Aubergine

Daybook: June 27, 2009

Outside my window...
My neighbors next door are having a yard sale, which is bringing extra foot and car traffic to our normally quiet street, but good people-watching.

I have been thinking about...
Food.  Where mine comes from, what choices I'm making about what I put in my mouth and what path it took to get to me.  I watched the movie Food, Inc. this week, which gives one a lot to think about.  I'm also thinking about how to cook more in my limited amounts of time, and about canning, now that we are in the season of plenty in my corner of the world, and about making strawberry jam.

I am grateful for...
A quiet day today with only loose plans (I have been so busy for so many weeks).  Time to clean up my house that had become cluttered and messy in my lack of time.  A party tonight where there will be friends and good food and sitting outside under the stars listening to live bluegrass music.

From the kitchen...

Not enough.

In the garden...
I built raised beds in my back yard this spring and they are filled with yummies.  Tomatoes, basil, cucumbers, shizo, peppers, tomatillos, beans, peas, chard, kale, dill.  I go out and water in the early mornings before work and I'm so much enjoying watching things grow and fill in.  A friend has been calling it my "award-winning garden" (to be) and I feel as proud of it as if it did have a ribbon on it.

Elsewhere in the garden I am pulling weeds, slowly getting it back under control.  Planning to lay weed cloth down and spread shredded bark where there used to be lawn.  Well, never lawn since I've lived here, but once there was a lawn there. It has only been an expanse of ugly since I have lived here and I'm tired of it.  I have flowers that need to be planted in the flower bed, and containers that need tidying and re-filling with new plants, and gaps that need filling between the volunteer zinnias running along the front of my porch where the resident gopher colony have been disappearing them in the middle of the night.

I am wearing...
Jeans, rather more tight than I'm comfortable with.  A favorite black tee-shirt with a glow-in-the-dark Mac power symbol on it.  My joy bracelets.  A silver necklace with my word on it: Create. No shoes.  Summer red toenails.

I am making...
Plans.  Starting new journals.  Making room in my life for more rest, more creativity, more cooking, more making.

I am reading...
One more story to go in Flights of Love, by Bernhard Schlink before I take it back to the library.  Next up: Drowning Ruth, which I just renewed so I didn't have to return it yet. I have been savoring Plant Seed, Pull Weed by Geri Larkin, and will be sad when it is done.  I have also been slogging through two books that I started a while back and am either not in the mood for or really just not enjoying: Suite Franciaise and Unconfessed. I had been really looking forward to both of them, which is all that's keeping them from the "sell these to fund more books" pile. This morning with my coffee, I read cookbooks:  The Breakaway Cook and The Farm to Table Cookbook.

I am dreaming...
Of travel, and the life I am slowing moving toward, and more time to myself, and paintings I want to paint.

The best thing...
Basil from the market last week that was so fresh it started growing roots when I put it in a jar of water.  Some will be pesto on pizza this week, and some will be planted in the aforementioned garden.

A few plans for the rest of the week...
A menu of good things to cook and eat throughout the week.  Lunch with a friend and then Pilates class with my sister on Monday.  A massage and a haircut.  Ani DiFranco out under the stars (I like outside music best, it seems).  A day off on Friday for the holiday to make for an even longer and lazier weekend to look forward to.

A picture or two to share...

randomness

I've been in the kitchen recently, which has been great.  I spent about 3 hours on Sunday cooking up a bunch of stuff so I'd have lunch and dinners throughout the week, and now I have a nice full fridge.  However, although I diligently packed my lunch and took it to work yesterday, I worked through lunch and then went straight into meetings and didn't have time to eat it.  Granola bars do not make a good lunch substitute, I can attest.

On the way home last night I finally used a gift card for Sur La Table that a good friend gave me for Christmas.  I got myself a pizza stone and a pizza peel.  I've been coveting a pizza stone for a good long time, and that's exactly what this gift card was intended for, since said friend thoroughly understands my love of pizza and desire to replicate Tuscan pizza at home.

Let me just say I have a long way to go to rival any Tuscan pizzas.  My first pizza is a runaway lead for "ugliest pizza ever."  This is an extremely flattering photo of it. It stuck to both the peel and the stone and basically came apart coming out of the oven. It tasted far better than it looked, though, and the crust was nice and crispy from the stone!  Another friend tells me first pizzas are like first pancakes (crepes, waffles...) - they are always ugly.  The next one will be better.

Between buying the pizza stone and cooking the pizza, I stopped in at urgent care to beg for more antibiotics, because the sinus infection I had a couple of weeks ago is back. I think I felt well for all of 24 hours before I went downhill again.  This is so not amusing any more. The doctor called the new antibiotics the "bigger cousin" of the amoxicillin she gave me last time and warned me to take them with lots of water because they taste bad.  Whoo boy, she wasn't kidding.  Also they are chalky, start dissolving immediately, and get stuck in one's throat.  And did I mention that I have a hard time swallowing pills anyway?  One down, 19 to go.  I haven't taken my morning pill yet because I'm scared of it.  I'm considering imbedding it in peanut butter like my mom used to do with the dog's pills when I was a kid.  If you have any suggestions...

Last night and this morning I did a bunch of reading about my birth control and other birth control options, because I am starting to suspect that the NuvaRing I've been on has killed my sex drive.  TMI?  Probably. But I realized that the waking-up-in-the-wee-hours-of-the-morning insomnia I had badly a few months back and intermittently since may also be related.  As well as my deeper-than-usual depression the last few months and the general spacey-ness that is making me a little batty. I've just been feeling like I'm not all here.  I was off hormonal birth control for 7 years, so you'd think I'd have noticed these changes sooner, but I didn't.  I don't remember having adverse side effects back when I was on the pill, but I wasn't terribly self aware in those days either.  I do remember having a fairly low sex drive, but I thought I just had a low sex drive.  Maybe that was always the pill.  How annoying is that?  I am firmly single still, so neither birth control nor sex drive are of much use to me at the moment (I was working on the idea of "if you build it, they will come..." - so to speak), but doesn't it seem counter productive that hormonal birth control kills sex drive?  I'm pissed off on principal.  Other than barriers (which I use (well, would use), but I'm paranoid and a two-method user), there aren't many options for non-hormonal birth control on the market.  Basically there's the copper IUD.  And remembering how black my finger used to turn from my wedding ring, I'm concerned about putting any metals that close to such sensitive skin.  So, well, I don't know what to do.  But I think I'm going to try a month off the NuvaRing and see how I feel.

Some of you are going, "Hey, wait.  I thought she was a lesbian." No, my wife was a lesbian.  I walk the middle line.  So now I've outed myself and also discussed my sex drive and birth control on the internet. 

Back to safer topics.  Knitting.  I'm going for a record on how many projects I have going at once.  Or I would be, but I've totally lost count.  I have socks (at least two pairs), wraps (at least four, in various gauges and pattern complexity), two sweaters (one for me, and yes, a yellow sweater for my middle sister that has become a family joke I've been working on it for so long), a queue of baby hats (one down, one in progress, and I think three to go), and probably a couple other things I've tucked away and forgotten about.  The upside of all this scatteredness is that I always have something to work on no matter my mood, attention span, or need for portability.  And I'm not even counting the projects that are neatly packed up with yarn wound and pattern ready but not yet cast on.  A friend asked me this weekend if I had more yarn than the two baskets that are in the shelf in my studio, I think because she was feeling badly that her stash so out sized mine, being the very simple gal that she is.  Oh no.  My yarn is just divided up into all these projects, which I then have stashed all over the house.  Careful where you sit in my house, there may be knitting needles there.  And then what did I do while I was in San Diego and up north, both?  Bought more yarn.  Only small, single skeins, I swear!

I need about six months off work to knit and read and rest and generally just be.  That would be so nice.

10 things

That are making me happy today:

1. The weeping cherry tree that I brought home from the garden shop today.  I don't know where it is going to go yet, so I got a pretty black pot to put it in for one season, while I figure that out. Ideally, I want to be able to see it from my bed.

2. My local library, and new books to read while I travel next week.

3. My cozy bed, where I retired to rest and read for a while after returning home after the errands that wore me out (I called in sick today - I really shouldn't have been running errands, either).

4. This sweet one, who is really glad I'm at home today.  He doesn't really care that I'm sick, just that I'm here. He keeps coming in the room I'm in and bumping his head up against my knees.

5. The new holes in my roof that bring in SO MUCH light and make my formerly dark house a very much nicer place to be.  I really need to do something about that wood paneling, though.

6. A knitting project on my kitchen counter.  I don't know why that makes me happy, it just does.

7. Meyer lemon tea sweetened with avocado honey.  I have drunk so much of this stuff since I got sick, and it is so good.  Soothing, hydrating, good for me.  My mom brought me this honey back from Julian, and my brother brought me the lemons from the farmer's market on Saturday.  That makes me happy, too.

8. Rainbows spinning around my kitchen while I make my tea.  I thought that my little solar-powered prism was broken, but it just needed a little kick start.

9. Modern medicine.  The decongestant is keeping me sane (I have a sinus infection, and it HURTS), and the Amoxicillin is supposed to make me better.  Any time now. I have been sick for way too long at this point and I'm totally over it.  Maybe it is a stretch to say these things are making me happy, but they are making me grateful.

10. A brand-new spring-decorated travel journal, and the promise of travel just a few days away.  I can't wait.  Artfest, here I come! Hopefully I'll feel better before I leave!

in bed with my friends

I am a very sick person today.  I have recently been congratulating myself on the luck and good fortune of avoiding all of the many colds that have been going around my office, but they have now all caught me.  All at once.  That will teach me to take my good heath for granted.  I even thought I was going to get off easy, with a few days of a lightly sore throat, and then a day feeling sort of better.  And then I went down hard last night and now I have to admit that I am very very sick.

Living alone and being sick kind of sucks.  There's no one to bring me medicine, or soup, or more tissues, or to listen to me whine, or prop up the pillows and start a movie for me.  So I've spent a good part of my day, when not sleeping, feeling a bit extra sorry for myself because I'm lonely.  But just now, this evening, I realized that I'm not alone really.  I have settled into bed with my laptop to watch a movie, which made me think of my friend Emily, with whom I had a conversation on Saturday about watching movies in bed.  If I recall correctly, my half of the conversation was, "I never take my laptop to bed!"  So here I am, eating crow on that point, but I feel Em here with me.  I'm also drinking meriko's whiskey lemon tea, which is nearly as effective as Nyquil but far better tasting, so she's here with me, too.  My tea is made from lemons from the meyer lemon tree Lisa and I planted in the front yard a couple of years ago, so Lisa's here with me, and sweetened with the rich avocado honey that my brother and sister-in-law brought to me from Julian at Christmastime, so they are here with me.  Also my belly is full of good Thai soup that Kirsten brought by for me tonight on her way home from work, and I'm having Oreos for dessert, which make me think of Kimberly and also my mother, who maintains that the Newman's O's I had in the house recently are *not* Oreos.  So they are here with me, too. These are real Oreos I'm eating tonight, though, because I do have to concede my mother has a point there.  And I have my iPhone here beside me, bringing me messages from a friend who says he wishes he was here to listen to me whine (easy to say when he isn't), and "get better" wishes from folks near and far via Facebook.

So really I'm not so alone.  I have a whole bunch of you tucked up here beside me, and I'm grateful. Scootch in now and get comfortable, I'm about to start the movie.

tonight

Matt Hart, the poet, has dark blonde hair that stands straight out from his head, in all directions, shocked, shocking.  A compact, energetic body, and glasses that slide down his nose over and over to rest on his nose ring while he reads, revealing pale eyes fringed with pale lashes, until he slides the frames back into place.  He begins his last poem, book in one hand, holding down the words on the page with a slim finger of the other, but as he gets into the rhythm, he begins to rock forward and back, foot to foot, his voice strong and clear although he's no longer anywhere near the mic.  His hair, I swear, stands up more, his face flushes, a vein bulges in his neck and his glasses threaten to slide right off his face because his free hand has lifted, conducting, sending the back-beat music of his words from the podium out across the room toward us.  He looks up from the page, the last two lines memorized, and delivers them directly, personally, almost brutally, a crescendo of syllables, and then, suddenly, is done.  He steps to the front row, turns, sits, and becomes, except for his wild hair and pale pale eyes, perfectly normal.  Just one of the rest of us.

Later, I step out of the book store into a cold cold night lit by a bright full moon, and I'm not sure if my heart thuds from the thick hot chocolate I had after dinner or the power of the words I have been washed with.

Resilience

_Optimism

by Jane Hirshfield

More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam returns over and
over to the same shape, but the sinuous tenacity of a tree: finding the
light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another.
A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers, mitochondria, figs—
all this resinous, unretractable earth. 

A friend of mine recently told me a story.  I've forgotten the exact details now, but it went something like this: There is a valley between two countries, or the north and south of the same country, maybe in Asia or maybe somewhere else, but the two sides were at war.  The war drew to a stalemate, and the valley has been the DMZ for some 50 years while the slow ooze of politics and money and mistrust and fear have held the two sides apart.  And during this time, ignored and uninhabited and unplundered, the valley returned to a more natural state. The jungle grew back lush.  The roads crumbled back to animal track paths.  A particular bird, nearly extinct, has started coming to this valley to mate, and in this one narrow strip of the planet, is now thriving.  My friend was telling me the story because recently the two sides are negotiating peace treaties, and the band of jungle holding the borders apart will be collapsed into freeway and towns and no one knows what will happen to that bird and she's pissed off about that.  But the part of the story my brain keeps returning to is how the valley recovered.  When left alone to thrive, it did. What resilience.

As the rain clears this week, and the sun warms my face again, and I look around to see daffodils peeking up and my apricot trees in bloom and the big old magnolia trees all around downtown covered in those lush pink and white flowers, I realize that I am recovering. I still hurt, but not every day, and the periods of hurt are farther and farther apart.  I find myself laughing more, and looking forward more.  I feel myself opening, like those magnolias, throwing back my silky pale skin to expose my insides, spiky and bumpy and raw, but mine.  I am still here.  Still alive. I am richer and more lush than before.  My heart is a different shape now, but it is pumping, and it is open, and it wants to love.

Heart

the resilience of heart

bash it to bits

a fresh new start

all the shattered pieces

snap back together

hold it in your hands

it's soft as kid leather

hold it in your hands

this crush in my body

tastes of saltwater and blood

the one who tugs the hardest

is the hardest to love

that's just it

it's how it is

I'll throw it if you catch it

I've got lots more to give

I'll throw it if you catch it

I'll throw it if you catch it

From "Resilience" by Annabelle Chvostek

Updated:  The country is Korea, and the bird is the Red Crowned Crane, Japanese Crane, or tancho as it is known in Japan, where it is a symbol of nobility and immortality.. The population of this bird is only about 1500 in the world, 1000 of them in this area of Korea and Northern China.  See the comments for the reference to the book the story came from, before being told to me.  Although the species has protected status in Korea, the fate of that strip of land is still uncertain and conservation areas have not yet been defined there.

journals everywhere

This weekend I taught a book-making workshop for some friends at my house. I sort of blissfully didn't know what I was getting into, or I might not have agreed to it.  But I'm glad I did.  I had 8 women plus myself here for 3 hours on Thursday night to prep their book papers, and then 7 of them back on Saturday to make covers and bind the whole thing together.  We were planning to have a couple of hours in the afternoon to talk about art journaling techniques and prep some pages with ink and stamps and collage and paint, but the cover preparations took too long and we ran out of time at the end. 

To make room for all of them to work, I opened up my dining room table to full size, covered it in butcher paper, and also cleared my kitchen counter and generously-sized coffee table for workspace.  It was wonderful. Art supplies on every horizontal surface, lots of excited creative energy all over the place. Each of them was making a book for the very first time, and all of the books came out just beautifully.

I forgot, however, how much energy it takes to teach, and I was totally wiped out by Saturday afternoon when everyone left.  I think I went to bed about 9pm.  On Sunday, my fellow class-organizer (and helper!) came over for a little follow-up work time, since all the tools and stuff were still out, and we had been too busy teaching to make our own books. I finished up the two books in the foreground of the top photo then. 

My journals were still strewn all around, since I'd been using them for examples and to demonstrate with, and it felt a bit like being surrounded by all my past lives.  Not all that comfortable, really. I had to put them away before I could really unwind that night.  But once I had, I made a fire and settled down in front of it with my knitting. And stayed there for about 3 hours.  

It felt really good to be teaching again.  I have missed that.  But if I do this workshop again, I'll definitely need to tweak the agenda and make a couple other adjustments to make it more manageable. It sure was great to have a helper, though! 

things found while cleaning my desks

my desk at work this afternoon:

- 3 pens of that are the only type I'll use, and which I thought I was out of (I sent a panic-y email to my admin last week asking for a new box)

- notes from one on one meetings with the VP who retired last fall (straight to recycling)

- notes from meetings on topics I don't even recognize

- notes that make me realize how much more engaged I was in strategic planning for my team last year than I've had time to be in the last several months

- a sock and a half that I'd forgotten about (I used to knit in meetings - that doesn't really fly any more)

- 3 mugs that really need to be washed

- a notebook I used to use every day that I'd completely forgotten I even had

- a wedding portrait of Lisa

- a whole lot of dust

- room for my new salt lamp

my desk at home this evening

- 3 years worth of registration stickers for the motorcycle that has been parked in my garage for a lot longer than 3 years

- really old love notes from Lisa

- at least 4 copies of a forms for an open claim for about $500 that I just need to send in to get

- a big stack of non-activated credit cards - I don't even know which are for accounts I still have. 

- all the birthday and Christmas cards I received this year

- all of my tax documents for the year - hey, I'm ready to do my taxes now!

- the coffee cup coaster that I haven't seen in a while.  I've been using a stack of bills for my cup recently.

- the stack of blog cards that I collected from BlogHer.  In July.  Man, am I lame about networking.

- a large stack of catalogs and torn out catalog pages that are now enjoying the comfort of my recycle can

- the sim card for my old iPhone.  I gave the phone to Lisa in December.

- the pale wood surface.  Wow.  I haven't seen that in while.

This post is dedicated to Kirsten, who has also been facing an overwhelming desk situation.

Ah.... space.  Feels so good.

when it rains

After many months of feeling very lonely and unattractive, I suddenly, like in the last 3 days, seem to have a line forming in my vicinity.  What happened?  Did Mercury leave retrograde?  Is it the very bright Venus hanging so near the moon these last few days?  Do I suddenly smell very very good?

I don't really expect it to last.  But I'm sure going to enjoy it while it does!

dasspunk

It is someone's birthday today.  Someone who I met in my first job at Apple, and who I became unlikely fast friends with.  Someone who taught me how to play Quake by killing off my avatar over and over until I learned to dodge him.  Someone who came up with crazy nicknames for nearly everyone in our team, which stuck even when we wished they wouldn't (mine was Doñata, which was better than the nicknames my little brother invented).  Someone who has a long string of nicknames himself (BRay, spunk, dasspunk, etc.). Someone who loves orange, the letter "K" and thinks bananas are the perfect fruit. Someone who can give a long and entertaining monologue about why he loves each of those things.  Someone who has strongly opinionated but is happy to hear out differing opinions, too (as long as he can make fun of you).  Someone who plays beautiful music and is wholeheartedly passionate about it.  Someone who loves basketball and is one of only two people I have voluntarily watched sports with. Someone whose old leather desk chair I still sit my butt in nearly every morning to read my email, and whose coffee grinder I used in my kitchen this morning. Someone who makes fun of me about nearly everything, but somehow it always comes across as love. Someone who has at least twice given away or sold almost everything he owns to move across the country or to another country (that's how I got his stuff).  Someone who quit smoking a few years ago after a very long habit (so proud of you!).  Someone who has the sweetest softest heart, but would never ever admit to it.  Someone who calls women "broads" and "chicks" and I forgive him because I know how much he respects us really.  Someone who has a huge collection of Hawaiian shirts.  Someone who drinks "old man drinks," and always orders his vodka tonic with lime (limes are the runner-up perfect fruit). Someone who wore shorts every single day that he lived in California (with Hawaiian shirts, of course). Someone who took gentle care of me when my last relationship was winding down to a messy close and I really needed a friend.  

Someone who I love and miss very much.

Happy birthday, Brian.