Love This

Good Grammar is Cool

Me Likey

"It's very distracting, a loved person, and makes the planet managable. The planet, which is so large and lonely and blue, and also hurtling through dark empty space. All of which you can feel when you are alone.

I'm not un whole. I am not half a person. But being with someone is energizing and relaxing, the opposite of coffee. It organizes me. The doubleness amplifies things, but in a way called softening.

I love having a boyfriend. Men are not like cars or pets-the opposite. But having a man in one's life is like having a car in America-easier. A home without a man in it? It gets a little museum-ish. Not bad. Beautiful, and very, very still. Stewarded only by women, objects, life, can get weird to the touch, overly pristine."

-Heather Selles

Let the Right One In

I screwed up. I don't know how to put it more unvarnished plain that that. I trusted someone who was not to be trusted, someone I myself described as "not one to be counted on" and now am being made heartily sorry for doing so.

My tangled mind keeps flashing on a movie I watched a few months back, a Swedish vampire movie called "Let the Right One In". The title references the fact that classical vampires never break in. Bound by surprisingly inflexiable etiquette (you would have thought after thousands of years the undead really would have found a way around that) they must be invited in. That's one reason why they are such insidious, get-under-your- skin kind of villians. We are made willing, even eager, accomplices in our own downfall by their easy charms. We offer our necks, our selves.

So it was with me. I invited the vampire in then was shocked when he tried to bite me. He didn't-except for the emotional wallop which has been extreme and the toll on my relationships with my nearest and dearest-I am fine. Left saddened and shaken, but fine.

(Makes me think of the fine line from The Bottle Rockets' "Smokin 100s Alone"-"happy that she kicked him out/but sad that he is gone")

But in that charged moment everything changed. Like a narrow miss on the highway-one thing done differently and it could have been much, much worse.

Now, he's gone.

As I predicted months ago he is so not the kind who stays. And now, because of how everything all shook down-my last words "I don't understand you", his reply "I know you don't"- I find myself in the very lonely position of being unable to mourn this loss of a friend. I feel the sting, of course, but when a friend proves to be the opposite no one who loves you wants to hear you miss him, forget even trying for empathy. You can't even offer any positives at all for fear of turning into "that girl". "That girl" who discovers that when someone has charmed you into being on your knees it can be damn hard to stand up again. Another apologetic crying "that girl" backed into making excuses for a man's bad behavior. That or owning I screwed up, I chose unwisely, I let the wrong one in.

I choose to own it. No matter the blow to pride, to peace, to faith in my own judgement.

I own this.

Thus, I screwed up, I chose unwisely, I let the wrong one in.

I Sing the Body ill

It has been my privilege recently to get close to not one, but two, cancer survivors. Now these men are so interesting, fascinating and just plain flahoolick* that being a cancer survivor isn't even among the Top 5 most interesting things about them.


And yet.

Watching them both dogged by the spectre of new illness this week I am just..well, I'm gobsmacked. As someone with 3 chronic conditions I thought I knew from coping and bodily gracelessness, about simultanously caring for yet hating the machine-your most intimate machine-that is failing you. But apparently, like a lot of BIG LIFE LESSONS, there is always more to learn and admire. The grim set of a jaw when the shooting pain comes, the sigh, then the John Wayne Handbook stoic picking up a burden thought long since left behind. If it's true that the only way out is through, and I believe that it is, I'm glad I have these two to lead the way.


These were my thoughts as I watched and tried to help where I could (and where I was allowed to do so) and then when I stumbled home after I found this on one of my favorite blogs (the incomparable Nightmare Brunette):


"I wanted to stare uninterrupted and touch, not because his scars were freakish or ugly but because they were remarkable. The success of his healing was astonishing. I wanted to feel connected to it, the strength and cleverness that had gone into keeping him beautiful."


That's really what I wanted to say. What she said.




*Flahoolick-an Irish word meaning openhanded, generous, expansive i.e. something inherently cool in and of itself. A Ferris Wheel lit up at night? Flahoolick.

Namecheck Win!

From Lizzie HERSELF (!):


"I do think available bbq is a solid decision-making parameter

Don’t get me wrong — I love the book reviewers. But I love the bloggers MORE, because they have no filters, and let’s face it, who do you want to sit next to at a party. Here are some lovely online mentions of the book over the weekend:
From Librarian Avengers:
If I suffered from Pageant-Mom syndrome and wanted to create an exact replica of myself from the raw material of some random pre-teen girl, I would begin my narcissistic experiment in literary manipulation by having her read all of the books celebrated in Shelf Discovery.

And from The Hoyden! (Exclamation point mine):
I also want Lizzie to be my friend because she is, under her full name, a poet with huge gifts with language (just making a gift package featuring her “Bells” to my long distance sweetie RIGHT NOW) and when I e-mailed her for real to beg that she come to my town on her tour, she e-mailed right back to ask if Louisville had good barbeque.
GIRL. AFTER. MY. OWN. HEART."

Lizzie, Pick Me! Pick Me!

How much do I love Lizzie Skurnick?

A LOT.

How much do I want her to be my friend?

OMG.


If she and I were characters in one of the young adult books she lovingly (and surprisingly clinically) dissects in her new book, Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading, I would WANT to be the cool sidekick friend-quick with a quip and sage advice-but I FEAR I would be the stalker girl-walking too close, invading her space, saying in a pleading voice like nails on chalkboard, "What do you think, Lizzie?"

Oh, how I laughed when I read this book. How seeing those covers, which I would have sworn long forgotten, took me right back. Reading way past bedtime (hello secret flashlight!), the steamy passages breathlessly getting read and reread. And reread. How the spines got broken in such a way so they opened just to those parts. (hello Ralph! and Ralph? Really Judy Blume?)

I want Lizzie to be my friend because she totally would understand why, at least once a year, I check out all the Little House books from the library and read them all in one setting. I want Lizzie to be my friend so I can bore her with my theory about how Laura being the son Pa never had stood her in good stead later in life after Almanzo became an invalid. Lizzie would also understand and applaud my Madeline L'Engle shelf and we could spend long hours discussing why I am a Polly and she is a Meg. (If you don't know what I'm talking about you should GET TO READING).

I also want Lizzie to be my friend because she is, under her full name, a poet with huge gifts with language (just making a gift package featuring her "Bells" to my long distance sweetie RIGHT NOW) and when I e-mailed her for real to beg that she come to my town on her tour, she e-mailed right back to ask if Louisville had good barbeque.

GIRL. AFTER. MY. OWN. HEART.