Music dances in my blood.

not feeling much outside of anger and numbness today. hooray.

a borrowed ear

I log on to social networking sites, but the truth is I don't trust a lot of people anymore.  I don't trust them to not be cruel.  I much prefer the few who know me here, along with any wandering strangers.  It's a mess, you know.  I feel caught in a jacob's ladder of second-guessing others' impressions.  Some days I don't know who or what I am, other days I'm as sure as salt.  I feel as though one mind occupying separate bodies of emotions & concerns.

So friends and strangers.  I'll tell you what I couldn't tell fb or g+:  I'm soaking oatmeal for the morning.  Enough water to cover it and a bit of buttermilk to acidify it should be enough.  I have high hopes for waking up early and fixing it all up before church.  I know my record for high hopes, but I choose to have them regardless.

I greatly enjoyed the act of pulling out my little kitchen scale, the clink of the glass bowl on its glass plate.  I love the word and meaning of tare.  It makes things seem weightless - it seems to mess with the very physics that hold the world together.  Anything can be nothing.  It makes the world feel minorly unsolid.

I like the perfect numbers as well.  One point zero zero.  For a moment it read one zero one, but a generous pinch corrected it's error.

Scraping the smushed oats out of their cardboard cylinder bit by bit.  It's a cousin to the feeling of plunging your hand into a bag of smooth grain, or scooping cool softness of a well-turned bed of earth.

Tomorrow I look forward to folding in dried fruit and pouring maple syrup into the thing and pressing it to the corners of my pyrex pan.

The baby burned his finger today.  Just a little - on a pan that had been out of the oven a couple minutes. He was barely upset & I was glad for a real example of the word "hot."

The past couple weeks have felt so difficult, so full and heavy despite the fact I was off an extra two days.  I feel so wobbly and tired.  Now this house is making noises and it's freaking me out a bit.  

friends.

They're knitting a web.  Close and comfortable.  Private.

It hurts my heart that I'm on the outside.

I don't feel loved.

My son qualifies for early intervention speech therapy.  There isn't much in this world that is more frustrating than being told to get him on medicaid when you've been doing everything you possibly can to make that happen, yet still been denied twice.  The government is just so well run that they make things due on days it's impossible to turn them in.  Like Sunday.  Perhaps the only thing more frustrating is being told to talk to him about everything... when I already do.

I took dev psych, people.

My son could also have a very bad blood disorder.  I don't know because I can't afford the tests without his medicaid.  See, even as he sits here in my lap, the iron in his blood could be building up in his tiny organs, damaging them beyond repair.  There's no cure - just a lifetime of blood transfusions (and the risks associated with those).

It took me a year to get a (free) eye exam.  Because so many other things are more important.

We're getting kicked out of our house.  My husband plays video games instead of packing.  He turns on the TV to dull my child's brain and he dicks around on the computer.  He won't take care of his loans even though all he has to do is make one call to the school to get them to fax one piece of paper.  Then he gets mad at me for not doing my lab time for my spanish class.  I've accepted that part of my classwork is going to suffer because of this move.  Our credit and finances are infinitely more important than 5% of my grade in what is essentially an elective.

I should leave and take my son to the museum.  I should take the modem and his power supplies with me.

He dicks around and wastes time while getting to do what I desperately want to do.  Stay home with my son. I try to convince myself I don't know why I have the dreams I do - but it's a lie.

A cold and spiny creature nests beneath my breastbone.  It pushes my organs aside for a bed, lining it with hatred plucked and gnawed from its body.  When it stirs, I clench my jaw, sending pain through my teeth.  It infects me. Like some horrific fetus fatally misplaced, it writhes if investigated.  So I leave it.  It can't get out.  For now.

The Quakers ruined holidays for me

but in a good way...


"Friends have also eschewed the traditional church calendar of holy days, not observing religious festivals such as Christmas, Lent, or Easter at particular times of the year, but instead believing that Christ's birth, crucifixion and resurrection should be commemorated every day of the year. For example, many Quakers feel that fasting at Lent but then eating in excess at other times of the year is hypocrisy, and therefore many Quakers, rather than observing Lent, live a simple lifestyle all the year round (see Testimony of Simplicity). These beliefs tie in with Quakers' beliefs on sacraments and the belief that all of life is sacred."

I leave my kitchen light on at night.  The dim light illuminates the sink with its soaps, scrubs and colander in a warm, yellow glow fading to gray in the room's corners.  My mom left her kitchen light on.  I would wander toward it for a cold glass of milk on occasion.  I remember the floor being much too cold; I remember shivering to move the sleepy, sluggish blood in my veins and the pain that shot through my dilated eyes to the back of my head. 

I never need the light anymore since my body has outgrown milk and water is never quite worth the journey.  My son will make the same little midnight pilgrimages in only a few years, but until then, his midnight milk is warm and snuggled next to him. 

But still, my kitchen light is on. 

The drops settled heavily on the glass. My skin pricked as the sun rubbed uncomfortably up my arm. The night's chill slowly settling down, drawing itself into the clamminess of the air as the summer's morning sun warmed the world too quickly. I was lost. In that cast iron chair on the porch, chilled by the dawn, I soaked in the sunrise. Watching another day fall over my small, unruly stretch of grass, gravel and brush was comforting, in a way. It was the regularity of it, the promise, the constancy of change. Time bloomed forward effortlessly, simply. I always felt like I was meeting face to face with a deep and beautiful truth when I stayed up this long, waiting out the darkness. Waking up to it was never this way, I was always too dazed with sleep to really feel anything other than the clocks ticking away. The urgent push to move, to ready, to leave. No, it was different this way - like we were equals, like I'd kept in stride with time. I even sort of loved the tiredness that came a few hours later. The true weight of sleep always fell so heavily after these mornings. The crushing force of it reassuring me I really am human. I loved giving in to that feeling.

I'm not a mother I'd like to have.

My mother isn't who she used to be. I can't trust her anymore. She's letting the wrong voice in.

My father is so fatigued. You would be too.

My grandmother is blinded by hate and lies. She'll live forever, but I'll never really know her.

My brother may not survive over there. It really wouldn't be fair to him, he deserves so much more out of life... I wish he knew that.

My friends are thin. All we talk about is how we should get together more. That's hardly having anything in common. One of them, I feel like I never talk to her unless I've got something informative to talk about. I feel awkward and am overly aware of my elbows and how congested the skin on my face feels. I feel sick when I talk to her, because I know we probably aren't friends. I just need a friend so badly, but can't step out of this shell anymore.

I feel like I'm always reaching.

I feel remarkably sad that some of you are so far away from me, physically or emotionally.

I'm sorry for being a bad person. Perhaps I'm just bad at being a person.

Mon enfant

Every hour I am away from you
I want to draw you closer
But I still can't understand
the reality of you
You are still but an extension
of my being
Must I love myself before I can love you?

On Motherhood

But the strength of God is sewn in my seams;
binding this patchwork being.
Stitching the skin to heal
in silvered scars.
Like a punctured wineskin
I pour forth into you
my child.
You rent and tear my heart.
He holds us together

His seams weave my being anew.

Homeschool moms with their WIC & their libraries, their SUVs guzzling govt-subsidized gas, babies all covered by Medicaid, complaining about the slackers living off the system - it kills me.

a highly sensitive child

In first grade, the boy I gravitated toward cut the back of his hand. He came to school with a white bandage wrapped around it. I remember feeling so sad that my chest hurt. He was perched in the homemade treehouse in the playground of the school and I stood at the base of it. Wanting so bad to comfort him and show him how sorry I was that he was hurt, I picked up the broken handle of a plastic spoon, quickly studied it to find the sharpest spot on it, and repeatedly scraped it across the back of my hand. The pink, ashen scratch rose slightly off the back of my little 6-year-old hand. I showed him how I'd hurt myself to make him feel less pain & he just turned away. He didn't understand. No one really did.

Do you?

soul.

soul.
sole.
bottom-down.
underneath.
that which presses into the ground.
that which is closest to the earth.
center.
stillness.
axis.
foundation.
support.
strength.
rest.

I prayed so hard.

I'm sorry.

I don't feel like sharing. I want to... kind of.

But my thoughts have become more geometric... out of necessity. I guess when a thorn is removed, you can't paint with blood anymore.

I can't seem to see anymore. I can't see how I used to.

But the other day, I was walking up the concrete steps to our door and I smelled the concrete and the dust and the lingering cigarette smoke and I felt how the smell reached deep inside and pulled out a vague memory. So vague, all I could remember was emotion; a certain way my soul was settled on days that smell was layered in my mind. It was peaceful, young and full of exploration and curiosity.

I rejoice for my son and the days he will know that feeling.

it was intentional...

I think I probably have about 15 blogs.  That's gotta say something about me.  They seem to all start out as a playce to bare my innermost self, to play withe words, to leave off punctuation     .

But then i forget them.  I forget to be smart enough, creative enough, witty enough 

for myself.

my standards.

i'm never what i wanted to be.

but i think i might like who i am... for the most part, at least.

And that's saying a (whole heckuva) lot as i remember looking in the mirror and vowing to never pull back my hair because I looked like a boy.  I remember despising every fibre of myself when I stood silently under their hateful, judging eyes.  I was such a sad child.  Everyone thought I was shy, but I think I was really just sad.  and scared of being hated.

Now I can feel it better, like a cold, off-blue wave creeping toward me.  Sometimes I can manage to jump as it hits, floating over its surface; keep breathing.  other times i can't jump high enough.  Most of my childhood was spent drowning... and no one knew; not even me.

would you kindly look your best?

i think something confusingly sad has wandered into my life. sad, good, sweet, soft,

sadly sweet

but there's no bitter, this isn't bittersweet.

just sad.

i think my friend's back.

the sweetness is only that of familiarity.

i'm going to go clean him away.

there's this girl i know.  i hesitate to call her friend because of the past year or so, yet she is someone for whom i care deeply.  i've tried to explain the distance to myself so many times, but i suppose it's just the both of us, trying to be distant but foiling our own ends by pretending we're close.  her bitterness and fear is palpable, just as much so as i imagine mine to be.  a sad thing in the end, really.

i mention her because she was my roommate.  when she first came she was an art major.  she's meant for something else, but she chose art for her degree.  she's much too organized to be an artist.  anyway, the point is that i always feel so judged and belittled by her whenever i voice an opinion on art.  granted, i'm not going to say that my opinions on the great masters' work is a well informed one, and i won't say i know more about theory or history than she does.  i won't say that any skill that i have is more developed than hers; however, i do believe that i have a right to comment on art and what i believe it is.

first, there are two types of art that i see as very distinct but which have been often categorized as the same thing.  Art and Craft.  it's odd that those two words conjure up the images they do when a single 's' is added to the end of each, but the two words define the two facets quite neatly.  art is a communication of something human to others, while craft is deliberate creation through skill.  both have the capacity for immense creativity, inspiration and influence, but just because one calls the thing one creates 'art' does not immediately confer these qualities upon the work.  

another quality that can distinguish pieces in either category is what i like to think of as 'open' and 'closed' pieces.  i generally feel that an artist/craftsman creates one or the other on a regular basis, with unexpected appearances of the opposite on occasion.  

open work is something quite indescribable.  it'll cause you to stop at times, and stare.  the female form is most often an open work in itself; men and women both have been captivated by it for ages.  most pieces cheat a little and recreate that form in some medium or other... borrowing art from another artist.  open art has a way of making you stare longer, come back to a piece again; the powerful pieces seem to send tendrils of themselves of some communication into your brain and lodge themselves there, like they were flowing into the place they were meant to be.  as if there were some small void in one's being that was unfelt until something took its rightful place there.  

closed work has much more of a finality.  good work of this category feels stable, finished, complete.  there's no yearning for completion in it, but a solidity like a boulder sunk into the soft ground with moss settling in its corners.  or a smooth, unbroken field.  pure geometrics seem to be the distilled form of this quality.  they don't allow you to become a part of them, but instead rest beside you.