January 31, 2005
the walls have ears
One of the questionable benefits of working in an office is that you get to hear all about other people's lives, either because they tell you, or because you overhear their conversations. From child-rearing advice; to heated phone arguments with husbands, boyfriends, mothers and bill collectors; to wedding planning--it all goes on while people are on the clock.
A new Web site launched this month makes the most of the bon mots that spring, apparently unattended by brain power, from the mouths of coworkers: www.overheardintheoffice.com. Give it a whirl.
To the list of astonishingly idiotic comments on that site, I add to this one:
"I hate straight people; they're ruining Adams Morgan."
Said to me by a coworker caught in the first giddy flush of the "you kept me in the closet but now I'm free" hetero-bashing ritual of the recently out. I did think to remind him that if it wasn't for us breeders he wouldn't be here to despise us, but I don't think it registered.
Posted by JudyLa at 06:00 AM | Comments (0)
January 30, 2005
piano silence
To have desires and to know how to sustain them, correct them, abandon them ... what is the path of this experiential ideal? It is precisely that very delicate balance between the moment that is active and the moment that is patient.
Carlos Fuentes
I am naturally impatient. Like a lot of people, I guess. I think impatience is primarily what makes us Americans; it is a very American trait. We love action. Think about why, really, we are in Iraq. Our country elected a president who wants to get in there and do something. Kick some ass. Right now.
With regard to me, while I know that this is not my most attractive feature, I also know that this is the one thing that more than anything makes me who I am. No Zen stillness for me; my philosophy is "the future is now." I love knowing what's going to happen; I love trying my best to make things happen. The way I want them to.
When I read a book I have to force myself not to sneak to the ending first, find out the resolution for characters I haven't even met yet. Cliff-hangers make me nuts. I like to know how a movie turns out so I don't waste my time hoping for a plot turn that isn't going to happen. I finish people's sentences. I let my impatience fill in the blanks for me, and for them. When I walk down the street, my mind is already around the corner.
Yeah, there's a down side ... on my worst days I think about where my impatience has led me. I've let it haul me through my life: out of friendships, jobs, a marriage. If you can't give me what I want now, then I don't want anything. There's been a long honeymoon/she thought too late and spoke too soon.
Now, in middle age, I have to abandon what has been the driving force in my life and cultivate--or at least try to cultivate--patience. The knack of knowing how, and when, to wait. I figure that maybe if I pretend that outcome is less important than experience, eventually I'll be able to believe it. Be here now. Be here, now.
I wonder how I'm going to do it, when I haven't even got the patience to see this entry through to the end.
Posted by JudyLa at 06:00 AM | Comments (0)
January 25, 2005
Let us trim our hair in accordance with socialist lifestyle
At this point I'm wondering if I'll ever see his eyes again. He has to shake his head, like a pony, to get the hair out of his face so he can see in front of him. I have a recurring fantasy of sneaking into his room one night and giving him braids while he sleeps.
I suspect that hiding behind hair might be specifically a teenaged-boy thing, like never wearing socks or tying shoes, foregoing a coat no matter what the weather, considering farts an underappreciated art form, and taking an unbelievable amount of pleasure in the fact that he's got a body. "Look, Mom!" he says, lifting his shirt to show me what I still think of as his baby fat. "There's a six pack under there!" Somewhere.
When he's not gloating over the fact that he's taller than I am, he's gloating over the fact that he can pick me up and throw me over his shoulder. He hauls me from one end of the room to the other while I scream and the dog whines, thinking I'm hurting his Boy, and tries to bite my feet.
"What'd you do in school today?"
"Your mama."
It's like living with a foreign exchange student from a country far, far less civilized than ours. I look at him--this guy--and I wonder just how he got here. Is he really just an older version of the baby who looked at me with such complete, unadulterated adoration that it made me cry? He's got the same name as that baby, so I guess he must be. My baby.
Posted by JudyLa at 06:00 AM | Comments (0)
January 24, 2005
Monday morning
How to Kill
Under the parabola of a ball,
a child turning into a man,
I looked into the air too long.
The ball fell in my hand, it sang
in the closed fist: Open Open
Behold a gift designed to kill.
Now in my dial of glass appears
the soldier who is going to die.
He smiles, and moves about in ways
his mother knows, habits of his.
The wires touch his face: I cry
NOW. Death, like a familiar, hears
and look, has made a man of dust
of a man of flesh. This sorcery
I do. Being damned, I am amused
to see the centre of love diffused
and the wave of love travel into vacancy.
How easy it is to make a ghost.
The weightless mosquito touches
her tiny shadow on the stone,
and with how like, now infinite
a lightness, man and shadow meet.
They fuse. A shadow is a man
when the mosquito death approaches.
Keith Douglas
Posted by JudyLa at 06:00 AM | Comments (0)
January 23, 2005
ISO
You go to the place where you always keep whatever it is you are looking for now--wallet? license? pair of glasses? Set of keys.--and as you stand there it dawns on you that you don't quite remember the last time you saw it. Was it last night when you got home?--almost-but-not-quite drunk, sober enough to drive of course but not quite sober enough to have a clear memory of what happened after you opened the front door...
Your mind says "I put it where I always do" but your body says "I don't remember." And without the physical memory suddenly everything is much more fuzzy than it was a few minutes ago. Was it even you, in fact, who unlocked the front door? You stand in the livingroom, trying to recreate last night. First the drinks, then the drive home, then the apartment, then--? Then you're standing here now, 12 hours later, empty handed and irritated. "Where the fuck did I..."
Your body is starting to remember the weight of the keys in your hand, their rattle as the front door opened--but it's not giving you any useful information after that. Oh, you couldn't have, you wouldn't just ... leave them in the front door... would you? Your race from the car to the apartment building, from that door up the stairs to the front door of your apartment, its warmth when you opened the door, making you dizzy, a little bit...
You know it's pointless but you open the front door and look anyway. You close the door again and sigh, knowing your day just started a downward trend. Lost, goddammit. You know the keys are gone but that doesn't mean you won't tear the place apart looking for them. And while you open drawers and move magazines and lift pillows, resigned but hopeful against your will, you realize that you just might have given somebody you don't know access to everything you have.
Somebody you don't know might be able to come into your home or open your car door as if it were his home or his car. Come on in, look around, turn on the tv--hell, take the tv--go for a drive. Put your tv into your car, get right into the front seat, start the engine with your--lost--keys and go for a drive!
That's what happens when you're careless, I guess. You look away just for a minute; you forget to double-check; you remember doing the same thing so many times that remembering becomes doing, but it isn't. And now somebody else has just as much a right as you do to put his hands on what's yours. He might not be a bad guy; he might be okay in fact, just a little confused about the concept of ownership--he probably didn't even start out wanting to take your tv, but you invited him in and gave him the opportunity while you were distracted by habit.
You'll get new keys made on Monday morning and you'll park your car someplace else for a while until you can feel that it's safe again to go back to your routine, but every time you see someone in the hall or hear somebody on the stairs or nod at a guy you don't recognize in the parking lot you'll wonder "is it you?" And nothing will feel like yours for a long while.
Posted by JudyLa at 09:47 AM | Comments (0)
January 20, 2005
the one that got away
What it's like:
I help you pack. As you gather underwear and socks, fold shirts and pants, find shoes, you say to me "I love you so much; I want to be with you as much as I can. I'll be here always."
Finally you're ready to leave. As I drive you to the train station you say to me over and over "I'm not going anywhere, I'm staying right here."
Then you're on the train and it's pulling out of the station. I stand on the platform, watching the train get smaller as the distance between us grows. You wave to me and shout "Hello! Hello! Hello!" as you disappear.
Posted by JudyLa at 06:00 AM | Comments (0)
January 19, 2005
ain't it thrillin'
It snowed today. It was lovely, actually--the snow was dry and light and blew across the streets of the city and whirled and eddied between the buildings, and when I looked out one of the office windows all I saw was white.
But I don't live in a part of the country that enjoys snow, or even knows what to do with it. We see snow, it's time to panic. First, panic. Second, get in a car, preferably an SUV the size of a small town. Third, go out on the slippery roads and try to mow down the more cautious drivers. Milquetoasts. Pussies. Hah!
But still, anybody with half a brain knows that, yes, even if your car is really, really big, it will still slide on ice. Which just goes to show, apparently, that the pilots of those SUVs have less than half a brain. Sliding SUVs, other drivers in too much of a hurry to care that there weren't actually any visible lanes on the highway, people who maybe have never actually seen snow before, all contributed to my commute this afternoon--a trip that normally takes me 40 minutes took two and a half hours.
When I finally made it off 95, negotiated the slushy secondary roads and reached our street, I realized that I must have been the first car to drive on it since it had begun snowing. Damn. No cars, no plowing, no sand, no salt. Gripping the wheel, I inched the car to the top of The Hill--where once, in another winter, I parked and called you to come get me because I was too scared to drive down it. But you don't live here any more. So today I sat at the top, engine idling.
A woman out shoveling her driveway glanced curiously at me; I waved. Hi there! Yup, just sitting at the top of this incredibly steep hill, admiring the view--my last, probably, before I put the car in gear and go careering down the sheet of ice that the road most certainly is at this point, like somebody on an out-of-control sled, gaining speed, jumping the curb, veering across the grass and into the lake, where unable to break my window to get out I will die, frozen solid and sunk to the bottom, becoming an urban legend while the geese paddle over me.
In the rearview mirror another car suddenly came into view, cresting the hill behind me. No, not just another car--a Cadillac Escalade, white, like a man-eating polar bear. A Saab-eating polar bear. Shit, shit, shit. I remembered you saying to me "don't forget that first gear is your friend" and holding my breath, eased my foot off the clutch. The Escalade was directly in back of my bumper; I figured if I didn't move fast enough it would probably push me down the hill.
So we started off in first gear and because that seemed to work so well I kept the car in first gear, probably making the polar-bear driver nuts but oh well, and we made our stately journey down the frozen, snow-covered hill, safely past the grass with no veering, across the bridge and onto our street, where I began to breathe again.
When our son got home he said "Mom! The schoolbus is stuck at the bottom of the hill and can't get back up!" Hah. Amateur.
Posted by JudyLa at 06:00 AM | Comments (0)
January 18, 2005
She said to me "even when you smile I can see how sad you are"
Yes, well, the wisdom of little children and all that.
So if someone says he loves you, but he doesn't give you anything you want or need--well, let me rephrase that:
If someone says he loves you, but he gives you only enough of what you want and need to keep you wanting more, does he really love you?
When what he says and what he does are not the same thing, how can you tell what's real?
"You know how I feel about you." Do I? I know how you say you feel about me. "You know how I feel about you." Do I? Or am I supposed to just assume "how I feel" means "love"?
"It's going to be a while before she accepts our relationship, but I know she will." I know she will. I know. She will.
I'm not stupid enough, not any longer anyway, to think you don't say I Love You to The Other One just as much as you say it to me. In fact I kind of wish you'd just stop saying it to me because I'm not enough of an optimist to think you mean it when you say it to us both. In fact it offends me, if you want to know, to be just another member of your fan club.
But the thing is, I think that really the club's only big enough for one, and it's not me. But it's not The Other One either. It's just you.
Posted by JudyLa at 06:00 AM | Comments (0)
January 17, 2005
strange interlude
I went to the movies this afternoon to see Closer; I had the day off and the kids were doing something that for a change did not require any participation on my part. Can I just say that I love, love, love going to the movies in the middle of the day, especially by myself. It feels illicit and sneaky, which I also love.
My first husband and I used to go to the movies all the time--get into an altered state of consciousness and go to independent or off-the-wall films, like the double feature of Freaks and Eraserhead we saw one rainy Saturday; or we'd go to the Lincoln in New Haven or to a film festival. Cheap fun about a million years ago, and we were serious about it. When Kubrick's The Shining came out, we went into New York City to see it on the day it opened.
When we got to the theater the line for the movie stretched around the block a couple of times. We waited for hours in the warm May evening with all the other Kubrick fans, and I remember perfectly how it felt once we got into the theater: cool, dim, almost like church, the atmosphere hushed and reverential as if the director was present, and the audience was silent.
I don't really go to the movies much any more. I can't seem to find the time, they're expensive, and frankly, audiences suck these days. I can't figure out why most people who go to the movies even bother since obviously they think they are much more interesting than anything happening on screen.
Today a woman in back of me was talking on her cell phone during the movie. "Uh, huh, uh huh--okay, thank you!" Then came a lengthy discussion with her film-going companion, presumably regarding the conversation she'd just been holding as counterpoint to the real reason we were all sitting in a darkened theater.
I wanted to get up and smack her. I finally couldn't stand it and said "shhhhhhh," and I hate shushers but jeez. She ignored me, but she left a few minutes later and that was fine, and for what was left of the movie the audience behaved.
When I got home it was late afternoon and the sun was going down. It was 23 degrees outside, and windy, but the house was quiet and warm, Spike and Jack met me at the door, the kids were still gone. I had a glass of wine while I watched the light change on the lake and thought about Julia Roberts, Clive Owen, Natalie Portman, Jude Law, adultery, people in theaters who talk on cell phones. It was nice to be alone.
Posted by JudyLa at 06:00 AM | Comments (0)
January 16, 2005
another Pleasant Valley sunday
I'm starting to get a kind of itchy, not-finished-yet feeling if I don't write an entry every day. That's good, I guess, if I have something to say; mediocre if I don't.
I don't really have anything to say right now but I sneaked downstairs anyway to write--or to pretend to write--while our son's 13-years-old-looks-20 friend plays tag with our daughter upstairs. It's been a long weekend and I'm glad for her to have the distraction and the pleasure of an older girl paying her some attention. S is tall and gorgeous, with long, dyed-black hair and creamy skin that she usually tries to disguise with lots of make-up and layers of aggressively black clothes. Today though she has on fatigues and a camisole (yes, black), pretty sexy, that shows the tops of her breasts.
It was funny earlier in the afternoon to watch everyone, boys and girls, hover around her, and the thought "bees to the flower" came into to my mind. I don't know how the boys manage to not touch her--even I could barely keep from staring--but I guess they're not at that "must-have" stage yet.
Unfortunately for me I am at the must-have stage. After you left last night I saw that you had left your shirt hanging on a kitchen chair. I picked it up and held it to my face. It smelled like you; it was a nice surprise. I stood for a while, eyes closed, breathing. Must have. But I guess maybe I've already got you. More or less.
What I thought was an end turned out to be a middle.
What I thought was a brick wall turned out to be a tunnel.
What I thought was an injustice
turned out to be a color of the sky.
Tony Hoagland
Posted by JudyLa at 06:00 AM | Comments (0)
January 15, 2005
Sisters are doing it for themselves
"So, what do you think?" she said to me as I let the dog outside. "Do you want to have a Girls' Night?"
"Well, we're girls and we're the only ones home, so I guess that's what we're having anyway."
"I was thinking that we could sit on the couch and talk, and you could look at my Friday folder."
"I was thinking that I could work on my blog, and could you please stop taking off your socks in here and just leaving them for me to pick up?"
That was our last exchange before she ran up the stairs to her bedroom and slammed the door. Another wonderful end to another wonderful day as The Only Parent. She's nine and we hardly get along, for God's sake; just imagine when she gets her period.
I know I could have handled that whole exchange better--shit, I could handle most of them better. But I get tired. No excuse, I know it, but a lot of the time I'm just not very good at living in Momsville. ...Though I guess she's probably not very good at living in Momsville, either, and has a whole hell of a lot less perspective on it than I do. Crap.
Here she comes; I hear her clomping around and then her footsteps on the stairs. Oh, and she's crying. "I miss Daddy," she says, as she comes into the room and hurls herself at me. She smells like Vanilla Rose Bubble Bath and her face is wet.
"Me, too," I say. "Want to watch a movie? And then you can sleep with me tonight."
"What movie?"
"It's Japanese. It's called 'Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, Spring.' It has subtitles." She likes subtitles.
"Japanese? Okay." She sniffs hugely, then goes back upstairs to look for the cat. Poor Spike; he gets a lot of love.
Posted by JudyLa at 06:00 AM | Comments (0)
January 13, 2005
hello from down under
 | the only thing
that you keep changing
is your name
my love keeps growing
still the same
it's like a cancer
and you won't give me
a straight answer Arcade Funeral |
I'm too tired to write anything and this song keeps playing in my head.
Posted by JudyLa at 06:00 AM | Comments (0)
January 10, 2005
the call of the wild
It took me a while the other night to realize that I was Enjoying Myself. The last few times I'd been out to a Friday happy hour I'd basically counted the minutes until I could say that I'd given the whole enterprise an honest effort, and then I'd go home and sob. Why this one was different I don't know, really.
Anyway because there were so many of us crowded into a relatively small space directly in front of the bar at DG's, the effect was like a party and "mingling" was as simple as turning from one person to the next. Which was great because I hate to mingle, although I love to talk.
So I talked: with my friend whose cat is seeing a cardiologist; with the woman who had the enviable "unconventional" marriage and is now divorced; with my friend C who is always fun no matter what; with the woman who stood like, two inches away from my face--so close I couldn't focus on anything but her hair, which at that distance seemed to wave around her head like the tendrils on a sea anenome; with Erin, tattoos on his knuckles that he's planning to get lasered off because he wants to get a security clearance.
And then I talked to the guy sitting next to me, with whom I work, kind of, but never see--one of the few remaining straight guys where I work, actually, and newly single as it turned out. I was about halfway through my martini when it began to occur to me that he was ... well, cute. I mean my kind of cute: Glasses. Bookish. A little bit of a snob. Reserved, but not so reserved that he wasn't talking to me. Smart.
During a break in our conversation I said to C "Wow, he is so cute." "He's creepy" she said back, shortly, and then I knew that he really was my type.
Posted by JudyLa at 06:00 AM | Comments (0)
January 09, 2005
everything falls away
What will be essential in 2020?
A long-overdue law that will make the egregious habit of "personal blogging" a crime.
Laura Zigman, in January 2nd's Washington Post
Hey, amen to that. If you can't get into print, it's obvious that you don't have the talent, or the right, to reach an audience. And what makes all you bloggers think that anybody else cares who you are or what you think about; what you read, eat, drink, listen to, drive, love, hate, fuck? Beats me. I'd just as soon forego all that messy "here I am, look at me" shit and read stuff that matters.
And while we're at it, let's broaden the scope and criminalize the writing of all "semi-autobiographical" novels too (Dave Eggers, Paul Auster, John Updike, are you listening?). Living your life is more than enough; why inflict it on the reading public? Jesus, give it a rest already.
Posted by JudyLa at 06:00 AM | Comments (0)
January 06, 2005
changes
in blog news fit to not print...
i've decided to start this year out forsaking a few of my life's pleasures in exchange for:
- vodka for bourbon
- elvis costello and his ilk for hip hop/rap/R&B
- vitmain c for k
- water, bread and salads for Popeyes Chicken & Biscuits
- therapy for another tattoo
- the gym for breakdancing classes
- and, finally, occasionally, men for...well... real men.
there you have it! off to get crunked up on some Maker's
peesh!
Posted by JudyLa at 05:12 PM | Comments (0)