sentimental journey

hmm, this was one of my favorite reads in college lit classes. most people probably hate this book because Sterne would agonize and rave for pages about this five second quasi-encounter with some beautiful stranger he brushed shoulders with along the way. i thought it was beautiful how he would read into everything and analyze potentials and possibilities. maybe i liked the book because i was traveling myself when i read it and had been alone for several days, stuck in Belguim without a friend or a place to stay :-). and maybe this lone traveler just missed meaningful human interactions so he would fantasize and create all these dramatic, fantastical scenarios to appease his lonliness. hmm, well, i used to think of myself as pretty sentimental... and then yesterday, my brilliant friend, Buechner, was talking about the sentimental tear that often falls down the cheek at weddings. sometimes these tears are good, they are legitimate responses to the mystery of human love to the transience of things, etc... However, Buechner says to be sentimental like this is often less a reaction to the actual thing happening and more a reaction to our reaction of the thing happening. what we're really crying about is "the pathos of our own tear" - ouch. he says, "it is all innocent enough, surely, except that it keeps us just one step further than we already are, and God knows that's far enough, from the reality of what is going on outside our own skins; and the reality of what is going on outside our own skins is the reality of other people with all their dreams and regrets, their happiness, the pathos not of ourselves for once but of them."

hmm, God, help me to think outside my own skin...

Timbuktu

bring me back to Bamako
i'll take you on a tour
we'll dine in the sand
we'll whisper in Bambara

Vergnuegen...Pleasures

i like:

• sitting on high surfaces where i can dangle my feet
• my cheap, cushiony-woven shoes from Argentina
• when pennies or any kind of copper turns green
• listening to loud emotional rock in the car with the windows down
• stretching out the soarness in my calf muscles
• when regulars at the coffee shop go out of their way to do really nice things when they're probably super busy and don't have time
• herbal teas
• Simon & Garfunkel
• nice, ecclectic fabrics
• extra live & active cultures in my yoghurt

shapes of time

i was talking with a friend the other day. we were talking about calendar time and she said that she saw the passing of months happening in this endless counter-clockwise looping dimension. in conversation when she talks about time, she makes this counter-clockwise, circular motion with her finger. fascinating, eh? i, however, see a year as this tall, rectangular, clockwise event. to me, the spring is vertical and falling, summer short and horizontal and low to the "ground," fall is an upward moving, vertical element and then winter is mainly just the end and then the begining of a new rectangle. the rectangles never have tops of course and they line up through time creating an open city scape of sorts. my city has twenty-four and a half buildings, each with a different texture, color, style, focus, etc... sometimes at night when i take a step back and look out over the city, the lights that line it are so beautiful i can only weep.

du bist falsch...

wenn du glaubst, dass du nicht liebenswert bist,
bist du falsch.
wenn du glaubst, dass du alles versagt hast,
bist du falsch.
wenn du glaubst, dass du falsch bist, hast du Unrecht,
du hast Recht.
du hast Recht zu sein wer du bist.
und was ist das für ein schöner Anblick.
es tut mir nur Leid, dass ich nie deinen Kopf küssen dürfte.
du hast ihn mir nie gezeigt.
aber ich wusste immer, dass es mir gefallen würde
mein Hand darauf zu streichen.

sweet, salty water

the other day
i thought everyone
was afraid of being alone
maybe it's just me
maybe it's not you
maybe it's not not you
...
we were at the ocean
i forgot my suit
i was wading
i gazed at my feet
sand rippled perfectly below

he was up on the beach
he was waiting
gazing who knows where
never near, hardly here
swimming laps in the hotel pool

where were you, Jesus
when i was so alone?
warmth from my feet
washes over me
in the pristine, perfect water
what are you doing down there, Jesus?
what are you doing at my feet?

oh, God, thank you for dying
so that we would never be alone

sweet, salty water wash over me today

all i can say

right now
and that's my everything

summertime new years

summertime new years
and the wedding clothes we never took off

flapper girl and sporty spice,
hip book readings
and a dance i could never follow

can i hitch a ride?
can we have another round?
young and free in cowboy town...

family foto album

aunt barbie sells wigs at the flea market on the weekends
uncle cheth picks mushrooms underground
taking a ride through the friend's family foto album
five kids and a dog and they all have red hair
except of course the dog