Happy 2005!

So far, moment for moment, this year is already way better than last year! I have high hopes for the next 525,599 minutes as well.

My Resolution for 2005 is to remember what I learned in 2004. (and to stop swearing so much.)

Much love to everyone, and a prayer for peace in the new year.

Shout-outs for '04 go to: KCwhereveryouare, my girl Tina, Rand, Charles, DanaTom&AaronO., Ms. Meraz, Mr. Faust, Jennifer P., John M., Leah for keeping me sane (when I let you), Jessy-boo, Chanse, Lindsay but not Kristin*, all the gang at Chili's, Cassie!!, my awesome boss Rachel, ANG, Michael-Eric-and the sexy nerds all over the world, my wonderful and supportive family, my still-can't-quite-believe-he's-my-boyfriend, and my very own HP.

Vertigo

Milan Kundera, in The Unbearable Lightness Of Being, described vertigo, not as the fear of heights or fear of falling, but as the desire to fall.

It makes sense if you think about it.

Part of you wants to jump
...to fly?
...to prove that you are indestructible?

The other part of you knows better. It's the struggle between these two inner voices - and the fear that in a moment, the wrong voice could win - that causes your stomach to churn and your mind to reel.

It becomes an obsession, the suspense of will you or won't you?

You can't pull yourself away from the ledge.

Because you don't want to.

You want to believe that you can come to the edge of the cliff, and keep going.
You want to believe that just this once, the rules don't have to apply to you.
You want to fly.

You want to jump.

ATTN: Post-Holiday Shoppers

Earthquake/Tsunami Kills Thousands in Asia

For those of you who like to complain that Christmas has become too commercialized, here's your test: are you reading the news, or just the sale pages? How far does your Christmas cheer really extend?

While we were eating leftover turkey and wearing out the AA batteries (not included) in our new Christmas toys, thousands of lives were lost in Asia and Indonesia. There probably won't even be a final death toll for another couple of weeks, at least. Many of those who survived the tsunami are injured and left homeless.

So I'm not saying that you shouldn't be buying next year's Holiday decorations at 50% off - I work in retail, it's my job to sell you the stuff, and yes, I bought a couple of things myself - but while you have your credit cards out, why not make a contribution to a very worthy cause? No one person can assuage the needs of the world, but every little bit makes a difference.

To help, check out the American Red Cross
P.O. Box 37243
Washington, D.C. 20013
800-HELP-NOW
www.redcross.org

Catholic Relief Services
P.O. Box 17090
Baltimore, MD 21203
888-HELP-CRF
www.catholicrelief.org

Direct Relief International
27 South La Patera Lane
Santa Barbara, CA 93117
805-964-4767
www.directrelief.org

Sunday

What about Comfort and Joy?

Picture it: Christmas Eve, about 7:30pm. 29 degrees outside. I worked all day (and before you start feeling sorry for me because of that, let me just say that I had an awesome day at work! All my favorite people were there, and it was all fun, fellowship, and finger-food!) Went grocery shopping after work to get what I need to make Christmas dinner. Don’t have a car, so I headed home by way of a bus and a train…and unfortunately, I didn’t quite make the last bus that I needed. Called the house, and nobody was home who had a car to come get me, and I wasn’t eager to wait another hour for the next bus, so I called a cab. I got paid today; I could afford it. Besides, it’s Christmas Eve.

Cabbie showed up very promptly at the train station. He was a little brusque, but again – it’s Christmas Eve, and it’s cold, and I’m sure everybody would rather be home. So we get to my house, and that’s when I realize I’m out of cash. I gave my last nine bucks to a very nice homeless man at the first train station. (Call me naïve or whatever, but you know what? I’ve been there. If nine bucks will help him get a warm place to sleep, then yay. Nobody should be sleeping outside on a night like this.) So anyway, I have no cash, so I pull out my debit card, and the cabbie won’t take it.

This is a first for me; I’ve never had a problem with cab drivers being able to process a credit card. But okay – I went in the house to see if anyone had cash. Except now there’s nobody home. So I muttered a bit to myself, found my checkbook, and went back outside to offer the cabbie a choice: my debit card or a check.

(I feel I should mention here that there was a credit card reader attached to his meter. So I didn’t, and still don’t, see what the problem was.)

Well. All the frustrations that this poor cab driver had been building up all day (and possibly for the last several days) got unloaded on me. He cussed me out, took my card, took my ID, threw them both around a bit, imprinted my card manually, threw the imprinter on the floor, cussed me out some more, then slid my card through the aforementioned card reader… “Why you didn’t take the bus? This is why we hate the people who call from the train station…” on and on, ad nauseum.

Meanwhile, I’m standing at the driver’s-side window, in the cold, trying to apologize - explain - whatever. Finally, I just gave up and realized that at least his tirade was saving me the extra 25% that I would’ve tipped him otherwise.

Once I got inside my nice warm house and shut the door, I had a few choice words to say about the whole episode. But even then, I only said one of them.

Now however, I think it would be a fitting time to print the list that “Jonathan” was asking about today at work: the so-called “kill list.” The list he was talking about was the one I made a few days ago, when I finally left work, after spending all day on a sisyphian project. That list included:

1. Lauren



2. Ronnie



3. Laura



4. anybody who had anything to do with the buying, selling, or processing of the picture frames that I was unsuccessfully trying to organize.

Tonight’s list has just one entry:

1. f-ing asshole cabdrivers!!!

But since, as I keep pointing out, it is Christmas Eve, I feel the need to balance that list out with another list.
My Favorite People of the Week:

1. Angela



2. Jessica



3. Michael



4. Chanse



5. Dona
   (To my boyfriend: You’re always on that list. You are a permanent fixture, right above #1. This is a list of people here, that I’ve interacted with recently, in the course of my day-to-day existence… Okay, no way that I try to explain it sounds adequate. I love you. You transcend the list. How ‘bout that?)

Just Try It

How do you know you don't like it if you won't even try it???

Matchmaking

“I’d let the geek get the girl”

Wouldn’t be hard, if the girl was me. I heart geeks – anyone who knows me, or has read my ramblings all year, knows that by now.

It just so happens that I know of a geek, and a girl, who really need to get together. But I have no idea how to make that happen, without turning into Cher (the 90s version of Emma…not the zombified singer)

So I’ll just state the case here, and throw it out into the void and anonymity of the W3. I won’t even name names…yet. For immediate purposes, the geek and the girl will hereinafter be known, respectively, as “Jonathan” and “Judith.”

I wonder though…what would the effect be if I created a “Jonathan and Judith” website – except with their real names? Let the word spread, and get all kinds of people involved in speculation about if and when they’ll finally hook up… Would the suggestiveness and insanity of it all cause their humor to kick in, and let them have fun with it, and form a bond? Or would they fight it, and draw apart? It might be an interesting experiment to try…

Both of these people – Jonathan and Judith – are so completely unique that just to be around them is like breathing fresh air after being cooped up in an overcrowded, smoke-filled meeting room. My personal style is to fight conformity whenever I can – but these two don’t even bother to acknowledge it. They go where they wanna go, do what they wanna do. They will say whatever comes to mind, and each of them has a great sense of humor, so a conversation with Jonathan and Judith can crack me up and keep me laughing for the rest of the day.

Jonathan, as with any good geek, is known for being smarter than all the rest of us…but I think it’s just that sometimes he puts up a really good front. He is smart, but there are several things about which he willingly admits he knows little or nothing. If a subject interests him, he will know all about it; but I think that’s true about a lot of people. The thing about Jonathan is that he’s a wordsmith. He is very comfortable with words, and seems to enjoy using them, playing with them, trying them out to see what they can do. He is a master of the snappy comeback – only his style is to respond to ordinary, commonplace remarks with the most bizarre, outré replies he can get away with – and he can do it with a completely straight face. I think it makes him fun to talk to…but a lot of people don’t know quite what to make of it.

Judith, on the other hand, speaks a language all her own. She has her own sayings, and inside jokes, and notions of what’s cool and what isn’t. If you don’t get it, that’s okay. She knows what she means…and if you ask, she’ll probably be happy to explain herself. Those who don’t immediately dismiss her as “weird” find that it isn’t at all hard to catch on – in fact, I’ve found myself borrowing some of Judith’s expressions lately. I personally think she’s one of the coolest people I’ve ever seen; there are few people I enjoy talking to more. She is incredibly sweet-natured and open-hearted, and almost always has something to smile about. Even the things she doesn’t like – the Christmas songs that we hear over and over and over and over, or the annoying rich kid who’s everywhere and drives us all crazy – are sources of amusement. She takes absolutely nothing for granted.

Maybe it’s just because Jonathan and Judith are two of my favorite people, within this particular circle of friends, that I’d love to see them coupled up. But they do play off each other remarkably well. His powers of observation are such that he can understand her nonverbals, and her open-mindedness gives her the ability to keep up with him in any conversation. She flaps her hand in a certain way, he immediately understands and moves to where she wants him to go – he takes a conversation into an unexpected and very strange avenue with one of his non-sequiturs, and she takes the gauntlet and runs with it – all while the rest of us are still looking on in puzzlement.

I know that at least one of them is aware of the possibilities of such a scheme. The other may or may not be persuadable. I don’t know, but I hope so.

To be continued. Maybe…

Nine days to Christmas

My feet are screaming
They said it got pretty warm outside today
I’m too busy
I worked for twelve hours
warm for the middle of December, that is
to talk to the person
with a fifteen-minute break
I wouldn’t know
who gives me a reason to stay busy
Because the high-school kids got out early today.
I was only outside at 9am and at 11pm
I hate that
And it was freakin’ cold both those times!
It makes the holidays a lot less fun.

Out Today

I wonder...?

oooh, I hope I hope I hope!

In Memory of KeDavi

There used to be a great - and I mean great - little coffee shop in Plano, at Spring Creek and Alma, called KeDavi (pronounced kuh-dahh'-vee.) My roommate Liz was their number-one recruiter. How she found it first, I don't know, but she took everyone there. And once you tried one of their frappucinos, you were hooked. End of story.

They had one called the Funky Frapp, that had an entire banana blended into it. Liz also loved the Hazelnut one, with an extra shot; I always liked the Mandarin Orange. The frappucinos were thick and rich, hand-blended to the perfect slushy consistency, and they came with these giant straws as big around as my thumb. The cafe itself was a cozy little space, with groups of overstuffed chairs and occasional tables with chess sets and decks of cards. There were internet stations along the walls, for those who preferred a dose of Java with their java, and two or three wrought-iron tables outside for those who favored coffee and cigarettes. It was a great place to chill, to talk, to try something slightly new and get comfortable with it quickly, a great place to come back to. And that's what Liz did - almost every day, in fact. We, the not-so-regular regulars, used to tease her about her habit...but deep down, we understood.

Another friend of mine mentioned today that she'd like to go to KeDavi and try a frappucino. She'd never been there, but she too has heard the legend. I told her it would be better if she went with Liz, that she needed to get the personal introduction from the unofficial spokeswoman herself. (Besides which, I was there earlier this week, a little too soon after eating dinner, and I got a large Mandarin Orange with an extra shot - when I should've been content with a small, regular. I spent the rest of the evening with my stomach ready to overflow, and my brain bouncing off its cranial walls! So I felt I needed a few more days before I'd be ready for another KeDavi encounter.)

Now that I've heard the news, I'm regretting - unreasonably - that I passed on KeDavi this afternoon. Somehow I believe that if I would've said yes, it might still be there. Instead, I got a call from Liz this evening saying that she'd driven up for her daily fix, only to find the windows covered in brown paper, the smokers' tables gone, and the storefront space empty! Everyone is in a bit of shock. Nobody saw this coming - how could we? We thought Liz's business alone would keep our favorite coffee shop running well in the black for years to come!

Sadly, the suddenness of it all makes me wonder what might really have been going on. Could KeDavi have been run by some kind of alternate League of Red-Haired Men? What exactly was in those frappucinos that made them so addictive - and do we all need to be drug-tested now?

Gotta Move

I need to get out of the city.

I've known that for a while now - not least because my boyfriend doesn't and won't live here - but the point was driven home this morning. I got off the bus at the train station, where I change buses every morning on my way to work, and there on the concrete was a purplish-brown splotch, about the size of two hands, that could only be a bloodstain.

I suppose there are any number of explanations for how the ground at Forest Lane Station came to be splashed with blood...but honestly, only one or two seemed very probable - and that's really more to the point than the reality of what happened anyway, isn't it? It's also interesting to me that, though the incident surprised me, it didn't surprise me very much. Not enough.

The chances that the blood on the sidewalk will ever be my blood are, I think, pretty slim. But that cold, queasy feeling - recognizing the splatters on the pavement, and what had almost certainly happened to cause them to be there - it's not something I want to get used to.

In defense of lyrics

'All art constantly aspires toward the condition of music,' Walter Pater said, in one of the only lines of criticism that has ever meant anything to me (if I could write music, I'd never have bothered with books); music is such a pure form of self-expression, and lyrics, because they consist of words, are so impure, and songwriters, even great ones like [Aimee] Mann, find that, even though they can produce both, words will always let you down. One half of her art is aspiring towards the condition of the other half, and that must be weird, to feel so divinely inspired and so fallibly human, all at the same time. Maybe it's only songwriters who have ever had any inkling of what Jesus felt on a bad day.
- Excerpt from 31 Songs, by Nick Hornby

Me, I like the words - though it's invariably the music that catches me at first - the song 'Kathleen' by Josh Ritter was one that I heard at work, and I fell in love with it, even though I couldn't distinguish the lyrics until I got home and tracked down the song and listened to it in the quiet of my living room. Now I love the imagery of the words; there's an innocence there that doesn't seem to belong to this day and age, or to any day and age that I've ever been a part of, but that maybe my mother would remember.

I think it's interesting that the songs I love tend to have tunes that are simple, repetitive, or even monotonic - 'Kathleen', Blue October's 'Eighteenth Floor Balcony', and 'These R The Thoughts' by Alanis Morissette come readily to mind. The music catches me, the words hold me...but it's the combination that really does it for me. In 'Eighteenth Floor Balcony', Justin Furstenfeld gives words to a mood...an atmosphere...an emotion that I've felt, but that I could never have put into words so easily. And the words aren't fancy, or especially poetic - seen in black-and-white type, in an entry in a weblog, they may not make much sense; and the tune, without the words, is so simple that it's almost obvious - it's hardly even worth humming. But there's a rawness in Justin's voice, and you just know that what he's singing means something personal to him (even if it's imperfectly expressed), and there's a violin, and it's beautiful. Everything comes together to make the music and the lyrics into a song - and the effect, in my humble opinion, is quite divine.

(Where the words are inadequate and flawed is here, in my attempt to explain the loveliness of a song that takes my breath away. Just listen to the song, if you can find it, and then maybe you'll understand...)

Eighteenth-Floor Balcony

I close my eyes
And I smile
Knowing that everything is all right
To the core
Close the door
Is this happening?

My breath is on your hair
I’m unaware
That you opened the blinds and let the city in
God, you hold my hand
As we stand
Taking in everything

And I knew it from the start
So my arms are open wide
Your head is on my stomach
And we’re trying so hard not to fall asleep
But here we are
On this eighteenth-floor balcony
We’re both flying away

We talk about moms and dads
About family pasts
Getting to know where we came from
Our hearts are on display
For all to see
I can’t believe this is happening to me

I raised my hand as if to show you that I was yours
That I was so yours for the taking
I’m still so yours for the taking
That’s when I felt the wind pick up
I grabbed the rail while choking up
These words to say -
And then you kissed me

Yeah I knew it from the start
So my arms are open wide
Your head is on my stomach
And we’re trying so hard not to fall asleep
But here we are
On this eighteenth-floor balcony
We’re both flying away

And I’ll try to sleep
To keep you in my dreams
So I can bring you home with me
And I’ll try to sleep
I'm keeping you in my dreams…

I knew it from the start
My arms are open wide
Your head is on my stomach
We’re not going to sleep
But here we are
On this eighteenth-floor balcony
We’re both
Trying to make it snow

Idiot Tolerance

People are getting on my nerves today...

I didn't eat breakfast, and I haven't had any caffeine today, and I'm getting a headache, and I'm starting to lose it.

It's a Saturday, three weeks before Christmas, and I work in retail - what did I expect?

I keep thinking of that first scene in the movie Serendipity - five days before Christmas, at Bloomingdale's New York, and the shop assistant finds a single pair of gloves in the wrong place, and she stops what she's doing, and calmly puts the gloves in a basket, and takes them downstairs to where they belong. I just want everybody to know, that's not what happens!

...and now this lady wants me to wrap her satin napkins in tissue before I put them in the bag. THEY'RE NAPKINS!!!

God, grant me the serenity...

I really don't like writing about my job, and I try not to do it too often. There are plenty of people who spend most of their waking day bitching about their jobs - and there's a great website called iWorkWithFools, designed specifically for people like that. This is not that website. And anyway, I don't work with fools. Most of my coworkers are fun people and I enjoy working with them. My usual state of mind is much more Clerks than Office Space. ("This job would be great if it wasn't for the fucking customers.")

The Magician

When I first met the Magician, I didn't know who he was.

He didn't look like what I expected the Magician to look like, based on everything I'd heard, or read, or been told. I never saw any magic, so I didn't recognize him; I just knew he was different. And that bothered me a little, but I never knew why.

And I always wondered why I'd never met the Magician, and never seen any magic.

One day, I heard a voice say, You can't always see the magic. Sometimes you just feel it.

Then I realized I had felt it.

Then I realized I could still feel it.

And then I went looking for the Magician again. Only this time I knew who he was...so I found him.

----------------------------------------

Magic isn't always what you expect it to be, and the Magician wears a thousand different faces.

Cacophony & Motion

It's late fall, and the air is rich  with the variegated chatter of a million birds. They swarm so thickly in the pewter twilight that some of the trees don't even seem to have dropped their leaves - the dark shapes of the birds form clever silhouetted stand-ins - until a car horn blares and the fluttering shapes are suddenly airborne, leaving the trees bare again.

I am intrigued by the shapes of these sudden flights. All together in a great sweeping circle, then break in a hundred different directions. It's a grand ballet for anyone who cares to watch, each set of wings making its contribution to the graceful whole, then swooping away to its predetermined place of rest, waiting its turn to join the dance again.

I wonder what the birds do when they're not dancing in the public sky. Is there an avian equivalent to lounging in front of the TV, or splurging on a cheeseburger, fries, and a diet soda?