will move to a different place on the same street but I do love the street and the neighbors, the convenience of the tram stops and the trolleybus, and I love the life that goes on in the courtyard. To which, by the way, I now have a key. With which to open doors to places that always belonged to me, so to speak. It's not bad.

chrysalis

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players gonna play

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I have a task manager on my phone where I type in things I want to do and every week I have a fresh notebook page where I write down the things I want to do (different parts of the page for different things) and I also have alarms to remind me to do things I want to do. Like there's work and there's performance stuff and there's just looking after my own well being, like "do a load of laundry" or whatever. Despite all this I often find I don't get as much done as I would like. And yet I do things, I wouldn't say I just sit around looking at the walls, although that is also something that I like doing very much. I am often very tired and I thought for a minute before I started traveling in December that it was because I was doing too much, specifically working too much, and I thought that when I was away from work I would finally get some sleep, and then while I was traveling I sometimes thought that I was tired because I was seeing and doing so many rare and unusual things but that when I got home again I would finally get some sleep and now I am home and I'm not really sleeping. I gave myself a week before returning to work so that I could do things like organize the paperwork that came in December for my taxes and get a haircut and check in with some friends without worrying about the inevitable hangover of such reunions and its effect on my productivity. I've been home a week and one of me says that I'm doing pretty well for just one week in (I am, for example, unpacked, which often takes me a month) but the other of me is a little disappointed that at my age I have learned so many tricks for doing things well and I don't do them. Today I read about knitting a sock for a sense of accomplishment and I really thought "Shit, do I have to take up knitting on top of everything else?" but then I mopped the bathroom floor and I guess that counts for something. I would like to be able to give myself credit for doing things, finishing things, and even doing some things well, even though I also want to hold myself to a reasonably high standard and keep striving though maybe not striving so hard that the striving itself exhausts me. Dude, I don't know. I'm going to practice ukulele for a while. It's the weekend, after all. 

More than 59 probably

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Briefly, as I sit in another airport on the next to the last leg of this. I am primarily thinking that it's funny how much humans in general annoy me, for example the woman seated behind me loudly on her phone, and yet how what brings me the most happiness is people. The people I've traveled with, the ones who have welcomed me into their homes, people who took time out of their busy lives to clear a space for me to come in and occupy the whole space for a meal, a day, a weekend. I read a story about someone who used a rosary not for prayer but to remind himself of all the beauty and wonder in his life. There is a lot of beauty and wonder in nature, trees and flowers and for example the moon last night overhead and concealed by clouds, then bursting forth with a host of stars in the crisp night air. But it's people and the beautiful things people do, large scale and small, art and kindness, that would fill most of my rosary. I am so blessed, I am so lucky, I am so grateful.

RE/search

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One thing that I remember is that I felt so odd and like I didn't belong, and I met people who also didn't belong but then amongst them there was also belonging and not, an inner and outer circle. Eventually, I didn't care, I understood loneliness as a natural state.

When these books came to us (how?), it was everything. It was an encyclopedia guide to a world of which I inhabited a corner. And then I was not alone.

There is always the struggle to reconcile the attachment to being unique with the desire to find a tribe. These books were the tribes.

Yesterday, we were in Vesuvio and I thought I was going to tell the story of how people take me for granted, how I have granted myself for people to take. I wanted to be anywhere but the room I was in, suddenly ready to cry, and the books appeared on the sidewalk and I was 18 again, running to books, and this time the publisher was there and all I could do is say you changed my life, you saved my life, and we took pictures and my whole day turned around. Books will always save you if you let them.

copy paste

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When I was in high school I used to shave my eyebrows and draw them on with liquid crayons. Blue, green, lurid. I wanted to look like a weird and intriguing alien; I probably just looked weird. Some months later, the school newspaper profiled another student who had just started painting her own eyebrows: what a fashion trailblazer. She was cute; she looked cute and intriguing. I don't want to claim that I invented the wheel but it was painful at the time to see someone else get credit for having invented very much the same wheel as I was spinning.

In the heady days of live journal, a young woman copied my blog posts and posted them to her LJ and added provocative photos to them. It was unsettling to see her posting my words, getting gushingly positive feedback. A group of my friends went and posted comments calling her out for stealing and eventually she disappeared but she didn't seem to ever get why what she did was wrong.

A few years ago a man who failed in a misguided attempt to woo me then turned and took my words to try to woo other women. Woo is a funny word. The combination of that and other factors at the same time gave me my first true case of writer's block, a feeling that having my means of expression stolen and twisted meant it was better not to express myself in writing at all.

These aren't the only times this has happened, my words lifted out of context and re-poured from someone else's mouth. I don't want to keep feeling this particular hurt. I suppose if I keep writing, anyone who might matter to me will know who said it first. Earlier this week, I found someone using my words again, uncredited, to promote their own agenda. I'm not doing anything because people who don't intrinsically know that stealing is wrong aren't worth the breath. I will take a moment to wish them crushing failure on the basis of who they actually are, which my stolen words are not enough to conceal.

squeaky clean

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I spent last week in a remote village on the side of a mountain in Spain, visiting my friend who owns a donkey as her mountain is too steep for cars. She has a DIY approach to life beyond any aspirations I recall ever having. The donkey is agreeable despite having what can only be described as a mohawk. The ostensible goal of the week was to learn how to make natural cosmetics, although the main goal for me was to see my friend and her world and the house she built in it. She teaches groups how to make shampoos and salves and creams, which she does with plants she harvests and distills. As a person generally devoted to the grid I feel like I don't belong in this group of medicinal herb aficionados but it is pointed out to me that lots of people feel they don't belong for many reasons so I try to be present and pretend to be someone who should be where she is. 

The forests are populated with cork trees stripped of bark from the waist down, their dusty blood colored cores exposed, and when, one night in the village, a flamenco dancer lifts the frills of her skirt to reveal her staccato legs I half expect a similar shade of red. 

Information seems to float across my brain and evaporate, like the day we distilled essential oils. We picked hidden wildflowers I struggled to find and collected them in baskets, and then used various tubes and contraptions to extract byproducts and small amounts of essential oils, the overflowing baskets boiled down to tiny vials. At times information flows so quickly through me that I feel that I lose even that which is essential.

Also, despite living among them, people are intense for me, it's like drinking condensed milk, and sometimes I have to just go lie down for an hour or two, like a preschooler or a genius, whichever. 

One day we go to a nearby farm to learn about making soap, which I decide is like baking as compared to the other things we've been doing, which are more like cooking; I consider this a very insightful and interesting observation and repeat it several times. Most of my observations are witty or "witty" asides such as one makes when not paying attention to the teacher, but this one is related to the material we're learning so I feel good about it.

There are sheep lying in a field like a bargain bin of pillows; up close they are probably scratchy, but at a distance they appear as fluffy restful piles of temptation.

On soap day we learn that soap was traditionally made of animal fat and ash and that this may be connected to animal sacrifice and volcanoes which is the kind of factoid my brain can actually hang onto so that's cool. 

I spend about an hour of the soap class nearly apoplectic with the desire to make a "little white lye" joke but I don't want to be the asshole whispering in the back of class all my life. There are increasing layers to this joke as the lesson goes on, like how the use of lye has a bad reputation but can be good for you when applied correctly and how we should be careful with lyes and children should be protected, etc. I have to leave the room before erupting into volcanic ash and giggles.

We make bags using natural dyes; we try on shoes handmade from leather. We make more creams and our faces are shiny from sitting by the fire, from hard laughter, from the moisturizer left over after we've spooned it into jars. Waste not want not. Everything smells of lavender and calendula.

A flock of chickens strut by, black feathers so glossy they appear deep blue; one chicken is doing all the talking and I wonder if they also need quiet time and whether I'm the noisy chicken.

After a week I leave for the airport, proudly laden with jars and bottles of things I made, like a kid after a week at camp. If eleven-year-old me met me now, would we recognize each other? I tend to think we would.

un gato Andalou

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I wanted in some part to be away from home long enough to know what things actually mattered to me as identified by their absence. So far: utter darkness for sleep. A blanket or duvet and sheets. A window or good fan in the bathroom, and heat. Good toilet paper. Small things mostly. I need a lot more silence than I imagined. I enjoy my own company more than I remembered. I don't read as much as I thought. Now I am in the mountains, breathing air that smells variously familiar (Iike California, like Greece) or new to me, and with people who are similarly familiar or new, though nothing human is alien to me, and I am the most alien. I am reminded now that I am a city mouse and an indoor cat, fond of foods that are easy for me to find and require little work, of being stroked affectionately in front of fires, of smooth floors and furniture upon which to curl; that I like a human world even when the humans populating it can baffle me. I am mostly happy, mostly sleeping, mostly nourished, mostly liking where I am.