When the World Falls Apart

(Vague for a reason)

Everything is coming unglued.  All the pillars of stability are falling in or being ripped away, and I don't know, anymore, what to think.   I'm a person who can adapt to a great many variables when I know they're coming, in a situation like travel or a project or something that demands it.  In the other areas of my life, though, I need most things to be what they're supposed to be, need a minimum of chaos.  Surprises are okay, I don't mind being flexible, but there comes a certain point past which all the flexibility becomes so much flailing in water that's too deep to survive.  I can only build when there's a firm foundation.  Is there?  Will there ever be again?  I am soul-sick with these questions. 

A New Doctor

"Beans are evil.  Bad, bad beans."  The Eleventh Doctor

I am watching the Dr. Who premiere again on its replay.  Matt Smith is the Eleven, and I'm getting used to him.  Some of this episode is hilarious.  The scene at the beginning where he's trying to find the food he craves is classic.  By the time he hurled that saucer of bread and butter out the door, I was laughing so hard I had teared up. 

I also think I like Amelia Pond.  I didn't expect to since they made her look about six in all the previews.  She's feisty, but she doesn't appear to be another Rose Tyler, who, I know it's heresy to some to say, I actually got very tired of very fast.  I love the scene where the child Amy packs all her stuff in a box and then goes to sit in the garden.  I also love the fact that she's running away with her "imaginary friend."  The set-up this time is good, much better thought-out to me than usual, it seems.

I won't know for sure how Eleven is going to stack up for a few more episodes yet.  If they all live up to or build on this first one, I think he's going to be a worthy successor to the tradition. 

Julia's Gone

Designing Women was on during much of my junior high and high school years.  It passed into syndication, and I watched re-runs for years afterwards until it disappeared into those late night, hard-to-find slots on Nick at Nite, Lifetime, and WE.  The whole original cast worked well together and was necessary for the show to be a success as is so often the case with ensembles, but the character I admired the most was Julia Sugarbaker. 

I think we all found something of an inspiration in Julia.  She had it all together.  She was what real Southern girls with brains want to grow up to be.  Even when everything was falling down around her, she maintained dignity and poise, kept her kindness, and above all, dealt with situations with her formidable intellect.

And that intellect was a mighty weapon.  She was erudite, a master of the art of linguistic skewer.  I loved her for that most of all.  She, like my own mother, was a woman who never needed to resort to profanities to reduce someone to a tiny little pile of ashes.  The famous "The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia" speech remains one of my favorite examples of Julia in her rhetorical prime.

She also had a strong sense of what she would and would not allow, what was and was not going to happen in her life, in her world, and to herself.  Her moral code was unbending.  She knew what she believed, and she stood up for it fiercely, with the same grace and determination of the heroines of the movies I love from the 30s and 40s. 

She was never so rigid, though, that she couldn't laugh at herself and the absurdities of the world in which she found herself.  Humor, so much a part of the show, was also a part of her own personality.  Julia taught us not to take everything, including ourselves, quite so seriously. 

Dixie Carter, the classy lady who gave life to Julia Sugarbaker, passed away today.  I think that much of the charm and richness of Julia came straight from the graciousness of Dixie.  I wanted to take just this one little moment to honor the character who, with her velvet glove and iron fist attitude, served as an inspiration for so many of us.  I said earlier that we all wanted to be Julia when we grew up; I guess we all still do.

What I Need

I'm in a reckless, sad, and tired mood tonight, and I need.  I need. 

I need a fast strong responsive car that I can get in, crank up, and feel the power of it hum through my fingertips and the bottoms of my feet as it takes me away.  Because I also need to be away, to New Orleans, to the coast, to Las Vegas, to Seattle, to somebody's backyard under a spreading oak tree, anywhere that isn't here.  I need to see something different, scenery that doesn't bruise my eyes when I look at it, that doesn't wear on my soul like fine-grain sandpaper because of what it makes me think of, what it makes me feel. 

I need an adventure, something wild and unplanned, something wonderful and unexpected, a gift falling out of the sky.  Not one of those things that costs a lot of money, but one of those things that takes me out of this space I get trapped in all too often between my own ears and away from the problems I cannot resolve, the pains I cannot ease.  I need something to remind me of the sheer stupid wonder and wonderfulness of this world.

I need somebody.  I need a person who can take me when I'm at my worst because lately, that seems to be all that's left rattling around the bottom of the barrel.  I need a person who can help me remember what I am when I'm not tapped completely out, who will just hold on to me when I'm wild and whirling until it all of it is done.  I need a fellow adventurer and a person who's not afraid to stand toe-to-toe with me when I'm a stubborn wench. It seems too much to ask for in any person, all of that.

Night falls; the sun dies.  The air is chilly and damp with it.  Weariness closes around me like another layer of cold dew, internal, clinging.  I'm wishing for magic tonight, wishing for a knock at the door that only happens in fairy tales and Greek myths.  Those days were never really "those days," though, and I think I am going to have to turn my mind to being content somehow instead.

Claws

I went to a meeting recently expecting an informative presentation of matters of interest.  What I got instead was a chance to hear my school get slammed through the floor for an hour and fifteen minutes. I've just about had enough.

It's easy to take shots at someone when they're down.  It's easy to see some person with a problem you don't personally struggle with, have maybe never struggled with, and point your finger, smirk to yourself, whisper catty little comments behind your hand.  What's not easy, what is in fact bone-crushingly hard at times, is to get off your backside, out of your comfort zone, and turn that pointing finger into a helping hand. 

It's the old Good Samaritan parable all over again.  This one is too busy, this one won't dirty holy hands, this one is happy to see the downfall as it happens because of some old personal grudge long-held and carefully cherished.  Who is going to be the one who stops even if their clothes get a little muddy or bloody?  Who is going to be willing to leave the country club bar and do instead? Who is going to be the one to let old petty conflicts pass and look at the greater good in the present?

I'm tired.  Mortally so.  I love my school.  I love my kids.  I believe in both fervently.  Am I blind to the fact that there are problems?  Absolutely not.  I'll tell you this for nothing, though.  I'm just about done with polite smiles and socially-gracious responses to those who seem to glory in our struggles and try to push us face-down in the mud.  The claws are going to come out.  I just can't manufacture it much longer.

Wicked

I saw Wicked last night. My friends and I were lucky enough to get some tickets to the New Orleans performance with the touring roadshow.  I haven't been to a Broadway show since I left IU, so it was nice to be back in a theater to see a big production.  I really miss that about IU.

I never expected to get to see this one.  I  had read the book a long time ago, and I remember being powerfully moved by it.  I need to go back and reread it because I apparently had forgotten a lot of it, but the musical was amazing. 

The basic storyline was the same.  Elphaba was the scapegoat for everyone else's issues because she was different.  It's easy to blame the one who doesn't quite conform, who doesn't play by the rules.  The performers in the roles of Elphaba and Glinda were perfect.  Elphaba, as she grew and bloomed, was powerful.  Glinda was both poignant and hillarious as she fluttered around the stage and became something more than "blonde." 

The songs were grand, and I loved the spectacle of it. What broke my heart, though, was the song "I'm Not that Girl."  Oh, it made tears well up in my eyes.  There were so many great songs in it, but I felt that one like a knife strike directly.  I may not be green, but the feeling reflected is all too familiar.

I'm going to get the soundtrack, and I'm going to reread the book.  I guess I'm off on another kick.  That's okay.  There are worse kicks to be on, I suppose.   If you'd like to read it, too, here's a link from Amazon to it:  Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (Harper Fiction)

Cafe du Monde

I finally got to go to Cafe du Monde.  Last trip to New Orleans, we were too pressed for time for me to go, and I really regretted not being able to do it. It was the one thing my dad told me that I MUST do while I was there. 

Getting there turned into a bit of an adventure since there was some kind of fun run going on today.  We managed to park and walk in, but we had to hike down some railroad tracks and approach it from the rear.  There was a small pack of hungry tourists with us who were all headed for the restaurant.  It was sort of amusing to see all those people headed so single-mindedly toward beignets. 

They were wonderful, and well-worth the walk.  I love pastry anyway, so it was a shoe-in that I'd love these.  I need to get a recipe and see if I can make them here at home.  I suspect, however, that I will just need to wait until I can get back down to New Orleans again and have them under than green and white awning. 

Impressionism by God

Driving home today, I was full of beignet and drowsy in the sunshine.  The pollen was gilding the air with a hazy of surreality.   Across the eastbound lanes of the interstate floated a yellow swallowtail, the first one I've seen this year.  Even the Mississippi roadsides were exquisite works of art.

I've never seen the redbuds bloom like they're doing this year.  Splashes of amethyst and the rarer rusty-red break up the multitudinous shades of green.  Bursts of white from the newly-opened dogwoods shine like left-over patches of the snow we had earlier, but far more delicate and more welcome.  Twining through it all like an ornament or a crown is the gold of confederate jasmine. 

Even a long road trip can be made a pleasure with the right scenery.  As much as I like Monet and Pissarro, I don't think either of them could have produced anything more lovely or restoring to the soul that the landscape I passed through today.  Of course, I am no art critic; I only know what stirs my own heart. 

Random Attack of Memory

I was at the kitchen sink this morning getting ready to load dishes into an newly-empty dishwasher when a phrase a friend of mine from college used to say came back to me for some reason.  I haven't thought about him in a very long time, but that phrase was like a spade turning over winter soil for spring planting.  More and more images of him kept coming, more and more of the time we spent together, the comfortable and the uncomfortable, too.

I remembered Snickers ice cream hysteria, a custom-cut wax seal, a Martin guitar, and endless conversations, many of which we managed not to argue in at all.  I remembered a stained glass studio, a high-tech lab, at least four different apartments, restaurants of various quality, some of which no longer exist, some of which will probably be in Starkville after I'm dead and gone, and the smell of his shampoo.  I remembered the ubiquitous brown leather sandals, a trip to the coast that was almost a disaster, long hugs, juvenile fights with plastic swords, and getting so mad at him I couldn't talk.  I remembered that he was always the one who believed in my writing and that without him, I never would have found the courage to push for my first trip out of the country, Costa Rica.

It's strange the things that stick, the things that stay, the shards and pieces that remain after everything else is over.  I spent time with other friends tonight, old friends and new, good friends all, and we had a great time.  Now, though, for some reason, in this still quiet of the night, the fingers of my memory are stirring the fragments of the past around looking at that which is lost and gone.  I don't know what augury it hopes to accomplish with this exercise.  I just hope that it puts all the bits neatly and carefully away when it's done.  Some of the edges are still sharp, after all.

Honey, If I Just Passed Your Mustang in My PT Cruiser, You're Doing Something Wrong

So I'm coming home from town today, and suddenly, there is a pair of Mustangs hovering around and about me.  I didn't think much about them.  Usually, they zip away quickly.  This pair, though, sped up and slowed down in that annoying fashion meaning they were being driven by people who either a) don't understand the concept of cruise control or b) were too young to have been entrusted with a car like that, especially on a Friday night. 

One would blow past me, and then suddenly I'd see brake lights.  What the heck?  Short of a wreck or other road emergency, who does that on the interstate?  Repeatedly?  It wasn't like they looked down, saw they were going 110 and thought, "Whoa...I need to slow it down...."

I bumped my cruise up a bit and passed one (something a four-cylinder car should never have been able to do, a profound violation of the universe) and got away from them for awhile.  Eventually, whatever malfunction they were having resolved itself, and they streamed by again and disappeared.

Electronic Holiday

Lately, I haven't felt much like being on the computer.  I don't know if it's the Spring in the air or what, but I haven't wanted to be on FaceBook or blog here, either.  I've been journaling in my Florentine prize, but for some reason, as I've looked at this laptop, it has felt somehow like a chore to come to it and do the things that I usually enjoy.  I guess periodically everything gets old.  It's just a phase and I'll cycle through it, undoubtedly. 

There are, of course, things that I have found that I can say in the pages of my journal that I cannot say here.  Maybe the freedom of that is a little enchanting right now, too.  I can do both.  Really, it's two different kinds of expression, one that I only do for myself, and one that I am conscious of a reader peering over my shoulder while every word falls from my fingertips.

Some of my other electronic endeavors are on a more permanent hold.  I'll get back to them soon.  I just need a little holiday from it all.  It will feel fresh again when I return.

Art for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad on the iTunes App Store

Art for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad on the iTunes App Store

For 99 cents, you can't beat this app with a stick. It's wonderful. I found so many of the works I saw when I was in Italy and favorites I know from other places in this app. You can take the images and turn them into wallpaper, too, and since I change my wallpaper frighteningly often, this is a feature I am really fond of. This one, along with iBird Explorer South and Nightstand, is one of the few paid apps I feel was totally worth it.

Running Down a Dream

(with apologies to Tom Petty)

I dream now, and I dream of the twisting streets of Italy.  I think I'm dreaming of Florence, but it's all blending together with Rome in a pastiche.  One moment, I am standing and looking up at the multicolored sky in the middle of the piazza in front of the Spanish Steps, the sound of flowing water the only sensation.  Then, I am beneath a magnificent dome arching high above me like the cupped hand of God protecting me from all harm.  The next, in the way of dreams, the scene flickers, and I'm on the Ponte Vecchio, scaffolding gone, staring out at a night scene of stars on water, something I never saw save in the eye of my imagination.

Wherever this dreamland my mind is conjuring happens to be, it is not a modern place.  There are no cars, no hoardes of tourists.  The only light, when there is any, is that golden light that bathes the world of dreams, soft, surreal, and seemingly coming from everywhere.  It somehow suits this landscape perfectly, the colors, the stone buildings, the marble fountains. 

Maybe they were made for dreams and dreamers, Rome and Florence.  Maybe that's why poets and artists are born there, move there, sing of them, have built them lovely, lovely in their ancient splendor.  There is something about them them calls out to the soul that loves beauty, even from five thousand miles away, and my helpless dreamer's heart can't help but yearn.

Florentine Men

I think I found the place I need to go to find smart men. I went through the Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence, and it was only then that I realized how many geniuses came from that one city. Galileo, da Vinci, Machiavelli, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Dante,Vespucci, Fermi, Marconi...the list goes on and on through the ages. How is it possible for that one place to produce so very many geniuses in such diverse fields?

I might also add that the Florentine guys (not the stone ones above) I saw were very easy on the eyes. This does not hurt. Maybe I've just been on the wrong continent all this time. Hmm.....

The Colosseum

So many things a person waits for in life just turn out to be disappointments. The amount of anticipation and gift wrapping our imaginations carefully layer on top of the things we long to do or see frequently somehow diminishes the experience itself. When we reach that place or have a chance to do the thing we've always said we want to do, how can it live up to all those long-held dreams?

I have wanted to see the Colosseum for a long time. It has, in fact, been on my "list" for some time. On my recent trip to Rome, I had a chance to take a tour of it. Despite my many hours thinking of it and all the times it has shown up in film and drawings, it was more impressive that I ever could have imagined.

Just stepping into the cool shadows under the main seats and running my fingertips across the support columns made my breath catch. How many hands over the centuries have trailed fingertips there? What noble and awful things have resonated through those stones, those bricks, and that mortar?

Emerging into the sun again, I saw the vast bowl of the stadium itself open before me. Words fail. I tried to capture it with photographs, but there is no angle perfect enough, no lens ground well enough to show the heart-elevating majesty of the engineering, the beauty of brick and marble made perfect and true even after the ravages of the centuries. Right behind that emotion, though, comes the reminder of what it was built for, and a whole new set of feelings sweeps in. The eye is drawn irresistibly to the great metal cross that crowns the place where the jaded and self-proclaimed divine emperors of Rome once sat to watch the deadly entertainments that sated the lusts of their people, a fitting place for it, like a crucifix used to slay a monster, perhaps.

I clicked off photos from every angle, even a rare one of me standing in front of it. I want to remember always that I was there. For me, the Colosseum is both the best and the worst that we are capable of being. I have seen it with my own eyes now, laid my fingers on its bare and poignant bones, and I think that the sheer power of the place, both the great and the terrible, will always be a part of me.

Dante

I saw Dante's tomb while I was in Florence. He was everywhere there, one of the favored sons. I found this, of course, highly ironic, since they cast him out during his lifetime for being of the wrong political persuasion. Our guide, the lovely Marco, pointed out the fact when we passed the museum made of his "house." They tore it down when they exiled Dante. Later, after they recognized the grandeur of his writing, in a fit of guilt, they rebuilt a replica on the site. Irony abounds. A bust of him made from his death mask adorns a niche on the outside. I wonder if Dante himself would have been able to make that elegant shrug and say with his modern-day son, "Sometimes it happens" as he stood in that cobbled square. I hope so.

Inside a Migraine

I am actively migraining right now, and I'm going to try to write about it.  This may not make much sense.  This attack started this morning, and I finally broke down and took a Maxalt about fourth period.  It put up the necessary glass-block wall, and I observed the world from an uncomfortable distance the rest of the day, constantly pressing through to try to interact with people, feeling that horrible delay with everything as I tried to make my brain function. 

Once 7th period was gone, I left the lights off.  It was bliss.  Light is my enemy. I left the room dark and prayed for silence and stillness, leaving my stereo off and hoping not to have to talk to anyone too much.  I graded papers until it got too dark to see, and then I ventured back out into the world of overhead illumination. 

Immediate tension and pain, like a vise tightening inside my skull.  I wanted to cry.  I think I can feel the nerves inside my eyes leading into my brain.  I stumbled out to my car and started the drive home.  Every time the horrible headlights of another car struck my windshield, every time I drove underneath a streetlight, I yelled and wished for a dark hole I could pull in on top of myself.  Those hellish blue headlights were like someone literally stabbing me through the eye.  Halos like some kind of special effects from a video surrounded every light source.  They would have been beautiful had there not been that pain and dissociation from everything that accompanied them.

When I got home, the pain had dulled down to a softly pulsing drone.  I microwaved the only food that didn't sound like something that would make me throw up, french toast sticks, and had supper.  Everything was funny for some reason, funny and far away.  There is still a distance I can't seem to cross, a divide that separates me from my pets, my house, everything I know I need to be doing right now. 

I'm going to go to bed now.  I hope that sleep will reset my fried circuits.  Otherwise, tomorrow, Tuesday, always a crap day, is going to be a real monster.

A Moment of Clarity

It took seeing them bring her out on a stretcher to make me realize the depths of my own absurdity.  There she was, frail and weak, and it struck me suddenly how tenaciously I'd clung to all those old grudges that ultimately mean nothing in the light of all the good intentions piled up on the other side of the scale.  As they loaded her gently into the back of the Metro amubulance in the darkness of the cold night, I let go of those old frustrations and made my peace with that piece of my past.

I can't count the Sundays we'd been herded into that classroom and told dubious things about Jesus.  As my own understanding of the Bible grew, so, too, did my personal frustration level.  By the time I was a senior, I had stopped going to Sunday School at all.  I would not be disrespectful, and since that was the year my parents told me that I didn't have to go anymore, I took myself out of a situation that caused me an endless form of tearing inside.

Over the years, friction continued to be there.  The basic conflict just never went away.  I kept it there like a piece of sandpaper, rubbing my thumb across it, constantly feeling that grit abraiding me instead of somehow doing what even that simplest of bivalves is capable of, wrapping it in something smooth and creating something of beauty of it.

Why did I do that?  I would have and have done that for most other people I know, even those with far fewer redeemed qualities than she.  I have consciously forced my mind to the positive, sought that which would enable me to see the gold among the pebbles, laughed at myself for my own grumpiness.  Here, though, for years, I have been unwilling to see her as a person and value her accordingly, and for that I am deeply and most humbly sorry.  She has always been only the monster of those long-ago Sundays, and she didn't deserve that blindness, that disdain from me.  Nobody does from anyone. 

It's horrible but necessary to be shown that you aren't what you think you are from time to time, to have that moment when your own blinders about yourself and others are painfully ripped away to force you to look honestly at yourself and your own behaviors.  I will take what I learned in those lightning flashes of the emergency vehicles strobes and try to remedy these faults.  I just wish the revelation had come earlier.

Yeah, So....SCORE....

I went to the Hell of Retail today and did my preshopping for Rome today.  I figured that if I could get the first run of tiddly-piddly shopping out of the way, I'd feel less stress later in the week.  Inevitably, I will have to go again for whatever it is I forgot despite the fact that I made a very careful list, but at least I think I got most of what I'll need and what my pets will need while I'm gone.

While I was in Hell...um, I mean, shopping... I saw an iHome dock alarm clock in their sale aisle.  It was last year's model and the last one they had or something, so they'd shuffled it off to the "sell it fast and cheap" section.  It originally cost $50 and I managed to pick it up for $13.  I think that's a pretty nice shopping score, actually.  Since I have been deeply ambiguous about getting one of these, I was glad to find this one so cheap.

I think it's going to be just what I wanted.  I can charge my iPod on it (it doesn't do my iPhone, but I don't really listen to a lot of music off my iPhone anyway....) and use my iPod as part of my alarm clock aparatus now.  I can also listen to music in bed without having to hook the iPod up to some elaborate and difficult clock radio system not made for that .  Of course, being the Queen of Geeks, my favorite part is that now I can run iLava all the time and it won't run down the battery....  What can I tell you?  It's the little things that get me through these troubled times.....

Another thing I love about it is that I can just cut the lights on it OFF.  I hate light in the room while I'm trying to sleep.  I'm incredibly photosensitive.  Part of it has to do with my being a migraineur, I think.  If there's a lot of light coming into a room, even from a really bright alarm clock or a night light, I have to figure out some way to block it off.  I don't do the whole eye mask thing because it feels weird, but whoever designed this was thoughtful.  The clock will light up if you want it to, stay on like a night light if you like, or cut off if you want darkness.  Thank you, world of choice. 

Anyway, I'm looking forward to having music to doze off to now.  I haven't had that for a long time.  I used to love to use the sleep function on my old clock radio before I replaced it with my MoonBeam clock.  Now that I'm back to something that does music again, I guess I'll have to made a very short playlist of something dreamy.  I'm thinking that my usual listening fare isn't going to give me peaceful, fluffy-cloud dreams, somehow...

The Heart of Blue

The sky today was the most incredible shade of blue.  Just driving was a pleasure if I could look up into all that azure glory.  I wished for wings or for some improbable fantasy moment where my car left the road and suddenly floated upward.  I felt like I could happily drown in it.  I felt like I could reach up and grab a corner, could wrap it around myself like a warm blanket and sleep safely, suspended in that cloudless sky like some unfathomable resting place above everything.  Every word I know for blue flickered through my mind and felt like silken ribbons trailing through my fingers; there were shades that were cerulean, indigo, sky, true....  I feel moved to composition by that blueness, and maybe I'll post what I produce later if anything comes of it.  In the meantime, the sky now is royal darkening to navy, patiently waiting for the pearl stickpin of the full moon to be laid gently upon it.  What a lovely set of shades remains to be enjoyed.  Even though the sun is down, the heart of blue remains.