SuspendedAnimation

In which I display perhaps too much thanks for what I've got ...

Well, this is the big Jewish holiday season, and we seem to spend half our waking hours in the synagogue ... Last night we went to the family service for Sukkot (Feast of the Tabernacles! i.e. harvest holiday). The family services are generally laid-back affairs, so while the Jellybean was in the mood for a quite dressy little get-up (she wore the outfit shown here), Howie and I dressed more casually. Because the woodland fairies who do all our laundry have apparently been on strike for a month or two, I had dug out of my closet that morning a seldom-worn shirtwaist dress of brown corduroy, with brass buttons from collar to hem. The night air is already starting to get a little chilly around here, so I threw on my denim jacket on the way out the door ...

We arrived at the synagogue in good time, and entered the sanctuary ... as we went up the side aisle and across the front, I scanned the assembled congregants looking around for one of the Jellybean's friends from school. We don't know many people at the synagogue, so it was more or less a sea of unfamiliar faces. Coming from the cool parking lot, the sanctuary seemed quite warm, so I started unbuttoning my denim jacket.

Except, as it happens, my jacket hadn't been buttoned at all.

When I started to feel rather more ventilated than I expected, I had the sudden realization that I had gone about a third of the way to taking my dress off while standing more or less directly in front of the pulpit of the sanctuary. I had, I believe, four buttons undone: from between my breasts to about navel level.

So, at that point, I decided to just put the machine in reverse and button up. Good decision, you think?

The entire incident was substantially enhanced by the fact that I was engaged in plenty of eye contact with the congregation while disrobing.

Howie was behind me as we were walking and didn't realize what had happened--by the time we reached our seat I was buttoning the last button and choking with laughter. He didn't realize until hours later exactly how many buttons I had undone ...

And no, I didn't get a lot of friendly overtures from the male congregants at the juice-and-cookies break after the service. Perhaps I ought to make a mental note to wear fancier brassieres when stripping in the synagogue ...

Century Jill

Inspired by a recently-executed excellent performance in this genre, I give you my one hundred:

More not-me for all you not-me lovers

This is the Merwin poem I had wanted to post. It's much much earlier than the other one. And much longer. And unlike the other one (which I found on the web), this one I enter with my own incredibly rapid touch-typing little digits. Who knew 'ungulate' was a word? It means 'hooflike.'

Not written by me

The Speed Of Light

So gradual in those summers was the going
 of the age it seemed that the long days setting out
when the stars faded over the mountains were not
 leaving us even as the birds woke in full song and the dew
glittered in the webs it appeared then that the clear morning
 opening into the sky was something of ours
to have and keep and that the brightness we could not touch
 and the air we could not hold had come to be there all the time
for us and would never be gone and that the axle
 we did not hear was not turning when the ancient car
coughed in the roofer's barn and rolled out echoing
 first thing into the lane and the only tractor
in the village rumbled and went into its rusty
 mutterings before heading out of its lean-to
into the cow pats and the shadow of the lime tree
 we did not see that the swallows flashing and the sparks
of their cries were fast in the spokes of the hollow
 wheel that was turning and turning us taking us
all away as one with the tires of the baker's van
 where the wheels of bread were stacked like days in calendars
coming and going all at once we did not hear
 the rim of the hour in whatever we were saying
or touching all day we thought it was there and would stay
 it was only as the afternoon lengthened on its
dial and the shadows reached out farther and farther
 from everything that we began to listen for what
might be escaping us and we heard high voices ringing
 the village at sundown calling their animals home
and then the bats after dark and the silence on its road
—W. S. Merwin

My vegetable love*

I had an epiphany! Yesterday! You are so envious--don't try to dissemble ...

Here is how it went. I had just spent a better part of the day at the 'brary in which I used to work, trying to plow through preparation for one of my class assignments. Returning to my car, I reflected with some dissatisfaction on how little I had accomplished on this project for the past two days. Pig-piling on this observation was the recollection that I had work from three other courses to cope with, on which I was already falling behind; and from there, it's an easy leap to a succession of household projects half-finished or never begun, crying piteously for attention, their feeble voices drowned in the cacaphony of jeers from the peanut gallery of unfortunately anthropomorphized Routine Household Tasks that are sadly and chronically neglected by--me, hausfrau gone bad. Well, 'gone bad' implies a fall from some prior state of grace ...

I was then foolish enough to compare my own overall Life Task Performance Score to that of others of my acquaintance. It's a bitter stroke of 'luck' that I happen to know some shockingly accomplished people. For example, one person I know not only is an adept at folding contour sheets, but also recently accomplished refinancing her house under extreme duress while simultaneously painting a still life in oils with a brush held in her toes.

So why does it seem as though I've never gotten the knack for just getting through the ordinary tasks that most of my fellow humans seem to take for granted? What seems to be a walk down a brick path for them, is more like a wade through wet clay in hip-boots for me.

I suddenly found myself thinking about the David Attenborough BBC series, The Private Life of Plants. Plants, he claimed, exhibit many behaviors that natural historians used to attribute only to animals: they fight, they see, they even count--but in a dramatically different time frame. Essentially, without time-lapse photography, we could never see plant behavior the way we do animal behavior because it's sooooo daaaaaaaamn slooooooowwwww. And then came my epiphany: I'm a mutant! Specifically, I must be part flora. As a human, I'm miserably unaccomplished--but as a plant, I am the future: brilliantly mobile and quick as a whip! (Whips are quick, aren't they?)

Now that I know I'm a mutant, dare I say that I can slow down and enjoy life? I appear to have already mastered the former, so I suppose I can focus on the latter at my leisure.

*Mega-kisses and a special gift to the first person who identifies this literary allusion ...

in which I have little to say for myself

I wish that I could let you in on the world's funniest joke: me, sitting here some time after my shower, having wandered in to check the weather before getting dressed, but instead, getting immersed in my blogroll, until the point at which I am inexplicably driven to post not much at all, while I sit here virtually naked with my hair in that neither-wet-nor-dry state that guarantees that irrespective of what I do to it, there is no chance that it will look good until the next time it's washed; meanwhile, in the face of all logic and reason that tells me to close the browser window rather than hit the 'Publish' button, I reflect on the the fact that the only things on my mind right now are: 1. contemplation of the Yankees in the postseason; 2. wishing that Dame Fortuna could cut my beloved Mindy the biggest piece of slack available in her gigantic Slack Warehouse where she hoards all the slack remnants; 3. gratitude and wonder that I feel some peace these days; 4. all kinds of bittersweet thoughts about all the strange and sad and wonderful and difficult and complicated bits of my life that I feel fairly confident will all get sorted out somehow, if not now, then soon.

Have a good weekend, all. I'll be spending part of it as per Jewish tradition: not-eating and thinking about how I can be more awake and wiser next year than I was this year.

How to be sorry you asked,

or, What's your life really like these days, Jill?

Actually, it doesn't suck an awful lot to be me, these days (depending on what time it is when you ask). Y'know, as 'that dharma girl who only talks about sitting rather than actually doing it' (instead of Walking the talk, you might make a snarky remark here about Sitting the talk), I ought to know a thing or two about egolessness. And the way I understand it, that means, not: "Get rid of that icky, smelly ego you're polluting the planet with," nor even, "We do not exist as independent, unique personalities," but really something more like: "we change so much hour to hour, day to day, that there's no useful way you're the same person today that you were yesterday--much less the same person since the day you were born."

So anyway (this will all tie together at some point--bear with me), when I started this blog up, I was monomaniacally ruminating on some major anticipated transitions: a potential move to a different geographic region, possible family addition, finishing up one phase of my so-called career and initiating another. And if you go way back to my second blog entry ever, I noted: Sometimes, you just don't get the day you thought you were going to get. Well, more precisely, always, you don't get the day you thought you were going to get. This is also true of units of time larger than days. Also, smaller units. Okay, let's really generalize: Always, nothing is what you think, always always, no matter what. So, for me, what happened (surprise!) wasn't what I had anticipated. You can exhale now.

But there's always the suspended animation flavor, there's always transitions and anticipations. And these days, for me, there still is, in a kind of different way, the same kinds of things roiling around, but it just all seems to feel different. The word 'prolapse' came up some time back in a conversation with a friend, and even though I'm supposed to be such a smartypants, coincidentally *shrink* I didn't happen to know what that word meant. It conjured the phrase 'prolapsed uterus,' so I figured it meant, uh, drooping? No: inside-out! Ewwww! Anyway, that's how it came up: my description of my life. Turned inside-out. Who knew this would happen? Not me! On the exterior, a couple of unpleasant things happened. Yeah, I lost a pregnancy, and I got depressed. But in my mind, gosh, it's like I had gene therapy or something. Things Feel Different. Lots of things. It's subtle, but it's kind of like the smell of a house: backgrounded, indefinable, unique.

So, in some ways, the effects in my day-to-day life are fairly subtle, too. The whole maybe-baby thing--100% backburnered until I cease to find ordinary life quite so unnervingly thrilling. And then, I'm not trying to be a drama queen since it appears that virtually every person I admire is on some kind of psychiatric medication, but anyway: one of the most difficult adjustments I'm making is the recognition that as of a couple of months ago, I have this Condition that requires medicine just to feel like a regular functional person, and that's still weird to me. What happens is, I take my little capsule and praise be, I go on as I always used to, and in many ways (notwithstanding the paragraph above) I feel just as I always did. You know, it's not like the meds make me feel like some sort of Happy Robot MommyWife. So I guess that's the plateau. Then, for no apparent reason, within a week or two, I'm weeping, panicking, thinking desperately bad thoughts--far worse than this--and it's time to increase the dosage. Lather, rinse, repeat. It's during the slides down from the plateaus that I always feel as though I'm starting from the beginning. It's so hard to believe that the meds are, at this time, an intrinsic part of so-called 'normal', until they need to be adjusted. Gah. Well, Jill. Suck it up. At least the meds are available--the alternative is worse. This is one instance of several in which my major lesson is acceptance. There's nothing wrong with things as they are, even if it's not what I planned or asked for.

That pretty much sums it up: egolessness; surprise mind; prolapse; acceptance. Tra la la. Now go get a cup of tea or something, and thank you for stopping by. xoxox

on my desk

• empty marbled-paper covered pencil holder. Well, not empty: has key ring with spare keys in it.
• file box with Daytimer® wirebound page-a-day pocket calendar inserts for November 2004-June 2005
• ineffective, small, extremely cheap Ikea task light
• Josef Seibel (The European Comfort Shoe™!) shoebox with saved personal correspondence for the last ... uh ... forty years? ten years?
• CD of MS Office OSX (super hooks, easy to dance to)
• jewelry box containing birthday gift from my younger sister
• Rusty, wearing a diminutive red-and-white checked oven mitt
• half-drunk mug of this tea (hey, it's still less than 24 hours old ...)
• bottle of Neutrogena® Instant Shine Detangler
• blue Uni-Ball roller pen (note that this is not in pencil holder, and it's not because it's not a pencil)
• a small pair of blue-handled DuraSharp™ scissors
• jeweler's needle-nose pliers and wire cutters
• one blue beaded ponytail holder
• a small sharp needle threaded with heavy-duty white thread
• Swingline Tot 50 stapler
• near-empty sprinkle bottle of multicolored edible glitter
• a set of size 2 (US) double-pointed knitting needles
• this clock (the smaller, pewter one)
• ten books, in 5 locations, including My life in the bush of ghosts (Amos Tutuola); The art of eating (collected works of M.F.K. Fisher); Hoyle's Rules of games; Paterson (William Carlos Williams); Out of sheer rage (Geoff Dyer), and others
• that is not all, but it's most of it.

Not on my desk

• corpses, old or fresh, intact or dismembered
• the Rosetta stone
• a Nicole Miller dress
• fish heads
• condoms
• pale peach-colored roses (hint hint)
• M & Ms of any variety
• more than one goddam pen

---

UPDATE: Scored the roses! Thank you, my love.

Ohhhhhh nooooooooooo!!!

I missed International Talk Like A Pirate Day! Waaaaahhhhh ... *sobsobsob

I suppose it wouldn't be appropriate, now, to say Blast yer deadlights! ... so I won't. Anyway, that wouldn't be nice.

Thanks to fellow librarian elsewhere for the link--it's not her fault I didn't see it until this--alas, me hearties!--very belated moment.

more cryptic transcriptions, unglossed

me: What's that on the ceiling? Looks like a worm.
Jellybean: Oh! It's moving!
Howie: Let's have a look ... Well. What do you know. It is a worm. Well. That's an unusual place for a worm.
J: I want to see! Mommy, can you lift me up so I can see it better?
me: I thought that was too creepy for you!
J: No! I like wormies!
me: Okay ... [insert sounds appropriate for effort required to lift 40 lb. of six-year-old to shoulder height]
J: Cooooooooollllll ...