moving

I sort of feel like this.

Bridal shower for one of my best friends today. All the cleaning, cooking, planning--and it's over in a couple of hours! Strange.

Half of me want to go to the studio, half wants to go thrift shopping. I am just going to go over to B's house and work on paintings (this is one in progress, a collaboration) and grade papers and cook with him. That will be nice. Listen to music, make more paintings, draw on some prints. I really should go to studio, though.

All my movement is inwards right now. Other people feel like too much work. I feel very selfish (good selfish, not misanthropic) and want to work on my ideas all the time.

Of course it would be this week that my sewing machine would break. Oh, well.

and all

Sometimes, even when I am happy, I am wondering whether there isn't something more than this. Here is the one who makes me laugh, who has shelves of books on art and who makes prints that are so lovely, who I'm tied to by many small strings.

And then you, with your black hair and your pale skin and your freckles and your long love affair and your hours and hours of distance.

And then another, who speaks languages like me and loves them like me, who is witty and unapproachable and a bit broken and therefore all the more attractive.

It's spring; I'm here.


[St. Stephen's Day
AL

All winter long I can hear the cries of birds in the thatch.
They come down from the north to hide

in eves, wind forgotten, the lake looming
out of memory and their bones beating with blood.

Where is the one who will hold birds in his hands
for me? While on earth I sing and practise Advent

I look for the face in the rafters. Drifting to me
little pieces of hay, flecks of peat ash promise something:

maybe it is spring.
I hold with waiting. I hold with hands
that are larger than mine, spanning the shores

of the great Lakes. I hold with the white snow pushing back
the sky and the empty hours between houses.

Fill up the rooms with singing alone, I say. Who knows
what will thaw in six months? Make the song

and eat it yourself. Thus live the birds in the thatch, wrens.
If I dream in the smoke-draped room I dream

a little boy to dance under a cape of straw
the hushing
wings built full of air, scuff of foot at the door

(I am never afraid to open--)]

saturdays

Are for the smell of Lemon Pledge and the record "Summertime Dream" by Gordon Lightfoot on the record player.

New chore day, new soundtrack:

Lillian, Egypt---------------------------Josh Ritter
She's Like a Rainbow---------------------------The Rolling Stones
Tonight You Belong To Me---------------------------Josh Ritter
Snow Is Gone---------------------------Josh Ritter
[Redacted]---------------------------Ben Folds
Say You Miss Me---------------------------Wilco
Gracie---------------------------Ben Folds
Love Over And Over---------------------------Kate & Anna McGarrigle
Sea And The Rhythm---------------------------Iron And Wine
Kate (Ska Version)---------------------------Ben Folds Five
West End Blues---------------------------Louis Armstrong
Cold Hands Warm Heart---------------------------Brendan Benson
Songs of Love---------------------------Ben Folds Five
Une Année Sans Lumiere---------------------------The Arcade Fire
All These Things That I've Done---------------------------The Killers
Look After You---------------------------The Fray
Bright Smile---------------------------Josh Ritter
Rebellion (Lies)--------------------------- The Arcade Fire
To Live Is To Fly---------------------------Cowboy Junkies
Mushaboom---------------------------Feist
Bessa---------------------------Tilly and the Wall
Harrisburg---------------------------Josh Ritter
Inside and Out---------------------------Feist
Kathleen---------------------------Josh Ritter
Under my Thumb---------------------------Rolling Stones
Let my Love Open the Door---------------------------Pete Townshend
City Girl---------------------------The Owls

New place for my books. Lots of dusting. Happy day!

broke

Watched the first hour and a half of Brokeback Mountain tonight. I can't watch any more until there's someone around to watch with. It's the impending in the movie that I can't stand. I know some bad is coming to those two men and I can't bear to watch it alone.

My life is so full of people who think like me, people who believe in justice and in peacefulness and in care for the world and each other, that it always hits me really hard when I realize not everyone is like this, that some people not only make huge judgments but act violently on them. I have had the privilege of having all my partners be accepted by my society. Sometimes I am convinced that the only reason I don't act on (or even, except in very private circumstances, talk about) my feelings about women is my fear of what people might think. That sounds awfully cowardly. Even while I am writing this I worry.

I recognise the ferocity of these two characters, reuniting over and over. I have felt that--love so immediate, so broken, so breaking, so breakable, so fierce, so in danger and on edge that something kin to violence is its end expression. Here, the time, the situation must have to do with it. Of course.

But what is this, my country? In my body I don't understand people being made to live in fear. Oh, god! It's like seeing the photos of the freedom riders and sit-in-ers getting spit on, getting ketchup poured on their heads. I can't stand the debasement of the human figure. I don't know what I can do, except continue in my small way. If anything, I hope that people who love can be exemplary in that love. And then maybe things can begin to change. Everything spirals out from this--who should be allowed their civil rights, who should go to war, who deserves to live--and it is so large I feel completely hopeless and powerless.

-------------------

Maybe it's appropriate, in some general way, that St. Thérèse of Lisieux comes to mind as I write. She wrote, "Love proves itself by deeds, so how am I to show my love? Great deeds are forbidden me. The only way I can prove my love is by scattering flowers and these flowers are every little sacrifice, every glance and word, and the doing of the least actions for love." She's the patron of AIDS patients, among other people.

someone else, for a change

Check it out: http://newyorkmetro.com/news/features/16529/index.html.

who will be the one forevermore?

Ben Folds Five: "Annie Waits"

Some songs are too private, still too close to the bone to send out into the ether.

I remember the long turn off the highway, passing the strip malls, the liquor stores, the university, until at last there was the curve, down the hill, under the old bridge, and then we were almost home. 202 East Main Street, apartment 2, wasn't it? Shame I can't remember that.

I can't send some stranger the feeling of the headlights cresting the hill just as that clear tenor voice sang headlights crest the hill/ who will be the one forevermore? The song sticks in my tenderest marrow. That would mean electricity, the hundred nights I thought my thoughts eastward. All the forty-dollar roundtrips. Your hands on the wheel, you looking over at me, the way you scrunch up your nose to be silly. None of that can go, so the song stays off the cd I'm making for a stranger (via this).

Headlights crest the hill/ who will be the one forevermore?/ Annie, I could be/ if we're both still lonely when we're old.

Image from here.

names for babies

I don't think I will ever have children. In high school I wanted to have twenty, so this must be the other end of the pendulum. In any case, there was this song

Don't look so sad, Marina, there's another part to play
Don't look so sad, Marina; save it for a rainy day

by the Jayhawks. It was popular when I was a senior in college. Marina instantly entered the ranks of favorite names for me.

Juno
Wren
Ruby
Thea
Poppy
Marina.

I don't talk about this with my parents. I think it hurt my mom's feelings the only time I intimated I might not want to have kids.

For my writing and making life, the idea of having children, of being married--even of living with someone, and sometimes even dating someone--is frightening because of the expectation I feel to give up my private life (words and things).

Virginia Woolf writes, in her essay/speech/book A Room of One's Own, "All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point—a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved." That 'room of her own' is something that, in our culture, we do not easily afford to women. Especially married women. Especially women with children. But even girlfriends, I think, feel this pressure. (I'm speaking in terms of heterosexual relationships, here, because that is where my experience lies. I would be really interested to hear opinions on how this dynamic does/not play out in homosexual relationships, especially between women. I'm also interested in how the dynamic plays out in any relationships.)

And many women don't afford it to ourselves, either--we call ourselves selfish or bad housekeepers or silly if we acknowledge the need for this kind of private life. Creation is essentially (at its base; in its essence) a solitary act. Real, thoughtful making requires the maker to have time alone to process, to question, to experiment. It requires a place for those things--a private place. In the end, maybe the woman-artist-own place thing is difficult or dangerous in our culture because it gives power and creedence to the work women do.

My work consumes me. I don't have room to consider another way right now--a way that would make me choose between writing and art and people. I can't make any judgment on women who have chosen to have children. I am always astounded by all the ways they manage their responsibilities and their loves. Maybe I am just too young to have this make sense.

I hope this doesn't offend anyone. I have just been thinking about this a lot lately, while I write my supporting papers for my thesis.

Shhh

This is a bit of a secret for the people who come here: this week, for one day, I'm going to put the skirts from my fashion show this past weekend up on my bara blog. I don't usually sell any clothing there but I've had so many inquiries that I'm thinking maybe this once. I'll put each skirt up with its measurements and price. Not sure which day, but sometime this week, I think. You can pass the word, or not.

and in the mornings you can see them walking

The Mamas & the Papas: 12:30 (Young Girls Are Coming to the Canyon)

I can hear the bells from three churches echoing up Hennepin Avenue. It must be one of the first hot days, because I can feel the sun burning my neck, but I'm still wearing my yellow spring jacket. This would make it the end of April.

I live in a small house in a liberal, ex-hippie, co-op-y neighborhood of Minneapolis. One roommate is a fragile, sweet, funny actor. One roommate cycles from bad mood to bad mood, until she moves out abruptly and her place is taken by a guy who clomps through the house. The third roommate is a controlling, uptight, selfish, spoiled vegan.

Obviously, something is about to go down.

It is the last straw. It is having to do everyone's dishes, even though I am rarely there long enough to dirty my own. It's getting glares for tossing moldy cups of coffee down the drain. It's being the only one who knows to clean the garbage disposal. It's coming home to find out someone's been in my room again without my permission.

So I spend a few hours in a completely other area of the city and call landlords. My lease isn't up until August, but just knowing there is somewhere else I can go is helpful. When I break the news to my roommates, the controlling one goes ballistic, accusing me of shirking my duty (even after I say I'm not going to break the lease and leave them in the lurch--I'm going to pay both leases).

On June 15th, my brother, my dad, and two of my friends help me. We move all my stuff (which I've been packing for the past month and a half) in record time: just over 3 hours. I don't go back. Apparently the roommate was pretty shocked to find out I'd actually gotten out of there.

Sometimes it is good to be reminded that I am the agent of change in my own life.

---

I used to live in New York City/ Everything there was dark and dirty/ Outside my window was a steeple/ With a clock that always read twelve-thirty//Young girls are coming to the canyon/ And in the mornings you can see them walking/ I can no longer keep my blinds drawn/ And I can't keep myself from talking.