tuckova

the living had better be easy

Hi, I made some changes to the site, including adding some aliases (aliaii?), updating the "about" page a bit, and changing the colors so we looked less like winter mourning and more like, you know, summer. Sorry if I broke your feed or anything.

Squire Tuck (the boy formerly known as K) is done with school, finally, today, and is celebrating by having a fever. He'd better get better before it's time to leave for Greece, as I'd hate to leave him behind.

I'm trying to decide which of my Procrastinated Heavy Books I'll take to Greece. I started "Love in the Time of Cholera" in the waiting room (which is sort of like the beach except no fun at all) and I feel so much more optimistic about finishing it than I did about 100 Years of People with the Same Name, which I finished because at that age I still thought finishing books was a virtue, like cleaning your plate. But now I am old and wise and must watch which words spend time getting into my head.  But I'm going to finish it before we leave, I think, so I must pick something else. Arthur and George? Kavalier and Clay?

Otherwise we're doing what we generally do. I got all the paperwork in order so that if the house catches fire Friar Tuck (the man formerly known as P) will know which papers to grab. How much do you love these aliases? See what 5 days without a single drop of alcohol does to me? Busy busy busy brain. Gosh, do I need a dreamless sleep ever so badly.

A ja mam se skvele

My sister sent me a bathing suit (two, actually: a black one that I asked for and a blue one that she picked) and it came yesterday. I am going to hire her to come here and Geranimalize my wardrobe, so that all the tops match all the bottoms and I will never again be standing in front of the closet all, does faded black still go with black? and weeping. The suit she picked is a very vaa-vaa-voom bathing suit; it is the color of sweet Westley's eyes, and it makes me look like I don't even know what. A forties film star from the neck down. Like someone who uses a lot of L words. Lounge. Lush. From the neck up I'm the human embodiment of practical fun. Short hair is awesome because you can get stuck in a massive rainstorm and be all, flip! and back to normal. Altogether this bathing suit feels like a reward for managing to stay in my body this spring. After about three months of pain in one place or another and more doctors than I've seen in ten years total, I think I'm finally feeling normal. Spring sucked a fair bit of life from me, but it's summer now so I am done with the swooning and I am definitely done with the waiting rooms, I do declare. I noticed yesterday that I was sitting up straight and my back didn't hurt, and my body and I enthusiastically high-fived over it. Basically I feel better, I look great and you totally wish I was your girlfriend. Sadly (for you) as Friar Tuck is the first man I've lived with who didn't tell me I'd be really pretty if I just lost some weight, he's the one who gets me. However, you and I can still be great friends, and if you're really nice to me I'll let you touch the hem of my extremely cute bathing skirt.

In other news, we went to a concert (neocekavany dychanek) last week that was just awesome. I don't even have words. It was so much music, and so loud, and yet each one of them (accordion, electric guitar, flute, drums, sax, clarinet, mandolin, and I think there were some more) got a turn and they all seemed to be having fun. The female singer danced like mad whenever she wasn't playing flute or swinging around a megaphone (she's very pregnant and she did more moving on that stage than an aerobics teacher, it was like watching Tina Weymouth in "Stop Making Sense"). The accordion player pogoed!  AND I've never seen anyone type as fast as that clarinet player could move his fingers. The whole thing was just... exhilarating. The audience was great, too, like watching deadheads dancing to punk music, and since I couldn't understand the words much because it was too fast and busy, I got to people-watch like mad and think anne thoughts without feeling like I was missing anything. I was thinking, for example, that the female singer is beautiful and yet because she is talented she seems detached from her appearance, which enables her to make faces like crazy and still seem gorgeous.

And then this weekend, which was coincidentally St. John's Eve, we went to the cottage and worked and played super hard and we walked home through the forest with certain wise people, we stepped over fireflies instead of over fires, and everything was sparkling and wonderful, and it seemed as magical as fern seed and perhaps now we really are invincible. Or invisible. Either way.

a few days, a few thoughts.

on friday we went to see pirates of the caribbean again. i wasn't sure i'd want to see it twice but i made up a drinking game in which i pretended that i was drinking every time keira knightley demonstrated her utter inability to act, but i did not actually drink, which means i amused myself but did not distress anyone in my vicinity, which happened when we took literal drinks for the da vinci code and ran entirely out of beverage before the movie was over. it was the "tom hanks' hair is ridiculous" that pushed us over, i think. anyway: pirates. the first time we saw it my friend commented that for all the talk of ms. knightley being anorexic, she's got nice legs. do you know why? i suspect a body double, as i haven't seen face/legs/face editing that choppy since jennifer beals in that frankenstein movie. lucky, lucky faceless woman that had orlando bloom kissing her leg.

i went to a party on sunday. i hadn't been to a party in a while and i had a bit of a meltdown right at the beginning in which i lost not merely words but sentences and some other key features of brain function. it wasn't pretty. i had to sit in a chair mumbling to self and pinching the insides of my arms while another friend who hasn't slept in a month expressed some concern, which made it worse, and then i opened my mouth and said some stupid shit and died a little more inside and it was all poor yorick but then it was okay.

i am thinking about how you learn so much when you're young and as you get older you don't gather information in quite the quantity and so it is really neat to have learned in the last year to peel a banana from the other side (take THAT kirk cameron) or in the last month i circumvented the "how to peel a boiled egg without getting shell all over the damn place" and last night i learned the magic of cornstarch is not to be underestimated and it's really just altogether wonderful to be alive in these interesting times, isn't it.

oh and also i have a squire tuck snippet, which is this: i was talking to him about nature vs. nurture and how this is such an interesting thing because we don't know which controls a lot of things about how we are as people. and i asked him, so does he think that personality is more likely to be determined by environment or by genes, and he said it's determined by what you yourself choose, and added that saying that something is a product of nature or nurture in both cases takes it out of your hands, which is unfair. and that is why i keep him around. and also because he smells nice.

Eaten by Cats

It's a hard and scary thought for most people: you're going to die alone. Even if someone is there holding your hand you're still generally the only one in the room dying, although probably the hand-holding makes it seem somewhat less lonely.

What's harder and scarier is living alone. Growing old alone. For some people it is a task of such terrifying magnitude that they'll do anything to avoid it. Live with people they nearly hate. Suffer awful treatment because at least it's treatment. Dash from one social engagement to the next like they're rungs on a hamster wheel. Some people have children because they think children will keep them from feeling alone. Maybe all these things help: the partners clutched like life rafts, the friends selected from desperation, the children bred in preventive hope. I don't know.

The thing is: no matter how many people we surround ourselves with, we are, as Rilke says, unutterably alone. I think that it's good to learn that, because then you can choose the company of people whose presence does not function a light against the darkness, because you make the light you need yourself.

Sooner or later, you come to an understanding that dying, probably the most mysterious thing you'll ever do, is something you're going to do alone. I think that this understanding makes the things you do alone in the rest of your life seem less challenging. Go to the movies alone, eat alone, wake up alone: this is nothing once you accept that you're going to die alone. But until you come to that understanding, I think you live with something worse than knowing you will die alone. You will live alone, too. You actually already do, but you are more alone for imagining that you are not.

shopping

the last time i bought a bathing suit i was... uhm. oh, let's not play ladies. i was larger than i am now. so and i'm going to greece next month and i need a bathing suit that will not be wrested from me by a big wave. so i went to buy a bathing suit.

how to buy a bathing suit:
step 1: DON'T. look life is short. what do you want with a bathing suit? seriously, go to the mountains or something instead. while realizing that greece is a dream you've had since you were 12, and that greece has the longest sandiest beach of ever, and that greece is a mere plane flight away, and that greece for 12 days is cheaper than a plane ticket to america... dude, greece is hot. stay home. you could work on the cottage or something.
and also you, with your glow in the dark whitey whiteness, would be banned from beaches if such banning were legal. the three of you together are like some milky way constellation. you belong in the sky, or possibly in some mushroomy cave somewhere. you have no business being on the beach.
or maybe you should wear a muumuu or something, skip the bathing suit and that irritating note of rising hysteria in your voice.

step 2: okay shut up. you do some internetly clicking which is always fun because they're like: this suit covers up a large bust. this suit covers up a large belly. this suit covers up a large ass. you want the suit that makes you invisible: where is that suit? the suit you want is the suit for frolicking in the water with your son without getting sand in your parts. you want the suit that's for getting drunk on the beach and stumbling back to the pension (a mere crawl from the beach!) to play catan. where is that suit? that suit is not available in stores, and you can't get it by mail order either. give up the idea of a suit that suits. you're thinking: tankini top, and you'll buy some boy's trunks and anybody that looks askance gets poked in the eye.

step 3: go to TESCO. you hate TESCO with the burning hatred of a thousand suns, but it is somehow connected to target (the only place you've bought a bathing suit that fit) and therefore you think they may have some reasonable bathing suits. you will be wrong. they have hideous yellow things covered in what appears to be glitter.  they have bathing suits that make their mannequins look fat and or badly proportioned.  they have a bikini top that you actually try on because you like pain; this bikini top would go well with your drunk on the beach scenario, as it gives you a shelf upon which to rest several beers, but it is otherwise really a nightmare and it costs a ridiculous amount. they have mirrors tilted in at an approximate thirty degree angle, presumably because restocking is hard and simply not moving the merch is the way that TESCO is playing its hand. they also have a peeping tom(as) in the dressing room, which goes well with the mirrors. you feel angry, you feel filthy, you feel weepy and punchy. you also feel like you will never find a bathing suit.

step 4: press hand weakly to forehead. perhaps you could make a victorian bathing suit, although that will probably get even more askancing, and victorian ladies do not poke eyes out.

step 5: write in desperation to sister, who has better fashion sense than you do, and is not driven to tears by shopping but in fact actually enjoys it. apparently your sister and your mother are happy to spend your mother's birthday shopping for a bathing suit for you. you cannot conceive of a sentence that has happy and shopping in it. you are probably a changeling. a changeling who is having a bathing suit sent to her, though!

the thing is, while i've bought enough regular clothes to have gotten over the idea of Transformation, i can count the number of bathing suits i've owned in my adult life (uhm... four), and so some part of me probably is still stuck back at age 16, all self-loathing and eternal moments. but the thing is: self-loathing is boring, and no moment lasts forever, whether it's a knee-melting kiss or a creep staring through the cracks in the dressing room door. i've got better stuff to do than this. for example, now that my hair's short, i can start dyeing it interesting colors again. and i may require more earrings for my freshly exposed ganesha ears. also: i'm going to GREECE next month. woot.

A Quick Study

Lessons I learned in childhood
served me well though
the lesson taught
is not the one I took away.

Take for example
the forced intake of food
Poor Richard and
the starving children seated beside me
drooling over my Lima beans

This taught me
to feel guilty for not wanting;
and that sometimes it's easier to do it
than think of the reasons you'd rather not;
a certain stoicism has seen me through
and when they ask
"Are you comfortable?"
I can convincingly say "it's fine"
around a mouth of stringy asparagus
cold Brussels sprouts

Or for example
the allergy shots
the hours spent with ankles
wrapped around chair legs
waiting to see my reaction

This taught me
to sit still for hours;
and that to show a reaction
is the least desirable response;
a blank face to greet the worst news
and when they say
"I don't..." or "I can't..."
I don't even blink, and if there is an inadvertent
tendency to red eyes, puffy skin, the
inability to breathe I'm not letting on.

a shard of glass, but still surprising

things that hurt more than you expect them to:
paper cuts
unrequited flirting
curiosity

things that hurt less than you expect them to:
conking your head on the doorway
walking away
breaking up

things that are right about on target:
the dentist
the word no
saying goodbye

and what brings you here, my pretty?

my week

Ducklings,

I am sorry, I was busy entertaining Awesome Company this past week and describing how much fun I was having would have been like describing a roller coaster ride while you're on it. Metaphorically speaking: I was preoccupied with screaming and drooling with joy.

I wrote a little culture thing over at Lost in Transit, though, so you don't go entirely hungry this week.

Returning to normal next week, I expect.