i am more proud, i think, of being able to change a tire on my bicycle than i am about anything, any test scores or awards, any poems or creations or accolades.

it is concrete, finite: before, i could not do this thing, and now, now i can.

maybe this is just an illustration, a metaphor for one of my own demons: the ocean of space between talent and skill. one you are born with, you have no responsibility for its insistent intrusions into your life, no reason to take pride in it; you are blonde, you can play the piano, you remember the nuanced meanings of words, you have freckles on your shoulders.

a skill is something towards which you work; you start with nothing, and then the first thing you do is you fail, you fuck it up, over and over you fuck it up, until you can do it: you can throw a frisbee or hit a golf ball; you can fix the computers, the plumbing, the broken étagère; play the guitar, cook a steak, make the fucking bed like a normal person.

one of these i have in self-satisfied/self-hating abundance, and the other wholly absent: a justifiable source of shame. i can talk pretty sometimes, i can punctuate like a motherfucker, and i can barely iron a shirt without setting something on fire.

but at least i can change a bicycle tire.

half-life

I dreamed that I owned a flower shop;
that I lived my life in orchids, in hydrangeas,
wallpapered in baby's breath.
The seasons flickered through the window glass:
tulips marked the springtime; vivid asters,
then chrysanthemums in the autumn air; the flash of poinsettia
bright against the snow.

Blank-faced men drifting to me,
identical, their palms turned upwards,
clutching for something:
I pressed roses and marigolds into their outstretched hands,
stroking my fingertips over petals,
over flesh and thorns.

I grew old inside my flower shop,
feeding the faceless men;
they came for the tulips, clung to the asters,
to the fading mums.
There was the murmur of water, the laughter of windchimes,
the faceless men with poinsettias, bright against the snow.

tattoo

This is what happens when my mother isn't so much around to temper my father and my sort of warped sense of hilarity.

I'm feeding the cat and thinking of Far Side, and mutter "cat fud" to myself and snicker. Twenty minutes later, I come out of my bedroom and open the door to find this stuck on it:

Which cracked me up to no end that he got the reference, when I don't think I even quite knew what was going through my head at the time.

Now half of our house is covered in things like this:



As it will probably remain for several more weeks, if not indefinitely.

Things I have found while cleaning my room:

pizza hut pay stub from 2003
cord to a bathrobe I don't own anymore
detachable inner pocket to a suitcase I don't own anymore
the tote bag equivalent of the three-wolf-moon shirt
full page sketch of snail races I probably drew in middle school
nirvana in utero cassette tape insert
a girl scout badge that I cannot interpret
homemade national antelope day tshirt
2 pairs of leather pants

And I haven't even touched the closet, or oh god the desk drawers...

Devolution

Or, Why I Need a Dark Cave in the Desert to Get Anything Done.

12:30 pm.
OK. I've opened my project, fixed up the template. I'm ready.




Look: notes on the left, vitamin water, chewing gum. I'm clearly a girl with a purpose. Note for posterity's sake the internet wire duct-taped to the closet door in the upper-left corner, as well as the keyboard firmly set into the desk drawer.

12:45 pm.
Remember that Rafael Nadal is playing in Wimbledon. Some other stupid sporting event seems to be all over the television. I take to the internet.


An understandable distraction.

1:45 pm.
I have ten whole minutes of audio done! Only... 248 minutes to go. Spent 15 minutes trying to decipher an unintelligible name. Google's failing me. This is upsetting. Inexplicable segue into looking up salsa recipes.

2:00 pm.
FISHING CONTEST IN THE WORLD OF WARCRAFT THIS IS CLEARLY AN APPROPRIATE EXPENDITURE OF MY TIME.

2:08 pm.
Didn't win.

2:11 pm.
But Nadal did!




Again: understandable, I think.

2:35 pm.
16:48 minutes done! Obviously, this is the time to upload to this blog so I can update from here. That way I can close the other MS Word document, because it was distracting me from the one I should be working on. Yes, that's way I haven't been getting much done. Definitely.

3:11 pm.


Accomplished.

3:31 pm.
Literally nothing. I think I got a glass of water. Guess that took 20 minutes.

4:30 pm.
32 minutes done! I thought that I was like 1/5 done, and then I remembered that an hour is 60 minutes, not 100. Not sure how that played out in my head.

5:30 pm.
I guess I've guilted myself into actually doing some work. 60 minutes done; under 200 to go!

8:30 pm.
I've officially ADD'd out of my own ADD recording.

in which TV dinners are like cadavers

I had to go to work at 5:30 pm today, and since I could only haphazard that I'd probably get home somewhere between 7:30 and 11:30, my mother told me she had gotten me some dinner for whenever I got home, which was totally sweet and thoughtful. And she knows that I'm trying to avoid eating the really grody chemical soup like foodish things, so she got me some chicken teriyaki frozen dinner than appeared to be made of food ingredients and not a misplaced high school chemistry lab report like most TV dinners.

Which, as I said, really thoughtful! However, during my years as a TV dinner connoisseur (I like to pretend that I'm past that stage and not just in a temporary interlude of generally having access to one Actual Meal a day) I learned a couple things to which I have yet to find much exception. One is that Asian food, regardless of how awesome it may be in general, is almost never remotely palatable in TV-dinner form. It's all oily, but like BP-oily (too soon?) and not like delicious olive oil oily, and soggy and squeaky like Chinese takeout chicken seems to me. Basically at best it's all like that really terrible Chinese delivery food that's so fucking awful it's awesome, except without the part about it being awesome.

The other thing I learned, which should be palm/forehead common sense, is that it is absolutely not possible to marry the twin dreams of healthy and tasty when you're packaging up a pre-prepared meal to freeze and stick in the frozen-food aisle of Wal-Mart awaiting the tender ministrations of a microwave to bring out its fresh and delicious goodness. You can't do things like that to fresh ingredients and expect it to come out tasting anything like it would with all those chemicals to do whatever it is they do. It'd be like putting a fresh and formerly healthy young corpse in a coffin without embalming it and expecting it to be rosy-cheeked and non-squishy a week later. Except I think the freezer bit throws the analogy off, and I don't know anything about embalming or the decomposition process and I'm goddamn well not researching it. Point being: it's gross.

A lot of people -- or at least some people, or at least maybe one or two people -- swear by the Kashi brand, but I still have found that it tastes like ass. Like chemical-oozing ass, even, despite the nonthreatening ingredient list. Whereas, you know, Stouffer's lasagna, with its ingredient list that takes up half the box and most of it ending in -ides and -enes and -ynes and shit, is fucking delicious. Especially when you burn it a little and you get the burnt lasagna crust on the sides, which is the best part.

So I threw my decidedly non-lasagna-crust-edged chicken teriyaki away and ate bread & butter for dinner. And died a little inside.