The mannequins in the storefront window of a second-story boutique are positioned so that one who is walking by and glances skyward will look inadvertently up their extravagant dresses, feel intensely embarassed, and then feel intensely silly for having been intensely embarassed.My father always told me that if you eat a fruit seed, a fruit tree will grow from your stomach. There is no convenient way to avoid the kernels when eating a pomegranate, so I have been eating them all, every pulpy red seed swallowed with reckless abandon. With luck, I will be an arboretum by next week.
I don't believe in trimming hedges or pruning trees. Nor do I believe in lotioning elbows or going to hair salons. Nor do I believe in religion, for that matter.
My jacket zipper is broken, my boot-zippers are broken, my sweaters are losing buttons, what a gaudy metaphor. Are they trying to tell me I cannot keep my life together? Whoever is writing my life has no subtlety.
Today I suffocated in superfluous words. Obese academic texts, corpulent scientific papers, bloated balloons. Let's place a wartime ration. One-hundred a day, spoken or written. Choose wisely.
Am I the only one who has heard that avocados should not be stored in the refrigerator? Furthermore, am I the only one who imagines that peeling an avocado is a lot like peeling a dinosaur?
There was a week-long hiatus, but for good reason: the gods gifted me with a visit from my good friend Adam. A good time was had, not by all, but by us two.
When it snows and the roads are glazed over with danger. When cars turn timid and creep down the road like careful old housecats. When scarves cover misting mouths and I walk ungracefully with a waddle like a crippled penguin, because I dressed for autumn.I like it best then, because everything is draped in a city-sized hush, because it is like Nature has shot us a stern look, and we are all on our best behavior.
Zeno's Cup: A Different Sort of Drinking Game. Zeno of Elea was a mathematician and philosopher who studied under Parmenides around 450 BC. He created a series of proofs designed to demonstrate the logical impossibility of motion. One of his most famous motion paradoxes states that there is no such thing as motion because an object in motion must always reach the midpoint of a journey before it can reach the end. The concept of motion becomes asymptotic. Space is infinitely divisible into an infinite number of midpointed segments, and one cannot possibly do an infinite number of things within a finite amount of time.
Zeno's Cup is the logical drinking-game manifestation of this philosophical paradox. Two players sit across from each other at a table, one cup of beverage between them. The first player drinks half of it. The second drinks half of what is left. The first drinks half of what remains. So on and so on, ad infinitum--in theory. In practice, of course, there will at some point be too little liquid to partition, and the player who cannot half what is left is the loser.
Zeno's paradox always seems to fail in practice. (Paradox is in the mind?)
Philosophy generally makes for bad drinking games--except in the very special cases of nihilism and epicureanism (and possibly postmodernism and existentialism, which are quite capable of making you wish to drink yourself into a stupor).
Note: this is not really the sort of drinking game that is played with alcohol (fine motor skills are needed), and is definitely not the sort played by people who want to get drunk. It is more the sort played by two overly-polite people sharing a hot cocoa or some such thing, who wish to avoid the social blemish of having eaten the last bite/finished the last sip.
One of my most charming attributes is my utter inability to navigate womanhood. I have exiled myself from three places in which I would have liked to while away time, because I have accepted the phone numbers of male regulars/employees and then failed to call them.I would rather not have accepted them, but I have not figured out how not to. I need a lead-plated excuse, one that not even Superman could see through. Something solider than "I'm allergic to phones."
If any one of you out there, some brilliant linguistics professor or powerful wizard or super-intelligent talking dog, knows the words to a magical phrase that says "oh, thanks" while really saying, "oh, sorry, I'd rather not accept this--I don't want to call it, and I don't want to feel bad for not calling it," but in a completely non-insulting way, I'd be ever so grateful if you'd drop me an e-mail.
I wish people could hear the parentheses in my speech.
Maybe, when a number gets given to me, I can simply take it, eat it, and then act like nothing happened. This would be baffling enough (and off-putting enough) to make the whole issue irrelevant. They could just shake their heads dazedly saying, "man, that girl's whack," and forget about the whole thing.
I might have called, you know, as a potential friend, if the very act of calling didn't imply a whole slew of things. Social interaction is all coded. I've disentangled myself from enough dates in platonic-sheep's clothing to know when somebody is hiding a romanticish thing in ambiguous language. I can barely hear it, but I can: a bomb ticking softly in a suitcase made of sentences.
I've never liked numbers, you know. Not in data. Not in equations. Not in bank accounts or shops. I skip the empirical parts of neuroscience/cognitive psychology papers, for the most part.
Perhaps you think I'm too suspicious. I frequently think I'm too suspicious. That's when I call the numbers, thinking "I should give this a chance." I try to think like a person who's never even heard of different genders, a visitor from a faraway land where all is platonic and friendly. A place more innocent than a Disney movie. More innocent than a PBS cartoon.
It doesn't work. It's like saying, "oh, dear, sorry old chap, but I'm not at all proficient in English." They'd see right through it. They know I speak the language. Everybody, by this age, knows how things work.
I could just get up and go to a cafe, but I know he's working there, and I wouldn't know what to say. I would say nothing. I would say first-semester foreign language student things, like "hi, how's it going?" and "I'm fine, how are you?" and I'd feel very nervous, for some reason.
I am a second-language learner in an immersion program.
My native language, according to this metaphor, would be incompetence. I am fluent in incompetence.
I voted in my first election last week. It was not as awesome as I had hoped it would be.Admittedly, I was mailing in an absentee ballot, and there are only so many ways in which the US postal service can attain awesomeness--and all of them involve delivering me awesome packages and none of them involve me trying to find the three stamps that I just knew I had somewhere in my bookbag, or my desk, or my room, or someplace in the apartment and somehow feeling it such an issue of honor that I could not just buy new stamps. Of course I wasn't expecting zombie George Washington to claw his way out of Arlington National Cemetery to tell me "good job" and give me a chilling pat on the back. But, still, I expected something special. Fireworks. A cherry bomb. A sparkler. A single lighter held up by a swaying, aging classic rock fan.
What's more, nobody else seemed very excited about voting either. Some friends told me they weren't going to vote for Kerry because they weren't sure about him, weren't going to vote for Nader because they didn't want to lose the election for Kerry, weren't, in fact, going to vote at all. Even the people who staunchly supported one candidate (or, ick, the Other) showed very little pluck concerning their decision--they sounded doleful, or resigned, or nervous.
That's when I realized that voting is very little like discussing the mind-body problem, or eating a hot-fudge sundae, or petting a tiger or doing some other awesome thing. I've got enthusiasm, but I can't seem to channel it into politics. I am part of the doleful bunch, and that makes me more doleful. It makes me long for adolescent notions of solidarity in voting-booth lines, and enthusiasm and cohesiveness. Instead, I check election statistics from CNN weblogs, and see that ballots in Florida won't be counted until Thursday. Not very awesome. I assign the world a mission: brainstorm ways in which awesomeness can be restored to national politics.
The biggest problem, as far as I can tell, is that I have no ideas at all on how to improve the situation.
Except this one: absentee ballots should be picked up and carried to the polling places (and possibly counted) by bald eagles. Rock on!
(See how strange it gets when I try to talk about something political?)
