The 9th season of The Amazing Race starts tonight (9PM ET/PT), and I am so very excited. A typical reaction when I tell the uninitiated about this show is, "Eh, I don't like reality shows all that much." But I'm telling you, this is not Survivor. This is not simply a show full of backbiting, manufactured drama and silly "competitions." OK, so there's a little bit of that, but they travel around the world, people! They have to navigate their way through Mumbai on crowded trains and race through the streets of Bangkok on tuk-tuks and cross African deserts on buses full of livestock! All with a camera and sound person in tow, on very little sleep, probably fighting with their racing partner, crazy low blood sugar, not speaking the language, no idea where they're going next. It is drama and excitement to the nth degree, full of villains and goofballs and slutty princesses and soccer moms and spunky retirees and always THAT couple, who should break up immediately if not last month or last year. It's a formula, and it's manufactured to a certain degree, and the inevitable "Ugly American" incidents really piss me off, but my god, it's exciting. (Except for last season, and maybe season 6. But other than that...whooo!)
So, who wants to watch it with me? My usual TAR buddies are playing hockey in Burlington and are living in Vietnam, respectively, and I need at least one other person, so I can keep up the necessary snarky running commentary and yell at the TV without feeling like a fool. If you don't love it, I'll...I'll...um...probably apologize and then evangelicize a bit more.
It's amazing how effective hormones can be at making you feel all fucked up. That's my scapegoat of the moment, anyway.
You know you've gotten pretty comfortable with someone when you can talk to them about your bathroom experience the morning after eating some damn spicy chili.
My dream last night was a lot like a game of Chutes and Ladders, except it involved ski trails and escalators, and I was walking up the ski trails and riding down the escalators. Feel free to offer your analysis--I haven't quite wrapped my head around it yet.
My local coffee place finally reopened on Sunday, after closing down for a few weeks after an SUV plowed into their front window. Chris and I were their first and second grand reopening customers. We didn't get balloons or free coffee or anything to mark the occasion, but we did get an enthusiastic "Hey! You're our first customers!" greeting from the owner. And they even remembered my name. Shiny!
Last week, I watched all of the Firefly episodes (perhaps evidenced by the Firefly slang in the previous paragraph). I loved them, LOVED them, and, though I'm glad I watched them finally, I'm sad there are no more. I also watched the movie last night (after having it imprinted on my subconscious through multiple sleep-viewings), and now there's really and truly no more to watch. Boooo.
It's fucking freezing out. Come to me quickly, soggy and slightly warmer spring. I need your yellow forsythias and grey pussywillows and chartreuse budding leaves, toute de suite.
I want to hold you close and whisper true things,
Bind you to me softly with silken cords
Of tenderness and gentle comfort.
Cradle flesh and feeling,
Sing lullabies and soothe.
Cup your heart and tremble with every beat.
All so fragile, this latticework of birds' bones
And dewy spiders' webs,
I fear I'll break a small piece with clumsy hands
Or words
And watch it crumble into dust and memory.
I'm sitting in my office, my first day here this week, and I've had a tension headache since 9am. Just thinking about coming in today and catching up and dealing with the turmoil roiling around this place lately made my jaw clench so tightly I could have cracked a walnut. Now it's almost 6, I can't really see straight, and I am miserable. And so I start thinking, hmm, I should get another one of those hot rock massages like I got a month ago when I used that gift certificate from my birthday. And then I started thinking, I don't have $140 + tip to spend on such frippery, worth-every-penny though it might be. And THEN I started thinking, maybe I should take up a collection. Alms for the tense! Alms for the I-can't-even-relax-my-right-pinky-I'm-so-tense! Won't you help me, please?
But then I started thinking that I am an ungrateful whiner and I should be happy I even have a job and health insurance and a roof over my head and organic chocolate to eat and people who love me and... and... you know, all the stuff I have. Which doesn't include enough money to get a hot rock massage whenever I want to, but still.
So now I feel tense AND guilty. But if you want to take up a collection anyway, I won't stop you.
This morning, as I drove past one of my old houses, I thought about the garden there. The rose bushes and bulbs and alpine heather and daylilies and climbing hydrangea and more that I planted there. The beds I painstakingly prepared, the plants I chose and eased into the soil and watered during the early fall. I left in the winter, and so I wasn't able to see them bud and grow in the spring and summer, wasn't able to fuss over their stems and blooms. The house I lived in that spring and summer, too, I created a small garden, with irises and bleeding heart and hollyhocks and I forget what else. I left that garden, too, before it had a chance to establish itself.
Now that spring is creeping up, I find I'm thinking about starting another garden at the house I live in now, another house that I'm sure I'll leave before too long. And I wonder whether it's worth it. I wonder how I'll feel, abandoning another creation before I have a chance to see it flourish. I'm not sure whether it's worth it, putting that effort and care into something I won't be able to hold onto. But maybe I will. It is something I love to do, and I feel maybe I need to do it. Sometimes you need to start things even when you're pretty sure you won't be able to see them through to the end. Someday, I hope, I'll have a house and a garden that I can call mine, that I won't have to (or want to) leave. But in the meantime, I guess my abandoned gardens are OK. Really, when I think about it, that's not a bad legacy.
The heart that breaks open can contain the whole universe.
-Joanna Macy, writer and teacher (1929- )
It seems like demolition is everywhere I look this week. Familiar pieces of my daily landscape are suddenly gone, and it's funny how much it affects me. I don't have an emotional attachment to these places, but just the fact that they were there for so long and are now absent...it makes me shiver a bit.
The building by the railroad tracks I pass by every day on my way to work (it was a...used furniture warehouse?) is now a rubbly gap. The "Gas With A Smile" station on Mass Ave. -- which I always meant to take a picture of because, c'mon, "Gas With A Smile"? -- is now dull twisted metal, abstract sculpture, coming down to make way for a shiny new Hess Express. And the huge Lincoln Park School in my old neighborhood, which used to cozy up alongside the Elmer Bumpus Bridge and always had trash stuck in the metal grills over the windows, is now completely demolished.
I suppose the landscape changes all the time, but it's certainly been more dramatic than usual lately.
(The following is a dramatization, paraphrasement, and embellishment of actual events. A name has been altered to sort-of-but-not-really obscure the identity of the more-or-less innocent. Also, we love our jobs. Really.)
Philbert: God, they really fucked up this layout. It's taking me forever to fix everything. And I don't know when this became my job, but I have to do all the color-correction. I don't know how I'm going to get this to the printer by Friday.
Me: Yeah, those bastards. I don't think I even know what color-correction is. I'm a little fucked myself. I double-booked QCs, I have to lay out 8 more chapters of my book by Tuesday, and I'm going to be gone Thursday and Friday. Fuck.
P: That sounds a lot like my internal dialogue.
Me: What, repeating "Fuck" over and over?
P: Yeah.
(Rueful laughter)
Wide awake before dawn. Not unusual for the early-waking insomniac I've been for as long as I can remember, but annoying and a little distressing all the same. So I'm out in the living room on the couch, writing this, with Antiques Roadshow FYI turned down low.
You're in the bedroom, flat on your back with your knee sticking up like a stork, sleeping hard. I almost wanted to wake you up, so you can wrap your arms around me and comfort me. I need that, but I'll still need it when you wake up, and you'll still be there in a few hours. Like you said, you're not going anywhere.
I'd like some things to just go away, like this sore throat I've had for a week. But they won't, I'll have to deal with them, and I will, I know, and it'll be OK, but I can't really do anything right now, and so I can simply stare at the ceiling and worry or write this and maybe worry a little less.
So I'll sit here with a little TV and a little Internet to distract me and quiet the anxious conversations that babble in my head, and listen to the pouring rain, and find recipes for Deviled Eggs (my traditional Super Bowl hors d'oeuvre), and wait for the sun to come up and for him to wake up from his deep sleep, full of dreams full of feeling. Just wait, for now.