July Tenth: A List

from the Logbook

Things for which I am grateful, even as I struggle to sort out the pieces of the day:

strong-brewed chai, savoury, steaming 

peanut butter scooped from the container with and eaten from table spoons
Imogen Heap
sunflower seeds in a stir-fry 

clean, open rooms 

the tiny private den created by the new filing cabinets placed temporarily in the living room
sunsets that leave me breathless 

mock-punch fights in the hall 

the stack of books awaiting reading to completion 

my memories of Washington 

my memories of my family, to be taken out and replayed over and over until they blur from running through my head 

strength to jog a mile's distance (sometimes, but not today) 

the ability to rest today, to recognise that my body needs the rest 

Howl's Moving Castle 

coffee and long, comfortable pants
low tables 

high counters and high stools 

candles, lists on Tumblr, and calcium magnesium tablets 

anime to be watched; anime to be rewatched 

moisturising cream

waking thoughts

Last night as dusk came over the neighbourhood I took a mug of coffee and my notebook, then went out to the back yard and climbed up to the little roofless deck on the swing set, intending to write. However, weariness overcame me, and I dozed off while lying face-up on the wooden planks. When I awoke (approximately three quarters of an hour later) the sunlight had entirely gone, and above me in the sky the partial moon glowed with strength enough to cast yard and house and surrounding trees in a pale dream-like light; a breeze, laced with the intoxicating flavour of wilder places, gusted sporadically around me. Somewhere between the moon and I there passed a helicopter, all alight. Slowly, as I became aware of the mosquitoes buzzing subtly around me, I gathered cooled coffee, pen, and untouched notebook, and returned with half-dazed steps to the house—a world bathed in the relentless hum of technology and electric brilliance, a world so different than the darkened one in which I had for a few moments been immersed.

I've been listening to Tori Amos through these past few days, and drinking less coffee. I'm trying to un-tether myself from my laptop and spend more time listening, more time breathing, more time reading. When online, I make a point of focusing on one task at a time instead of flitting between two or seven, writing an email or a forum post in one sitting, staying on the page of an article or blog essay until I have thoughtfully read to the end. There is a kind of life I want to live, a sort of person I want to become, and these are the ways to get there, starting on the cellular level of every day.

Through the medium of the internet, through the fusion of the digital world with every moment of my waking (and sometimes sleeping) existence, some of the best events of my life have occurred. My life is inevitably a meshing of fibres from both tangible physical and abstract digital elements, and I would not have it any other way, but if part of growing up is learning how to pick and choose between good and better, this is me growing up, ever so slightly. This is me recognising that the most important parts of my day no longer need to be passed in front of a screen, that constant digital input was a valuable part of my life for some time but that I now need to consciously let that go because it is no longer needed.

This is me saying that I refuse to spend whole afternoons aimlessly scrolling through image feeds long run into a blur of colour and flipping through sluggish social media pages merely to distract my brain from the fact that I don't really want to be living. I have an idea, even if vague, of what I want out of life, and it is not a self-imposed bubble of electronic isolation: it is laughing over ridiculous jokes with people I love, it is preparing tasty meals that will be savoured by those who sit down to eat, it is spending time outdoors—both accompanied and unaccompanied—even when the weather is not comfortable, it is noting the light mottled on the trees, it is spending hours immersed in the pages of books overflowing with literary and philosophical riches. It is eating well instead of clogging my body with edible garbage, it is drinking more tea and less coffee, it is writing and sending more letters more often to more people. It is writing, period, and copiously. It is remembering birthdays. It is giving hugs and learning to make use of telephones and Skype and in general focusing on forging relationships in many different directions. It is refusing to allow insecurity and obsession with personal inadequacy (which, for the record, is in all its legitimacy, self-centered) to paralyse my ability to connect with other people for their benefit and my own. This is me choosing life.

My cousins and aunt and uncle are presently travelling through various points on the west coast, and seeing snapshots of their adventures, whether it be cobbler-making in the cramped interior of the communal camper or my cousins in their Bermudas silhouetted against a broad blue sky and the Pacific Ocean beyond them, is stirring in my a deep longing to revisit Oregon and Washington, as well as a lingering sadness that while I was there I did not see the sea. Finances (ever the curse of civilised man) render a trip impossible now, but some day I shall pack a bag—just one, with a camera and a few articles of clothing and a notebook and pens—and I will leave my laptop behind and set out again to visit that breathtaking wild place on the opposite side of the country, and I will roam rocky beaches and hike through forests of sky-reaching trees in order to sit on lofty mountain shelves and I will haunt small-town coffee shops and walk penniless through street fairs and look up old acquaintances.

And maybe, if I happen to inquire among the right people at the right time, someone will go with me, and together we can be immersed in the splendour of the world exposed to the sky.

Matters of Marshwiggles and Feet

Shoes have come up in several conversations recently and the question of sizing with them, a question put directly to me for reasons to remain here undisclosed. Each time I have answered promptly, all the while internally recoiling from the sound of my own voice saying the number aloud, because...well, let's face it: I've inherited, along with the solid bone structure of my mother's more recent fore-mamas, their wide, beautifully functional feet.

Which is to say that their feet are, well, on the larger side of the spectrum.

And the same goes for mine.

Some girls are sensitive about weight; while there are certain aspects of my body I would definitely like to alter, such as the lingering flab around my natural waist and on my long un-exercised thighs, the actual number on the scale doesn't bother me all that much.

That inclination towards indifference to a number does not, however, extend to shoe size, as I have recently discovered.

Which is why I find myself, at six-forty a.m., after having jogged a mile and a half and walked briskly a mile and a quarter, Googling things like Karen Gillan's shoe size. I keep telling myself it's out of curiousity, since she's almost exactly the same height as I am and knowing such trivia is always interesting.

Not so.

Brutal honesty (ha) demands admission that my seeking the information stems solely from the desire to be affirmed in my shoe size by its existence in a woman widely recognised as both poised and beautiful, characteristics that I graciously pass by in public as being unnecessary but still cringe over not possessing in my more miserable moments. Granted, that is a point generally reached after I have spent all night going through an indefinite number of reasons why I am an impossible, disgusting person, which makes physicality the next-to-last thing on the list before I crash into bed to sleep off my night of self-obsessed ghost-courting. (The very last thing is frequently something like "If I don't get money for a dental visit soon I'll stop eating for good just to kill the pain in my jaw." That is always the point when I creep through the still-darkened house and slip into the bathroom with my toothbrush.)

Unfortunately, I find no consolation in Gillan. My height she may share, but not the size of my feet.

So I depart from Google and stare at the wall, or, more accurately, glare at it, because I have always wanted slender feet and of course that violation of satisfactory standard is the fault of the architecture of the house presently surrounding me. If my lower appendages couldn't have been small, could they at least have been narrow?

Clearly not.

After several minutes of grousing over my too-large feet (and complaining silently over the insensitivity of people with small feet who never consider how painful a detail it may be for those necessarily outfitted in larger sizes to publically share) I give up. My feet are my feet. They work, most of the time, and losing precious time fretting over an isolated aspect of skeletal sizing is completely pointless. And at least they aren't size twelve.

I did, after all, make a good showing with them on the road this morning. (My lungs are another story entirely, which is why they will not be discussed at the present time.)

However, there is still in my sleepy brain some hand grasping for a straw of affirmation, and, at the very last, failing to find anything of the sort in the realms of would-be-perfect celebrities, I turn to good old Narnia for consolation and perspective.

"I always was quite fond of marshwiggles, and Puddleglum's feet are huge..."

With that profoundly important matter settled, I betake myself to the kitchen to brew morning coffee before dragging myself and my feet upstairs for a shower to precede a much needed nap.

Lines by Louise Erdrich

Leave the dishes.
Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator
and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.
Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.
Throw the cracked bowl out and don't patch the cup.
Don't patch anything. Don't mend. Buy safety pins.
Don't even sew on a button.
Let the wind have its way, then the earth
that invades as dust and then the dead
foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.
Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.
Don't keep all the pieces of the puzzles
or the doll's tiny shoes in pairs, don't worry
who uses whose toothbrush or if anything
matches, at all.
Except one word to another. Or a thought.
Pursue the authentic-decide first
what is authentic,
then go after it with all your heart.
Your heart, that place
you don't even think of cleaning out.
That closet stuffed with savage mementos.
Don't sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth
or worry if we're all eating cereal for dinner
again. Don't answer the telephone, ever,
or weep over anything at all that breaks.
Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons
in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life
and talk to the dead
who drift in though the screened windows, who collect
patiently on the tops of food jars and books.
Recycle the mail, don't read it, don't read anything
except what destroys
the insulation between yourself and your experience
or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters
this ruse you call necessity.

— Louise Erdrich, Original Fire: Selected and New Poems

Walk With Me: A Peek Into Hillside Repose

[a throwback to June]

I.

 

  

II.

 

III.

IV.

V.

 

 VI.

VII.

 

I.

English breakfast tea and scrumptious chocolate pastries, my frequent companions.

II. 

Bookshelves I have known and loved...

III.

My grandmother keeps a window of plants at the top of the staircase to the second floor.
 

IV. 

Hall, night, second floor. Angles.

V. 

This baby squirrel dropped by for a visit in the wee hours, but refused to hold still long enough for me to turn on the lights and obtain a decent photograph before taking him outside; he leaped into an empty waste can and I carried him out into the night after castigating him for his inconvenient skittishness. 

VI. 

While there I went through most of my grandmother's photo albums, where I came across this photograph of my grandfather playing with one of my then-wee aunts.

VII. 

Evening engagements a la novel. My grandmother reads copiously. 

**For those readers unacquainted with my grandmother, Hillside Repose is the long-established name of the farmhouse in which she and my grandfather raised their family, barring a comparatively brief period of time during which they dwelt in Kenya.

"Reading is one form of escape. Running for your life is another."

*traversing Brooklyn on foot*

Yesterday evening I jogged without pause for an entire mile.

All day I curled into myself, hid in corners, wandered aimlessly from task to contrived task, asked over and over again in silence why I keep telling myself blindly to stay alive, stay alive, keep going, stay alive. Didn't eat. Guzzled cup after cup of coffee, black (and let me tell you, there is no better way to nurse a vile mood than by subsisting on coffee in all of its bitter strength). Made up my mind at last to quit tormenting my body and went to eat dinner. Cleared away the dishes and the leftovers from the meal. Went to the Keurig machine to brew another cup of coffee.

Stopped.

Told myself, No, you've already had your allotted amount of coffee for the day. Go run, and if you still need it when you come back you can have it.

So I turned off the Keurig dispenser and donned shorts and Skechers, grabbed the Rabbit and a pair of earbuds, and went out into the night.

And I jogged that mile without stopping, not even once.


The full circuit around the rural block is two and a quarter miles altogether. Alternating walking and running for the duration of the distance has served sporadically as my workout for the past several weeks, a routine both exhausting and refreshing, not to mention conducive to the completion of an idea first conceived in June: to by the beginning of autumn be able to run the entire loop.

It is, perhaps, an odd agenda to set with the heat of the summer months and all its inflicted lethargy arrived in full force. If the reasons driving the goal centered around weight loss and muscular toning, there would be dozens of methods by which to achieve those ends, but those aren't what I'm chasing with one foot pounding after the other on a now-familiar stretch of macadam. To be honest, I'm not running for my body, not really. Step after step, heaving breaths coming fast against each other, pain convulsing the space just below my right lung—I'm running for my life.

Because there are times—far too many—when I go to bed asking myself if the coming day is worth the trouble of waking for it, and far too many times that morning and an awkward faceplant in a great invisible puddle of despair run parallel. I'm not all that good at the whole keep-on-keeping-on thing, not without a reason.

Because I cannot recall one instance in the past two years when I did not feel like an abject failure, groomed and doomed from the start to make nothing but a faltering wreck of my own life and perhaps the lives of a few others.

Because that two-and-a-quarter mile loop is not some vague and fluctuating end to be attained, like fluency in a language or writing well or professional-level piano playing, all of which seem more or less impossible depending upon the mood of the day.


If there is one thing that I am, it is uncertain. Halting. Terrified of anything I haven't unquestionably mastered—which makes it all the more horrific to face the fact that there is hardly a skill I have already obtained, but merely a vast list of things to in the future be developed and pursued.

I, who catalogue my worth as a person by goals successfully accomplished and deeds already done, have a track record of procrastination and inadequacy and failure stretched long behind me. Given the seemingly endless number of bad habits that need to be unlearned and replaced, let alone the ambiguity making of my once pin-pointed aspirations a dizzying kaleidoscopic array of options and obstacles and fears, the record is not likely to see any drastic adjustment in the near months (even years) of the future.

But for running.

Talk about the ideal short-term, concrete goal...

Even so, it is far more than the mere satisfaction of putting something definable behind me.

Every time I strike out on pavement and propel myself best foot-both feet forward, I remember that I'm wrong about the invariable bleakness of the future; about nothing but greater failure—or worse, mediocrity—waiting ahead; and most of all, about whether I can open my eyes the following morning and roll out of bed to work through the day. Every time I stagger back into the house sweat-slicked and trembling from exertion, I realise again that the pact with myself to overcome somehow all that weight of my own making is not a rare fantasy entertained when I am feeling particularly mellow but a tangible, real goal that might not look like what I presently imagine it to be but definitely can be achieved.

I remember that I can live.

That makes a two-and-a-quarter-mile stretch of pavement all that much more than the measurement of the distance of a mere run.



*title quote attribution: Lemony Snicket