i have accumulated more gray hair in the last two months than i had over the whole year. there are maybe 20 now, i think. it's not like a million but it's more than i can count anymore. i almost can't pull them out to get a closer look at them, so tricky are they with the light. i think they are very pretty and sparkly and when i am a few years older i imagine that crows will drop from nowhere to have a look at my pretty shiny silvery business. if they made a nest there, i think it would be a bit much, but maybe they will like, take some hair home and make sparkle nests.
i want to take a hairbrush to the cottage and leave little gifts of silver and copper for Friar Tuck's birds. he wants to build a birdbath for them which is very cute but it's like: babysteps, my friend. first we build the cottage. "we" meaning "Friar Tuck" since i would have run down to the foreign employment office and hijacked myself some hardworking ukranians about six months ago, if it were up to me. i am good at planning and measuring and carrying and i will go where you point me until your fingers fall off, but i am not a constructor. a boa constructor, maybe. but not of buildings.
i have learned to pitch a tent faster than a hissy fit, though.
i've been thinking a lot this past month about how i define love and how really, really hard i am on people, how high i set the bar. it is one thing to set the bar high for oneself but it is a bit messed up to expect other people to feel like jumping over your standards. i tend to need to learn the same lesson a few hundred times, as my czech teacher will sadly confide to you, which is partly the fault of czechs for saying cottage differently depending on whether it is a cottage or whether you are going to a cottage or whether you went to a cottage. but it is largely the fault of my brain. it's probably because i used to see the same movies 10 or 20 times and i've got the idea that like, wow, i felt so good when i learned that lesson: let's learn that lesson again! which when it's czech is bad enough, but when it's like, life lessons, again and again is brain-gnashingly hard sometimes.
my father once told me that i like to punch myself in the face because it feels so good when i stop.
so anyway about love, and it was friday night, and i was crying in a pub, which is always so awkward. but i feel like i'm finally making the things i learned five years ago actually stick, which things boil down to: i am going to keep the bar right exactly where it is and i am going to keep trying really hard to clear the bar of my own standards and i am going to keep trying really, really hard to quit watching to see who jumps over the bar as well or better than i want to, and eventually i hope to bits that i will stop wanting anybody to notice what a good bar-jumper i am, because it's that moment when you turn to check your audience that you inevitably crash into something.
there was this book published here, it was written by a lawyer, and the bio section had translated "he stopped going to bars in 1987" but they really meant he had passed the bar. i don't mean either of those kinds of bars, though. nor gold bars, which are also called bullion, with which we make gold soup.
i'm older. i feel okay about it. i have a better family than i deserve, a better job than i ever hoped to get, a better life than i planned back when i thought you could make everything happen by planning it. and i am not myself perfect but i still feel young enough that striving for perfection seems like a worthwhile pursuit, like not in sight of the finish line but well enough clear of the starting line that it seems worthwhile to keep running.
My childhood best friend came to visit over the weekend, and we were talking in the kitchen while I cooked. She asked me, "How do you feel about being middle-aged?" and I said that I don't quite feel there yet. But I think that I may have been in error. I think the key to "being middle-aged" and yet not falling into the the mid-life crisis trap, is really accepting who lives inside of us, warts and all.
Posted by: Jorja | May 10, 2007 at 01:55 AM