bookish dreamer

Caffiene and cofee buzzed, with fingers hammering over the keys, my hands are scratched by our sneezy kitten and I'm warmer than I should be in the airconditioned house.  Then again, turning the thermostat up to 78 because you're tired of hearing it wheeze makes the air warmer, doesn't it?

Alone in the house again - Neil's gone off for his usual LA whilrwind and I'm left to mind the cat and hold down the fort and possibly get some work done.

But there are three different kinds of work all bundled up into this thing I call life right now.  The house, that takes constant maintaining because I leave a trail of crap despite my best efforts.  A paper here, a book there, the magazine I started in the bathroom and dragged out to the couch to finish.  Shoes seem to multiply in the front hallway faster than the kitten can attack them and beat them back.  Besides, he's sleeping anyway.  He wakes up at 5 or maybe 7 am to bite my hand enough that I have to put him on the ground - and still his back up, our little boxer kitten that never gives up and won't take no for an answer.

Work-work is the other interruption (of a sort) since there are phone calls and emails and I keep telling myself it's completely worth it because, hey, money.  And a healthy sort of money for a job that doesn't have hours or require that I do too much when I'm busy, just occasinally answer some questions and tell people they should download some software and generally that's it.

But it takes time, both of those do.  Besides the care and feeding of Kates, which take up lots of time too.  And then there's the checking of email, the playing with graphics, and although neither of these are a job, they certainly suck attention.  Oh, and I can't forget the phone calling - friends, relatives, countrymen?  Staying in touch takes work, it does, and it's worthwhile because i don't ever want to lose my people.

That being said, the last of the three, the schoolwork?  Never a quiet moment.  Tonight I'm planning to shut it all down - I have the books out right now, spread around me, kanji on the left and stories on the right, and a translated one to take outside on smoke breaks.  Surrounded.  Eventually they're gonna close in and I'll be typing in Japanese here someday, waiting for someone to translate my untranslatable sentences and look up my particles and wonder why I used that kanji. 

and so it goes

Fingers slap the keys in some parody of attention. Europe is wholeheartedly feminized, and there is weakness in it's soft power, it's economics, it's inability to mount a war. Americans, the males, the angry frat boys of the world, splashing missiles and choosing its own path, heedless of everybody and anybody. Schoolyard battles conducted in gray seats, in a wood paneled classroom with a moderator who's supposed to be the arbiter of truth, the broker of understanding, the one who clarifies. And I wonder if it's the language barrier that stops her. She seems like she understands without thinking, that dual power of the multi-lingual to organize the brain in many tracks. Or maybe its that she doesn't want to wield her authority because she's afraid once she does she'll never stop. Then there's those of us that can't resist, that open our mouths almost against our will, wishing we could correct, wishing we could show just how right we are.

I have all these little comments that I want to spawn that slink away the moment my fingers hit the keys. I wonder if I kept a notebook, would they flee as fast? I'm roped, increasingly, to this machine that's half portable and often unwieldy. Can't resist its lure or its clicky-clacky link to the outside world. Machines provoke them though, these random impulses, they're floating up from my surface thoughts when i'm in the car, that two ton machine that somehow inspires me. Or they trickle in through the ear buds of the ipod, sneaking around their musical accompaniment.

Tomorrow?  The weekend?  at some time in the near distant future, after papers due and presentations given, i'm going to attempt to write fic in this weird and uncomfortable slightly tilted voice and see what comes.

A weekend top-filled with love.

The kind of love you feel when it's your first night back in your old town, and your best girl comes to pick you up at the airport -- even though it's miles away and a bitch to get there and silly to triangulate with cell phones. The kind of love that means you get to call your friends TURD and mean it, but never mean it at all (because, turd, in my world, becomes a synonym for love, too). It was the kind of time where a couple of cosmos and the rat-hole of a bar we still show up and at hugs around the table and friends you didn't even know were going to come out - bright and brilliant friends, the ones you missed before you left town even, that kind of time when it all comes together and spawns laughter and more hugs and a post-bar run to McDonald's to get the grease-coating your hangover needs to be nonexistant.

And, even though we woke up and didn't know where we were going the next day, we still found the wedding. We got beautiful and arrived on time and everything. We oggled the groomsmen, because that's what you do (besides, they were hot). I had warm fuzzies because the most handsome one was the one I got to go home with at the end of the night - the one that held me through the slow songs and got sweaty during the fast. Mine. I got misty-eyed at the toasts, because those were the words that were all about the love the two people getting married shared. Actually, they were all about love on all sides. A celebration of love - that's why women always cry and girls always turn to their men and ask "when will we?" because the two people who are doing it -- if it's a good wedding -- look so radiant with love that it's irresistable. And these two were. Radiant and irresistable, I mean.

After that was a night filled with maniac dancing and giggling and hugging and so much fun no one really wanted it to end, even when it was obvious we were all dragging on our last legs and not even Doritos and another drink would perk us back up. But there was love in the morning too, in the shape of a bottomless breakfast buffet with lots of bacon and make your own waffles and fairly crappy coffee but the faces of everyone you had a great time with the night before, near and dear, hugging and smiling through the headaches and the slightly twisted ankles.

It didn't end though, this stream of good will and happy faces. Not then. Instead we got to make sure the place my bestest girl is living in is approved by the family, along with the boy she's with. He did get the stamp of approval, although it's always conditional because no one is ever quite good enough, not for family. But enough that he can stay.

Besides, we gave him the trial run at the best BBQ in town, where I got to hug EVERYONE, because I loved them so much and missed them terribly and was so happy to see them that I probably squeeled, and that's hard for anyone to mesh with if they're coming from the outside. Probably not many places outside of California where the hosts know to put on a grill for vegans and a grill for the flesh eaters, and still have tasty side dishes that both consume in equal measure (and mean margaritas too). I know for sure there's no place that's more filled with people I was so happy to see - just getting to stand and link arms with them and see their grinning faces and know they're well and lovely and still as beautiful as I remembered, inside and out. And I got to finally meet the beloved of one of my best boys, too - kindred woman whose face I'd recognize in marble statues of goddesses and in the happy glow in his eyes. Unbelievably good to meet her in the flesh and see that she is as radiant in heart and soul as he, and that they make everything burn brighter together.

To end that night with hugs and fond farewells and not in sadness, but in renewed love for all these wonderful people I'm so blessed to have known and to know, to have gotten to see my family of my own making again, that's love.

I haven't been granted much in the way of greater joy than these things. At least not all rolled into one weekend. It made the going home, going to sleep, waking up and flying home all worth it. It made fireworks anticlimactic.

See? Love.

don't want to work, don't want to learn, don't want to. It's the broken record of mantras, isn't it? I'm done before the semester's done. Lost my will to learn one more thing. Can't find it, don't want to find it. Would like to just take a night or two off and be done. Instead I find myself back in front of my computer, procrastinating, clicking 'refresh' on the flist and email, waiting for a decent distraction before I get back to work again.

Of course, distraction came in another form. My hysterical mother frantically, sobbingly, telling me that she can't do the job she just started a week ago, and she's sorry again that she's calling me to tell me so. ( I want to give her some of the strength she seems to have given me. )

No, I'm not my mother. No, I can't be her mother. No, nothing is perfect in the world. Isn't going to be, wasn't supposed to be, can't be.

The only constant is change.

Just wish... I just wish some things would truly change.

It's not as if she slurs. You'd think those slips of tongue would be the obvious signs. Those tell tales would be the ones that tip her hand. But she doesn't slur, and so that's not what tells me. It's some other sense, some daughter-bond that isn't ever supposed to be activated. Some painful awareness that tells me she's just a little too mercurial.

There was a reason I stopped calling at night. I'd just forgotten it. A reason I moved further away, let bonds of love hang loosely.

It twists my gut with anger, that bastard form of fear. Because I know the multitude of reasons. I've proffered the excuses, the forgive and forget reasons why. But ultimately no excuse is excuse enough to make my heart slow down, to keep my voice steady, to make it all alright.

She conflates me with herself, and I shudder at the vehemence in my voice, when I try to remind her that I am not her other self, not her second half, not her ... not her. I know I'm breaking something when I do that. When I draw her up short with my own certainty. It's guilt and shame and fear combined that makes me do it, and a desperate longing to be different, to be other, to be my own.

She calls me a writer and 'I'm a critic' is what I return. How can the fundamental me be so obvious and so obscured to her? The great American novel will never be mine. I'll never seek to wrest the great American soul into some definable shape, with words and wilted longings. It's not her domain either, but she thinks it is. How can she forget that what I love is the subtle weaving, the theory and practice, the walk on a tightrope between scorn and wonder? That's me.

And I set the phone down, the call made, the pit of my stomach churning, and wonder, who is she?