Bread and Roses

Dear People Who I Love

2005-11-08T19:43:00.000-08:00

Not only have I moved again, I've moved and stopped being anonymous. Which means if you want to know where I've moved to, you're going to have to email me (alex tree 3 1 4 AT write me DOT com) and tell me who _you_ are. Real name is not required if you're still internet-anonymous, but you have to declare a profound disinterest in stalking me.

love,

alex

Random Politicsat the end of a long Marxy weekend.

2005-10-23T19:12:00.000-07:00

There is one, and exactly one, completely pro-life and anti-choice argument that I feel is morally admissible: abortion is bad because a fetus at whatever stage is a child and its life is therefore sacrosanct.

If people hold this position, this is all they should be allowed to say.

Not, "women get abortions as a way to weasle out of the consequences of promiscuity". (Married women with children get abortions.) Not "abortion providers are immoral bloody money-weasles". (Abortion providers feel that what they are doing is right. If the clinical details of being face-to-fetus with abortion doesn't raise moral qualms in them, all your yelling will not.) Not "legal abortion is medically unsafe" (it isn't).

And one more time, not "that specific woman should have MADE ENTIRELY DIFFERENT CHOICES up to this point." I don't think a pro-life legal stance is morally tenable, but a pro- dictating the rest of women's lives too legal stance is unacceptable outside of a totalitarian society. Is your moral stance just pro-life? If you don't spend at least as much time advocating multi-racial adoption, or working in women's shelters, or campaigning in the government and church for complete social supports for single mothers, or providing foster care, then this applies to you: You are JUST pro-live-birth. You care about getting that baby through six to nine months of gestation and making sure it is shoved down the birth canal or surgically removed. FROM NOW ON, I want you to say this. You are rhetorically disallowed from saying that the mother "should just give it up for adoption" or "should go to the church for help" or anything else. What you get to say is: We are very much in favor of the baby gestating all the way and going down the birth canal. That IS ALL.

love,
alex

2005-10-22T14:18:00.000-07:00

Everyone I sat next to in high school is at Yale or Bryn Marr or Brown and I can't manage to write a single flipping paper on Marxist theories of economic development. Even though it's practically my freaking major. Sometimes I distress myself.

love,
alex

Splogging

2005-10-22T10:01:00.000-07:00

While I do try to delete haloscan spam as soon as I find it, I do find it sort of touching that the spam-creators of the universe want to let me know about things as diverse as 'books related to private road construction', 'colon cancer prevention', and 'SXQUL databases'. While the internet thinks I am a middle-aged landowning male, it still looks out for my wellbeing!

alex

Emotional Addenda

2005-10-22T09:23:00.000-07:00

1) These parents were not vegan, they were raw foodists. Normal vegans, especially whole-food types, would have been breastfeeding a baby this age, or supplementing with a formula designed to meet a baby's nutritional needs. Reasonable vegans would have fed the older children pasta and nut butters and soy foods and other calorically and nutritionally dense things, along with b-12 supplements. I am not a vegan - in fact, I think raising children you-can't-eat-the-cake-at-the-birthday-party vegan is sort of fascist and wierd - but I used to be, and these people are not vegan, they're crazy. And no they do not have the right to feed their children whatever they want, as the defense is claiming. Starving your children is ethically and legally unacceptable.

2) The campus is full of fuzzy-faced, blond-haired high school ROTC boys today, all of them playing with guns - drill rifles - and marching around. They are very, very young.

love,
alex

O you who believe! when you go to war in Allah's way, make investigation, and do not say to any one who offers you peace: You are not a believer.

2005-10-20T07:43:00.000-07:00

(Quran 4:94)

I don't. under. stand.

Who are these people? What the hell do they want? No, really, what do they want? Besides a vague goal of a world under Sharia, what? Do they know which people they kidnap? If their goal is to drive the US out of Iraq, why would they kidnap a vigorously anti-US-occupation reporter, in fact, the most anti-war reporter in the English-speaking mainstream press?

I don't get it. I really don't get it. My prayers are with Rory Carroll and his family today.

love,
alex

ETA: He's out and okay.

Como una flor

2005-10-17T15:25:00.000-07:00

(can there be too much Os Mutante? Never!)

I can write this entry like I was six years old:

Today I went to campus! And we had pie for lunch and I ate the pie FIRST! And then we sat on the lawn and there were PUPPIES! Lots of puppies! One was named Ginger and sniffed my hand!

Or I could write this entry like I was eighteen years old:

It is really fall now, all light and color and wind. My hands are chapped but my world is big and bright and light. Walking through campus is walking through a river of air and brightness, all red and yellow and brilliant. I love this season. Spring makes me want to take a long nap, but autumn makes me want to be big and bright, to do things, to create things, to be ever more in the world. I have written some stories, for the first time in forever. I love this town. I don't know how I'll ever leave.

I don't know how I would write this entry being twenty, though. That's probably one of those questions.

love,
alex

Or I could just move to a tropical climate.

2005-10-15T12:23:00.000-07:00

1) WHERE THE HELL AM I SUPPOSED TO BUY T-SHIRTS?

Let's face it, the mission is noble but Dov Charney is a narcissistic dickwad and the American Apparel website is full of (Suicide Girls era hipster porn (link is to the controversy, not the nakie pictures). My opinion on porn is neutral when it's not all in my face, but sometimes I want to buy a t-shirt sans objectification, you know what I mean?

SO THIS LEAVES US WITH:

Patagonia and the epoch of the $45 t-shirt
Mail order from the UK (oh that'll be fun and cost-effective)
Transfer to somewhere with a better thrift-store (always thrift-store one income bracket up from yourself! I've said it before and I'll say it again!)
Cave in and admit that this stuff looks great on me and lasts forever. I have a Gap tshirt I bought at a Boston thrift store in 2000 that I've been wearing once a week all winter since then. It still looks, if not new, about a season old.

I am a clothes snob; I expect to shop rarely, spend a bit more than I should, and wear things until they are literally falling apart. But my last three Ecosport longsleeves are in their last throes. I have mended up the pinholes where the sleeves are pulling apart at the stitching three or four times. Internet, advise me.

love,
alex

And They Will Call Me Señora Whiney

2005-10-13T12:01:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week, from the Land of Cranky:

Krispy Kreme, You Are Not My Friend

This morning I ate half a Krispy Kreme doughnut for the first time in upwards of four months. Between shaking like a junkie, watching all my vision narrow to a single point, and taking over my development class in a sugar-induced frenzy to explain how IBM believes in the tragedy of the commons - which they do - I am starting to think that one day I will be found living under an overpass in a filthy nest of Karamel Kreme Krunch boxes. OR I COULD JUST AVOID DOUGHNUTS.

I Refuse to Blame My Pants

I have been living in Fat Girl Land lately. I am to the point where I try not to sit next to thinner people, and cultivate a deep and burning resentment of people who, say, can go around eating cookies and still have a discernable jawline. I have also taken to eating peanut butter with a spoon. I realize I am but a tourist, not a permanent resident, until the scale says I'm more than, say, four pounds different away from skinny. It is all in my head, no doubt. (At the same time, this thing with the peanut butter, that has to stop.)

Today, Still in the Land of Cranky

Also, I am allergic to my dormitory, over the weekend I 1) was stranded in Yadkinville with an incompatible fellow traveler for six hours 2) was forced to listen to Rancid for about eight 3) Got an F on a paper I thought was, failure-wise, more of a B-minus.

Whining: a Meta-Analysis, With a Startling Change from Jovial to Reflective

I am cursed with a slightly better-than-average liking for pattern analysis. While this is in some ways fun - I know how the movie will end far earlier than other people would ever want to - it also means I tend to characterize things as trends that will drastically affect the future. (This is also inherited. My father, for instance, will punctuate an argument on where to properly dispose of seed-bearing weeds with a pronouncement that GOOD ANTHROPOLOGISTS ARE NOT SO STUBBORN and maybe I should seek a different field, such as that of Official Pain in the Ass. My father likes me and thinks of this as fulfilling his duty of moral education.) This can, however, be problematic when I, say, have a headache, a bad day, and a paper on which my professor wrote "Child, why do you DO things like this?" in big red letters. The healthy thing to do would be to take an aspirin, wash my face, and set about rewriting the paper. The healthy thing to do is not to crawl into bed to stay, convinced that this illustrates a deep-seated intellectual/moral flaw which will tarnish my entire future. If a consistant theme must really be found, that theme could most likely be stated "Papers written the morning they are due, without reference to the assignment sheet, for notoriously hard-grading professors seldom work out very well."

IN SHORT I AM FINE.

How are you all? Well, I hope?

love,
alex

Return After Long Absence

2005-10-01T18:47:00.000-07:00

I am not so sad. I would love to live a life of nine decades in good-hearted, good-humored pursuit of my cause, with a spouse who was in all ways my equal and a happy family and a day job that I enjoyed and was good at. Joe Straley was a wonderful man, and I want to write more about him, but what I most want is to keep him in my thoughts and feel out what the world is like without him in it.

I also want to talk about normal things. So I'm going to do that.

I am getting really obsessed with this movie. The book sounds incredible. I do think it's ironic how the author starts the book with an explanation of how any movie about war ever made, no matter how pacifist in sentiment, is still essentially war porn to some kid in the midwest who's going to enlist. And now his book is being made into a war movie, a war movie that I think seeks to be The War Movie of Our Time.

At the same time, it sure is timely, isn't it.

Other Movies I Have Seen:

Yes, I watch Firefly.

In fact, I saw the movie on opening night, surrounded by the kind of college kids whose ability to get girlfriends both inspires and frightens me. If ever there were a group of guys who were quintessentially in my league, these are they, scraggly beards, trench coats, and all.

I didn't like the movie. Kaylee whined all the time; all the female actresses had lost too much weight, the editing was choppy, etc. And they ::spoilered:: ::spoilerspoilered::! Also, it didn't stick as closely to the beautifully done space-western tone of the series as I'd like, and the movie actually managed less grandiosity with its big screen as the series pilot accomplished in the same time on the small screen. Nonetheless, it had interesting plot points, good one-liners, and made the poor, non-geeky friend I'd dragged with me laugh. So perhaps one thumb up.

I Heart Me Some Southern Ladies

I am very interested in my family's Southernness. It's a typical-ish story; we were Real Somebodies at some point in history, but my great-grandfather lost the estate and became an agronomist; my grandfather married a tobacco sharecropper's daughter who'd put herself through nursing school, and my father married a divorced Yankee. We have fallen pretty far from grace and connections, I daresay; my brother does still stand to inherit some dented silver flatware and some big heavy furniture, but that may be because he's the only boy of his generation for a couple of removes and people were getting desperate.

I have lived in the South for more than half of my lifetime, but I always find myself worrying that I'm not Southern enough. I put sugar in my grits; I have never in my life eaten a gravy biscuit. My politics are not a problem - red states are not much older than I am - but my inability to throw around Scripture is. (I am working on the Scripture. My favorite line in the Bible is "Joseph spake unto his brothers, but they knew him not." I use that one more than you'd think.

I am particularly concerned by my lack of good Southern manners.

There are, of course, ways to acquire good Southern manners by throwing away big handfuls of money, and even if we had been money-throwing types, I would have hated all of them. I would not have lived through Cotillion. I did briefly consider finishing school, last year, after a meeting where I realized the flawless Southern manners are politically invaluable. My mother forbid me to ask my aunt to set me up with such an institution; my aunt is, in fact, Old Money and was the sort of lady who stabbed her children in the elbows with a fork to enforce good posture.

It turns out I needed none of these drastic measures; what I needed was to work the early morning shift with Appalachian cafeteria ladies. These are the women with the puffy hair who call you honey-baby-doll when asking which vegetable you're wanting. They get up early in the morning to serve breakfast to the athletic teams, who are full of boys from the Eastern Part of State who tip their hats before talking to you (the hat tip has degenerated into a sort of brim-fidget, but it's there) and have very specific needs as regards to their grits. (Scrambled eggs under the grits, gravy sort of over one corner, bacon crumbled on top like, thank you ma'am. And so on.) By the time I finish this job, my manners will be impeccible, and I will call total strangers honey-lamb.

Yes I Do Take Geneology Way Too Seriously

Everyone with my last name, spelled the same, is descended from one guy named Dennis. I have a relative running for Texas state senate as a crazy libertarian who looks just like me. I am related to a lot of Southern-perky round-chinned blond women. I am related to a lot of southerners who are not the least bit blond - a famous basketball coach at a black college pre-integration, for instance - but look like me around the eyes. I know for a fact that one branch of the family is third-generation Puerto Rican. This all matters a great deal to me. Family is important; family is maybe the most important. Family is how my life is situated in history, in culture, in the world. Family is how I got to be who I am, and whatever power I have in the world comes strongly from being part of my people. That's the important thing. I am free, but I am not a free agent.

This post has gotten long - it's been accruing over several days while I decide whether or not to republish - so I'm just going to stop now and upload. I hope you all have been well, and I will talk to you and the internet again in a few more days.

love,
alex

Anachronism

2005-09-21T19:26:00.000-07:00

Maybe the reason I want to stop posting is that the important things get blurred over so quickly. It's strange to look back and realize how little the theoretical, distant things change the way you go about your day. I don't feel guilty for that - I try to lead good simple days, for the most part.

I will think about this some more.

love
alex

Again with the not writing

2005-09-21T16:42:00.000-07:00

Widespread Panic is playing tonight, and though I am not going and do not even own that sort of skimpy patchwork top, it was torture to come to the library instead of sitting and peoplewatching all night long. Already on a brief turn through the park across from the ampitheatre a boy - one of three tall, tan, thin, androgenous not-from-around-here longhaired types - gave me a Kermit the Frog smile. It has been years since I lived in a town with enough free-ranging hippies to see the Kermit smile - a bugged eyes, pressed lips expression, limpid, possibly psychedelic in origin. I wouldn't know.

I wanted to sit and people-watch, but I am being a Good Student, and I didn't haul my computer on my back all day for nothing, so I will end this entry and go write.

love,
alex

Just when I'm headed out I sprout opinions

2005-09-21T13:17:00.000-07:00

Third picture on page. You aren't starving parents, siblings, and children looking for food, you're looters. You're not refugees from a terrible human disaster, you're potential dangerous criminals. And we're taking your mail truck.

wtf america.

love
alex

2005-09-21T10:55:00.000-07:00

It seems like it's dooming someone to say that they're dying, even if it's a fact, even if everyone's saying it obliquely - sadly, we expect more updates soon, says the email.

Joe Straley is dying. You don't know him, internet, but he sent me to Nicaragua and turned my life around. I hope one day I am ninety-two and still fighting to get one more book out.

When ... when, I will write something for Joe and then I think I'm going to close this blog. Not directly in response, but because I've had less and less of import to say, and maybe a life is better lived talking to real though inconstant people. I might change my mind, if I think of something else.

love,
alex

Ahoy!

2005-09-19T13:12:00.000-07:00

My pirate talk be rusty, so I won't be a postin' anything but MOP THE DECKS YOU SCALLYWAGS.

Hm? Hm?

love
alex

Stranger With a Doorkey

2005-09-16T22:44:00.000-07:00

I am sure I am not the only person who, fueled by a new visa, made extravagent purchases at two in the morning. Internet, why do you make it so easy? So far you have given me takeout, and three new pairs of pants.

Those of you who know me may know that I own one pair of pants that are not Carrharts, and two pairs of Carrharts that do not have holes in the bum. This is about to change! I will wear jeans! Some of which are less baggy than giant man-pants! Get ready, world!

I went over to Friend J's and ate cheesecake and listened to radiocast comedy. I have missed Friend J. I am not a very good friend to her, but I do like her so much. However, she made me watch Toys, the mid-nineties Robin Williams 'cult classic'. Cult classic sometimes means incomprehensibly strange movie. I contented myself with talking through it and asking what was happening every five minutes.

Does anyone else find it strange that food and clothes cost money? I can understand other things - consumer electronics, for instance - costing money, but it still seems indescripably alien to me that something as basic as what you eat and cover yourself with should be able to be expensive. I suspect that's less because I'm a damn commie and more because I am bourgeouise with a capital B.

I am trying to get a job. I will work from 6:30 - 10 in the morning doing salad bar prep, if I can get all my forms in on time. I think it sounds kind of fun, kind of.

love,
alex

Marching, Marching

2005-09-13T12:02:00.000-07:00

I have finally figured out what I have been feeling is totally lacking in some of my Latin America classes. I will now name it: "ideological moderation and intellectual rigor". I could also term it "approaching an issue from every possible angle as if it were a big block of, um, intellectual swiss cheese, and the holes were trains of thought, and the various facets represented ideological approaches, and I was both of a proper scale and intellectually free to follow the Cheese Holes of Thought all the way through to the opposite side, perhaps pausing for a snack on the way." Mmm, Cheese.

Do you see why I am maybe having trouble expressing my sentiments? DO YOU SEE WHY I AM REDUCED TO CALLNG WENDELL BERRY NAMES AND ASKING "WHAT IF CAPITALISM REALLY CAN DELIVER ON THE FLYING CARS?"

There is a massive gap right between my ideology and the rest of the world and somewhere in the darkness lies factual understanding.

My poor professors.

In other news, I chopped all my hair off (it is shorter than it was though still in the range of soccer mom) and maybe my new laptop will get here someday so I can start spending all my money on DVDs and I still haven't learned the Spanish I should and I have a cold.

love,
alex

Back to normal.

2005-09-07T13:02:00.000-07:00

God save us all from teenage boys who, on meeting you, launch into talking about how no one likes them. Give me an ego the size of a supernova to an ego like a black hole any day.

love,
alex

Stupid f***ing bell

2005-09-05T16:17:00.000-07:00

I wish I could stop reading the news.

love,
alex

Fourth of September

2005-09-04T14:38:00.000-07:00

I am learning, at least, from watching my innate reactions to the flood of New Orleans. I am learning that I don't like to be caught up in floods of national emotion, that in fact I distrust them. It is horrible; yes it is horrible. What happened in the Superdome and in the Convention Center could have been prevented and I do think that there are real and specific reasons why they turned into a vertiable genocide-by-neglect. But these things happen in our world. They happen to poor people, they happen to black people, they happen to children and they happen to women. They happen in human and natural disasters. The fact that there were army people there looking them in the face driving by and lobbing water bottles at them - and the fact that at least there were water bottles - does not really make it a different thing that happened.

I am learning some things about my political views from this. I am learning that I want strong government, that I am furious at people who are sitting there blithely advocating libertarianism as a way to, I don't know, medivac people out of a flood zone. Initiative does not fix levees, concrete does. Initiative does not pluck people off rooftops, trained men and women in helicopters do. I believe that community is stronger than violence, that self-organization is stronger than disaster, but do you have any idea how many people died in New Orleans? Is it any wonder that whatever social bonds might have gotten people through were shattered? That's what a government is supposed to be, an organization that protects the weakest, that provides the community, the organization, and the goddamn concrete and helicopters when necessary.

I have been learning that some people are bigots, that some people are really, truly awful, but that the majority of the world doesn't think that being poor and black should be a death sentance. The majority of people are not capable of baldfacedly denying common humanity in this situation. I hope I remember that after this particular crisis is over.

love,
alex

2005-09-01T07:44:00.000-07:00

Two counties south of here - way, way north and east of the storm - about half the gas stations have nothing to sell.

The creepy thing is, this sounds exactly like what the environmentalists have been predicting, and I don't know what we're supposed to do about it.

I'm sorry, New Orleans, Biloxi. I've been to the Delta, though never to N. O. I've known people that loved that city with every bone in their body. I'm generally apathetic about natural disaster, but now this is a human disaster, and on a terrible scale.

maybe after this, something will change for the better? somewhere?

love,
alex

Down to the River

2005-08-27T20:02:00.000-07:00

Today I helped add half a mile to the Appalachian Trail, and learned to sing shape-note hymns with four-part harmonies. Life is good.

love,
alex

The District Sure as Hell Sleeps Alone Tonight

2005-08-26T19:58:00.000-07:00

1) I know that having to get up at 7 am tomorrow sensibly precludes getting shitfaced at the freshman/sophomore parties tonight, especially since I'm not a freshman/sophomore and don't drink that much. Nonetheless, it is kinda sad being the one person left in dorm.

2) Am having to be careful when talking to guy friends my age lest I interrupt their pursuit of nubile freshmen. Goddammit, where're my nubile freshmen?

3) My poor, broken laptop. As soon as I get a fresh, shiny laptop, which I will treat much better, I will buy Velvet Goldmine on dvd. I swear I got through last year mostly through the extreme nakedness of Velvet Goldmine.

Hey, has anyone seen Y Tu Mama Tambien? Does Gael Garcian Bernal at any point take his clothes off?

that is all.

love,
alex

Privatelife

2005-08-26T13:33:00.000-07:00

It makes sense, I guess, that the town should feel diminished through the absence of one person, one person who I was in love two years and a lifetime ago for nine days. He was, at that point, exactly twice my age, and departs now to actually raise goats (we all joke we will grow up and start goat communes) in a solar house in the northeast, with his dear partner. I really had no pang of regret; my life could be very very different, but I realized that last year, holding a baby that could have been mine if I had taken an entirely different course. I like to think, as far as choices and courses, that some part of me knows where I'm going.

There is no such thing as too many people who love you, admittedly safely, and from quite a difference, and there's no such thing as too many goat communes in the world, I suppose.

love,
alex

Campus

2005-08-23T12:29:00.000-07:00

People here walk at the speed of slow molasses, rural girls, the gait of east-campus kids who don't have to climb down one side of the valley and across the stream-crossed valley floor in the ten minutes between classes. People here are friendly, their faces gentle when they look at you, asking, do I know you? I know more of them than I thought I would. I know a whole world, I guess, just because we were in a class together once, way up in my dorm, up on the western wall of the valley and the world. In front of us when we wake up every morning lies a single street of shops, the neighborhoods hidden behind the laugh-line wrinkles at the mountain's base, the far expanse of a single farm, the highway out. Behind us when we go to sleep every night is a wavering track of road up past the parking lots and the woods they replaced, the source of the stream, the muddy pond, apartments holding to one side of the hill, and then down the mountain through houses and lives and poplar groves to the other highway, the road on through. That is where I live, in part of a single valley, and it can be claustrophobic, but it is also rich and alive. It is a teeming city of students, a dense settlement, a colony hive for the teachers and businessmen and preachers and farmers of the mountain towns. It is important. It is a whole world.

love
alex

The World in a Mustard Seed

2005-08-22T16:26:00.000-07:00

I just got shanghaied by a sophomore who wanted to show me his new kale sets and his bottle of fish emulsion.

It turns out that that garden-center smell is fish emulsion.

love,
alex

Tsidanalu

2005-08-21T20:15:00.000-07:00

My heart is full, of course. I've stolen a year, to know these people as sophomores - a year more confident, a year more tired, all together beautiful. I've stolen a year to watch the freshmen and learn not to be one, I've stolen a year to live in the great monastic expanse of my college in air filled with crickets and moon.

The first year I was in college, on Sunday night a girl made lasagna, and we sat in the lounge and ate. Last year, on Sunday, coming down the stairs, Doug B invited me to share a tupperware of penne pasta with soy sauce and olive oil, me and a gaggle of juniors on the couch. This year, my junior - junior? - year, today I ate angel hair with vegetables and parmesan bread and balsamic vinegar in the tv lounge with staff and sophomores. I have lived three years in this dorm, in this program, past my official graduation and into an uncertain, beautiful place. I am glad to be here. It is insane that anything can be this intensely good as being here. It is like being a child, a freshman, shellless, boundless, in love with everything.

Wonder, maybe, is the word. It is very intense. I missed the intensity, all this summer.

love,
alex

First day of Spring

2005-08-20T09:23:00.000-07:00

What on earth was I talking about, this last week? It is insanely good to be here. My only problem, again again, is that I have to tell myself I can't do it all at once, that the people will still be there - the freshmen to meet, the friends to reconnect with - after I unpack, nap, shower. I love it here. Friends that I valued might have migrated out of my reach, but there are still people here whose smiles make me light up inside, whose words I value. There is still a life for me here.

I may change blogs again soon. Claustrophobic coffee-stained wallpaper was what I needed this summer, but in the indian summer academic air, what I need is space and trees and light pouring down golden. I will be okay.

love,
alex

My own damn laundry

2005-08-18T13:54:00.000-07:00

p.s. 'someone' #1 was me, I try to only complain about one person twice per entry.

Re: the school I'm about to go back to, it sucks not to be counted.

People I swore I'd see this summer want to hang out but I'm not sure I can summon the strength to leave the cul-de-sac, again. I am, in fact, kind of a shitty friend.

love,
alex

Dirty laundry?

2005-08-17T19:03:00.000-07:00

These last couple of days at home have been very hard, which is a particularly bad thing because my last couple of days at work have been amazing, and maybe I want to tell the internet and posterity about how both the pre-schoolers passed the swim test and went off the diving board and then we played in the creek, not about how my siblings and I, all well past the age at which such behavior is acceptable, are getting into actual fist-and-feet brawls over whether we watch tv with captions or without. Also, my mother hit me on the head with a plate.

One of the hardest things is realizing that people make emotional promises they can't keep. People might, for instance, say that they can be understanding when you're cranky under stress, and then when you're actually cranky under stress call you names and hit you on the head with a plate. No one on this earth has any real obligation, I suppose. I suspect too that people present the person they want to be up until the person that they actually are takes over. For instance, *someone* might want to be so logical and sensible as to be able to handle stressful family interactions while in a state of high anxiety without snapping and hitting the near-adult who desires to yell at you about your close-captioning preference in the middle of your favorite movie, without even having the decency to pause. But that person, anyway, is not that logical and should probably consider cloistering themself during such anxiety. And *someone else* might want to give up hoping they can be Nuestra Senora in all situations and instead announce, hey, cross me with your cranky anxiety, and I will whap you upside the head with a plate.

love,
alex

I tried to do an instant-survey!

2005-08-14T19:22:00.000-07:00

But the form-creator didn't work. SO I made one up! It is super-fun when one has had more claritin than one ought!

You have five minutes to decide what zoo animal you'll be transformed into: Fish are mean to each other and it's too hot here for polar bears, so I'd have to say otters would be your best bet.

Are you going to be a cat lady when you grow up?: Maybe if I was interested in death-by-sneezing. Cats: fluffy. friendly. Forbidden.

Aliens land in your backyard. What do you say to them?: I have not seen "War of the Worlds" but would still prefer cowering under my bed.

Are you the sort of person that enjoys rock-climbing: See above.

Awkwardest moment ever that you'll put on the internet: One day in the third grade, every possible synonym for 'hot dog' became dirty. I did not get the memo in time. This might be why I'm a vegetarian.

Do you secretly want to become a Really Famous Blogger?: Bitter answer: ::looks down:: still a chick! Apparently not, according to some people! Honest answer: I'm enchanted by people liking my ideas, but I'm not willing to become organized, or, in fact, work hard. And I overreact to trolls. ::baits trolls::

Favorite way to get around the n-word while humming hiphop: "cure for cancer, cure for aids, makes a neighbor want to stay on tour for days... da da da... BOMBS OVER BAGHDAD..."

I'll go away now.

Thanks internet.

alex

I know it's cheap, but the form made it so easy!

2005-08-14T18:59:00.000-07:00

God Bless the USA

2005-08-13T08:30:00.000-07:00

River: You can make a lovely cucumber salad with some nice onions and tomatoes

Crazy American: YOU'RE TRYING TO POISON US ALL!!!!!!

I do love my country.

love
alex

On the other hand

2005-08-11T12:30:00.000-07:00

could someone who sees biting cultural commentary in, of all things, the 1964 Mary Poppins movie survive outside academia?

Seriously, how could people see that movie and not expect impending massive cultural upheaval? Zeitgeist, my friends, zeitgeist.

If I don't see y'all again, have a nice weekend.

alex

I think the words 'unwashed illiterate' may have been used.

2005-08-10T09:02:00.000-07:00

One of my nanny kids just dissed my academic ambitions. For the record (as I told him) there is nothing wrong with my academic performance; by small-town college's standards, I'm pretty darn good. But I'm not sure I want to go to graduate school, especially not right after college. I'm pretty gosh darned sure (sorry, the nannying is taking a toll on my language) that I'm uninterested in pursuing a prominent position in academia.

I said this.

Oh, he said, in a tone I would describe as dismissive, you don't think you could even get in to graduate school?

I've been dissed. By a nine-year-old.

I suppose if I really do intend to go through the world with no master's degree, it's a feeling I'll have to get used to.

do you want fries with that?
alex

Revenge of the $300 dress.

2005-08-07T12:52:00.000-07:00

Look how nice you can look, and still be fair trade, if only you (and I) had the good taste to live in England.

The girly phase is not ending, and all I really want is $50 anthropologie tank tops, but dammit I will stick to my morals. Patagonia is okay (leech on my family that I am, I'm willing to pay full price and buy one t-shirt a year) but I really, really want something that could concievably be worn when leaving the house after 7 pm.

It may be fortunate that US fashion is horrid right now, and therefore I don't really want much of anything in normal stores.

That's really about it. I have had 24 hours of peace and quiet, by the way, and it has been glorious.

love,
alex

Not for our purposes but for their own

2005-08-05T19:56:00.000-07:00

One of the nanny families has kittens, two little rough-furred fuzzballs found starving by a roadside. All week I have watched the human children and the cat children learning each other, roughly, heavy-handed, claws out. The youngest boy feeds the cats from on top of a wooden chest, out of their reach, crying when they get too close. The cats, afraid of the height of even a short human, clamber out of arms and up necks, digging their feet into napes and scalps trying to grab a hold. Gently, we tell them, gently, while the kittens in their crate tussel, digging teeth and claws into each other's necks and crying piteously when pinned. Gently, we tell them, gently, mixing condensed goats' milk and kitten formula and setting it down for cats who already are more interested in stalking and eating the giant carolina roaches that sneak in through the cracks in the sunroom. They go their way in our lives, I guess.

Anyway, parrots can do abstract math, and chimpanzees can talk like deaf people, and every house on my road also encloses something with fur or fins or feathers, something that looks us in the eye and does not know our names. Space travel is all well and good, but if we met sentience out there, who's to say we'd know it there either?

love,
alex

Nae simul pudere quod non oportet coeperit; quod oportet non pudebit

2005-08-04T10:38:00.000-07:00

I have been having wretched dreams about the ex-relationship. Dreams in which my subconcious is constantly railing at me like a priggish but clear-sighted aunt. I liked a long-distance relationship; not having someone in my space, crowding up my room, messing up my carefully-deposited clutter. Moreover, not having to see someone not just through my own eyes but through the more-critical eyes of friends, family, community. So, my subconcious nags at me, poking into the over-tender parts of my mind, shaking out my emotions like pebbles on a rug, was I ashamed of him?

Of course not, my thinking mind replies. There was a time when I felt more strongly about him then he felt about me; I certainly had enough insecure times. I wanted him to meet my family; it was the family that wouldnt' cooperate. But it is true that it fell apart for the last time on campus, under the weight of the residential college's mythos, under the imagined eyes of a compassionate but very curious group of teenagers. It is true that the dreams I am having have the same feeling as waking up nights, listening to breathing in the silence and thinking this does not fit.

What does my subconcious priggish-aunt want? Should I be ashamed of how my feelings turned, or should the turn of my feelings indicate that I should be extra-careful to avoid him upon my return to campus? Internet, I'm not asking your opinion, but if you've got one (besides 'stop whining') we may as well hear it.

I only have three weeks left here, after all, and maybe I should try harder to be here instead of in a remembered and anticipated somewhere else. Here, I am teaching the kid to play chess, and despite the heat it is raining every day all the way through drought season. Maybe I'll go to the beach this weekend.

love,
alex

"Community cannot for long feed on itself; it can only flourish with the coming of others from beyond, their unknown and undiscovered brothers."

2005-07-30T20:56:00.000-07:00

- Howard Thurman.

All the new kids from my residential college are up on the Facebook website.

Soon it will be back into the fray, won't it. Chubbier and duller, yes, but a year older and more certain of myself navigating all the frayed and difficult and beautiful boundaries of living in uncertain community.

Is it always painful to get a year older? Are you always looking backwards at the transformations you've already undergone, missing the excitement, or do you get to a point where you get to appreciate where you are?

I'm just scared. I was glad to graduate, to be ceremonially out from under the shadow of the Better Hippies, but at the same time, like I said, my relationship with my college - my infatuation with it - has been the major relationship of the last two years. It will be strange going back and looking it in the face.

nervous girl with transition issues. This will be peachy.

love,
alex

I have changed this title four times.

2005-07-30T14:57:00.000-07:00

My (little) sister and I walked a total of three hours to 1) eat a cannoli and 2) rent "Hitch". Now I'm too tired to clean the house. No, I don't wanna. So far I've done the dishwasher and put the laundry in and there is grout to be scrubbed, people! Urgggh.

My chiropractor seems nice and all. (I have a chiropractor! My neck is no longer a painful, clicky thing that I'm afraid to move! My hypochondria is disproved and it turns out that not only am I not turning into a hunchback, my thorassic spine is abnormally straight!). However, the thing I went in for - vertebrae T7 - still hurts like a beeyatch. Hmph.

That's all the news that's fit to print.

love
alex

Cranky Edition! (number 378)

2005-07-29T13:07:00.000-07:00

1) Have started watching Firefly on DVD. Is quite good but should probably be regulated by law as it is so fast-paced that watching more than an episode every couple of days makes me all shaky and tweaked-out. Save me from myself, Uncle Sam!

2) I am definitely sick of people adding gender adjectives to job titles. As in: "Kaylee is cool because she's a female engineer!" No, she's just an engineer, you birdbrain, get over yourself. I don't think they really have (HAS UTERUS!!!) written next to her job title.
(and while I'm geeking, what's with them ruining my Inarra/Kaylee subtext? Because no show is complete without space lesbians.)

3) Shaky and tweaked out and also trying to cover the AWFUL SILENCE OH GOD with music and tv and a pointless project all going at full volume in different directions. It occurs to me that maybe I should just put the computer down and back away and try to make my peace with the quiet-and-boring. Maybe.

love,
alex

2005-07-27T18:26:00.000-07:00

Today I babysat for the first time in a new house. It's one of those houses full of stuff, full of lamps and frayed faux-chippendale chairs, stuff on the walls and shelves and tables, jars and bottles and pictures and paintings and paper flowers and dried flowers stuck haphazardly in homemade clay vases and delicate spinning clocks with glass domes over them and twizzlers and pringles and South Beach bars and a Hello Kitty happy new year's card and glass birds and foam christmas trees and an inexplicable slice of foam cake covered with silk flowers in the front foyer and sunlight, perfect and peaceful, streaming in the west-facing windows.

On the coffee table, an art book open to Caravaggio, the Virgin - a swarthy girl, young - stepping through a doorway with the Christ Child in her arms, beggars bowing to kiss her bare feet.

love,
alex

Re: Not Taking Candy From Strangers.

2005-07-24T16:34:00.000-07:00

So the new Charlie & the Chocolate Factory movie was not very good.

Within the first ten minutes I concocted a soundbyte and I want to use it:

In Tim Burton's Chocolate Factory, every pleasure is a guilty pleasure, and every dream is a nightmare.

I think Tim Burton must hate kids.

love,
alex

Bubble bubble bubble.

2005-07-21T16:07:00.000-07:00

It has been a week and a half. Since I have left this subdivision.

My social contacts number in total my bratty little brother, my extremely introverted mother, three children under the age of nine, and the internet. One of the mothers I work for chats with me for ten minutes after work, twice a week. This is my second most important source of social contact with an adult. And I'm on her shit list, for flaking out and forgetting a babysitting appointment with a friend of hers.

I would advocate those of you who know me in real life trying to rescue me, but I fear if I were to ever glimpse something outside of this particular housing project, I would burst into tears, and that would be embarressing for us all.

melodramatically yours,
alex

"One thing the Bible tells us is that we need to pray for our enemies,"

2005-07-19T16:04:00.000-07:00

Benton said at a Duke Medical Center news conference. "Being angry and hateful doesn't hurt them. It hurts us. I guess I just feel a great sense of sadness. They've not accomplished anything. They've lost their lives, they've ruined their families' lives, and ruined a lot of other people's lives."

"Clever talk can confound the workings of virtue, just as small impatiences can confound great projects."

2005-07-18T07:37:00.000-07:00

- Confucius.

I'm not sure I like this new format, but it was shiny and there on the templates page and I said, I'll take it.

I've given up on taking Spanish classes, cooking, and leaving my cul de sac for any reason, so now I'm down to sewing. Luckily, I get really really excited about sewing. Less luckily, I tend to believe that instructions sheets are included for those other people, the ones who didn't have the benefit of a high school sewing class in which they made two whole pairs of ill-fitting pajama pants. Expert that I am, I started with a Mexican baby shirt (small people use less fabric) and did a beautiful and irrevocable french seam right over the place the sleeve was supposed to go. I suppose I could call it a new approach to swaddling.

I started a second shirt that seems to be going okay, besides a slight and apparently unavoidable underarm bunchiness and a poorly clipped seam. I suspect this particular garment will be inflicted on a close relative who will not notice that the sleeves are different lengths.

Nonetheless, I am bursting with overconfidence and am having to tell myself over and over that I'm definitely not good enough to jump right to pretentious and adorable Norweigan designers.

But but... Norweigan designers!

love,
alex

Disappointing news.

2005-07-15T10:32:00.000-07:00

Google says there is no website entitled "I hate John Rosemond". In fact, "I hate John Rosemond" in quotes comes up with _no results_. No hate societies. No anti-rosemond fan clubs.

Perhaps I should start one.

For the record, I agree with his basic premises, as stated thirty years ago. But every so often I read one of his current, right-wing fundie bits of parenting advice, and I am afraid, my friends, that the rage rises in me again.

I'm working out a parenting philosophy of my own, mind, and it should be ready just in time to be torn to shreds by actually trying to deal with offspring five or eight years from now. I would call myself an old-fashioned parent. I sort of feel that the best place for children is 1) doing the business of being a child, which is playing alone and with peers, not being entertained by adults and tv 2) living in the community by the community's standards, and (fellow first-worlders, ready those rotten tomatoes) doing useful work in that community 3)with a herd of other kids of mixed ages, possibly in the form of daycare. I realize that this looks like Rosemond all over, but it's not because I don't hate children, and also I was a rebellious twit and think they should be too.

See? Won't my theories get an ass-whooping when I actually breed? Kindermusik, here we come. It doesn't help that my children probably will be very like me, geek syndrome all the way, with 'personality quirks' that look like the dsm-iv page for sensory integration problems, and occasionally serious introvery tendancies. I've been threatening my parents with the possibility of sperm-bank babies for years now. Maybe I should see if there's any out there that would accept a request for 'cheerful, short extrovert. Not too bright.'

Whee! Babble! The kiddies have Big Neighborhood Sporting Event tomorrow and are wierd, so I'm hiding in the internet.

love
alex

The Intellectual Life of Alex M. Pseudonym

2005-07-15T05:09:00.000-07:00

"If You Give a Pig a Pancake" is by no means as good as "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie". I had high hopes, but "Pancake", while well-illustrated, succumbs to a hyperactive and fantastical sequence of events that could not be more different from the gentle tone and mellow pacing of "Cookie". If one is in the market for "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie" sequels, I recommend "If You Give a Moose a Muffin", which retains the calm and amicable spirit of the original.

love,
alex

Pseudonyms gone wild.

2005-07-10T19:20:00.000-07:00

My family lives - and I graduated high school in - Big University Town. Big University Town is a intellectual part of a wealthy area - the only reason we managed a whole house to live in was because the last resident had a lot of cats - and the people have a permanent edge of professionalism and resources. The hipsters are devout and unapproachable, the hippies beautiful and tan, the activists have short hair and sweaters and excellent analysis. The stereotypical - and in some departments, typical - Big University girl goes to classes in high heels, which she can actually walk in.

I went away to school at Small Town College. Small Town College is in the mountains. The mountains in my state aren't just the last holdout of The-South-Will-Rise-Again people; they're also a magnet for people that believe in aliens and crystals and Revolution in Our Time. The girls who go to my college can't walk in high heels for shit. There are two stereotypical types: the mountain girl, blond, a little lumpen, who came to Small Town College because it was a teaching school, a state school, within the circuit of Southern-Baptist Appalachia. The other type - rare, I know most of them by name - is a clean-faced part-time farmer who wears carharrt overalls on dates, has farm-girl skin and long curly hair and enjoys contra dancing.

I used to believe that I belonged whole-heartedly to Big University Town; I wore neat khaki clothing and had reasonable hair and I was a die-hard proponent of good analysis. I haven't lost the analysis, but damn I want to be a farm girl these days.

love,
alex

2005-07-07T19:18:00.000-07:00

I want to go home. I am sick, literally ill, of being afraid of buses and subways, airlines and unattended bags. I am sick of not knowing what to think or what to feel; I am sick of turning away. Everyone's been to London; I haven't. I have no idea what I'm supposed to feel for a city around the world. I have no idea what I'm supposed to feel for any of this; I can't stop it or fix it. I have sat vigil; I have held compassion through hopeless situations, but I don't have the attention span or the compassion for wounds the size of the world. I have a dull blind sense of panic that there's no way out.

I have this conviction that somewhere somehow there is a chance for a good human life, nothing too fancy, just a life with work for the hands and the mind, and health, and compassion, and families and friendships and a living world all around. That's all, a good human life for everyone, and I don't know how we get there from here.

love,
alex

By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day.

2005-07-06T09:45:00.000-07:00

- Robert Frost.

My boss is making me nuts.

Stomach twisting, heart-racing, loose my appetite before breakfast nuts.

I am a nanny; I adore this woman as a person, I've watched her kids grow up and I really like them, I share their basic values, and I realize that the specific circumstances my employer is dealing with - like any circumstances that require a paid parent-by-proxy sixty hours a week - are gut-wrenching for her too.

Nonetheless, I feel like I'll be spitting up blood soon if I can't get this woman to back off.

At root is a difference in personalities. Some people come into this world with a clear understanding that there are rules to be followed, and a sense that violating these rules - whether they're "do no harm" or "no shoes in the house" - makes the world a more difficult place for everybody. To such a person, who has an order and a policy for every action, failing to get things done on time in order and completely verges on willful and malicious incompetance.

I am not one of these people.
Luckily, neither is Eldest Child; we have about the same approach to things, and the same total confusion when faced with schedules and lists and tasks that have to be done over and over, completely, like sweeping and wiping down counters. I'm rather proud of how moderately I've grown up, I can make a timetable, clean a kitchen, balance a checkbook. But that doesn't mean I'll stick to the timetable or feel the need to clean the kitchen ever again, ever. I understand now that some things have to be done, but I still assume that anything lost will be found eventually and that "schedule" is synonymous with "mild suggestion". I think I'll live; I suspect I'll still manage to pay my taxes and feed my kids and avoid living in dumpsters, though I might still live in a dump. But I will have to learn to live with a boss for whom a lost anything is a disaster.

In the meantime, perhaps in twisted vengeance for the stress-nausea, I have taken to vengeance-eating. Because a boss without snack food must be a very sad boss indeed.

I really do like this person, you realize.

love,
alex

One's dreams are never as interesting to other people as to oneself.

2005-07-05T17:52:00.000-07:00

Two nights ago, I dreamed that I was some sort of environmentalist research scientist, living with my beloved other scientists in a research post on top of a rock on top of a jungle mountain over a green sea where we swam every day. (The water was warm, if two-dimensional, and full of - dolphins? seals? Some mammal.) Orders came from on high that we would be moved, fo some typical evil purpose - we'd published results someone didn't like, or they wanted to build a military base on the jungle mountain, or something. We refused to go, we went down into a bunker - strangely like a spartan beach condo - in the heart of the mountain, the last place the - fire - would reach. They were going to come after us, bomb us, kill us, and I was the one who decided - though I was not the leader - to turn us in. I decided that the people around me, these seven other scientists who I loved, should stay alive to fight the next battle, should be alive blockading nuclear submarines and chaining themselves to bulldozers and sailing the world in tie-dyed t-shirts forty years from now. So I opened the door, and went up to the command post, and I saw my friends hauled off in handcuffs - but still alive, I said to myself. I opened the door, and we all lived.

Last night I dreamed that I was a middle-aged black woman, an activist, with a tiny daughter. I lived in a city in a situation of constant struggle - tear gas, police helicopters, the whole bit. A wealthy industrialist killed my daughter and ate her. And yet somehow I ended up his hostage, me and a handful of other people, and I guess the Stockholm Syndrome set in, because I started siding with this guy, seeing things from his point of view, even though he'd killed my beloved child, even though he - who in my dream wore very nice suits and flashy jewelry - was the enemy. I think in my dream, again, I was negotiating to keep my friends alive, but this time the emotional stakes were a lot higher. In the end I was running, running somewhere, and molotov cocktails were being thrown all around me, at me, and I wondered if maybe they were right to target me, if I was now part of the enemy, if I had betrayed everything.

Today I was emailed the new Zapatista declaration. (word doc). It's all fairy tales; it makes my heart hurt to think the door might be open, the possibility might exist, especially because I know now what revolution looks like, at least more than I used to. I am afraid, my friends, but/and my subconcious thinks I'm a sellout.

love
alex

Other People's Memories

2005-07-02T08:02:00.000-07:00

1) In the car back from driving my sister to camp, a song (This Moment? something) was on the radio in the dusk, and it was the kind that you can hear staticking from a tinny record player in a linoleum-floored room, dusty screens on the windows, where women in flared skirts and heels dance with boys with buzz cuts. My dad talked about his big brother, high school class of '57, who went out in a cloud of Aqua Velva aftershave, gelled hair and a jacket with Pall Mall cigarettes in the pocket, and came back with lipstick on his collar.

2) Two yard sales next door to each other up the street. One of them is an estate sale - the aged father has just died - and when I buy a sewing pattern next door his son calls me over and offers me his mother's sewing stuff. We're upstairs looking for a pattern box in a room filled with his mother's newspaper clippings and old photos and tiny black velvet hats, and by the time I've gone they've given me a doll she sewed (porcelain, with a sprigged muslin dress) and an old mohair coat, protesting when I try to pay them. In the box of patterns I find a day planner, 1954, the year she graduated high school. The first half of the planner is full every day, with dances and dates and sleepovers with friends and notes about school. (School: Boring. School: hanged dull. School: Oh hell.) Halfway through a name appears: Dick T. She goes several weeks without seeing him. "Have been in a mood all day." her entry reads. "Nothing appeals to me. I am grumpy and dull." The next day he writes her. "Everything is wonderful!" she writes. A few entries read, "was supposed to go to the dance with Peeves. Dated Dick." On her birthday, he pinned her; two days before the New Year he asked her to marry him. In "Notes for 1955", only one thing is written: November: Marry Dick.

I walked back to the other end of the neighborhood and returned it, of course. Their mother A. is still alive; her children said she'd want to read it. I think they must have had a happy marriage: "It didn't say what they did on those dates", her son said. "Maybe a circle means something good." I'm glad I gave the book back, and have a box of patterns, for dresses with narrow waists and full skirts and little hats like curled velvet shells with veils.

If I kept a news blog, every entry would start "in this week's New Yorker..."

2005-07-01T11:00:00.000-07:00

But there is an article in this week's New Yorker(some background here) that passes the smell test about Iraq better than anything else I've read. Its analysis is excellent. Anyone who knows me in real life knows that "excellent analysis" is my highest form of praise, never mind that I rarely do any analysis at all. "Poor analysis" is nearly an irrecoverable damnation. Good analysis, after all, is a gift given; making the peices work together and increasing understanding is a generous thing to do. It is not isolated and intellectual; good analysis looks and smells and sounds like the real world. One of the problems I've been having with this war is that none of the analysis - left, right, mainstream news, whathaveyou - passes that smell test for me. This article does.

Maybe I'm just being told what I want to hear. But shouldn't things make sense if they're true?

Feel free to read the article and get back to me.

love,
alex

2005-06-30T13:28:00.000-07:00

2005-06-30T11:49:00.000-07:00

What does a girl have to do to get a response around here, post nekkid pictures? Good lord, internet. Well, you're not gonna get that, you're gonna get some Thursday Fives: What I am:

reading: 3 books today: Letters to Ms., which is like reading the backlog of a particularly vivid Livejournal community, Joust by Mercedes Lackey, which is entertaining but displays typical Fluff Fantasy continuity issues, and "Newton's Sleep" from U.K. Le Guinn's A Fisherman of the Inland Sea.

watching: Two squirrels mating outside the window. The male keeps trying to assume the squirrel position and falling off; the female keeps batting at him, not in distress but in a "can I please finish my lunch first?" sort of irritation. There was particularly sad squirrel roadkill on the walk to work today; I suppose it's heartening that the circle of life continues.

working on: picking out patterns for a secret blogger present. Also Work Related Spreadsheet because of employer dynamics I will not discuss on the internet.

listening to: Air conditioning, fan.
and last: where are the children I am supposed to be tending to? (under the haystack fast asleep.) Actually, upstairs pretending I don't exist, for reasons associated with Work Related Spreadsheet.

love,
alex

2005-06-29T09:07:00.000-07:00

To hell with you, internet, how bout some honesty:

1) Dictators who torture people are bad. Soldiers who torture people are bad. "Bring the troops home now" is childish and totally ignores the complications of the situation. "Support the troops" is starting to wear on me; I support their rights to some damn raises and salary benefits, but I sure as hell don't support Lyndie English, or her commanding officer, or any of the people who use their little bit of power to abuse someone helpless. In fact, I don't support our troops if they kill children or civilians _by accident_. I support our child-saving troops and our food-aid distributing troops. Nothing is black and white, Internet!

2)A prominent lefty blogger drew fire recently when one of his hosted guests, I believe, said 'abortion is horrible'. Well, you know what, my fellow feminists? I don't believe that all forms of abortion are painless for the fetus. I don't believe that the fetus's pain is irrelevant. I don't believe that the fetus is essentially the same person as the mother. And despite that I still believe that if abortions are necessary, then they should be legal. If we live in a world where women can't control their fertility absolutely, then we better be prepared to do some fetus-killing. At the same time, I find the attitude that everyone but the Minivan-driving, married, affluent, (white?) mid-thirties Kindermusik mommy is automatically unfit to have a baby - and should automatically have an abortion, because of age and economic status - to be absolutely morally despicable.

3) It occurred to me today that if I just went ahead and did myself in, I could spare myself the next two years of the Bush presidency, the potential eight years of a Bush successor, the construction of a new Wal-Mart half a mile from my house (and the subsequent dancing in the streets by local suburbanites), and the chance that some infinite energy source will be developed and our society will just keep going like this forever, covering over the surface of the earth until the poor die in our filth and the rich hop a spaceship to go infest the next planet. It is really, really sick of me to be praying for an oil crash.

But I promise I'm joking about the doing myself in. It's a BAD PLAN, dear readers. Don't do it.

love,
alex

Travels with Brooke

2005-06-22T17:38:00.000-07:00

(pseudononymous, four years old.)

1) We found the skin of a snake by the side of the road, and a redbird feather, and while she was very sad for the snake (an unfortunate confusion of the words 'shed' and 'shred') she likes the long dried seeds of trees that fal onto the road. The snake skin is hidden in a draw now to keep it from the cat; each individual scale is visible, and the domes of its eyes, and the opening for its mouth.

2) We watched fireflies rising under the bushes, and she wouldn't eat her dinner because she was watching a rabbit out the window, yelling instructions at it the whole time: 'Run, Rabbit! Eat some leaves! Leaves are good! Oh, run away! Go to your rabbit home!' et cetera.

3) She told me a long story about the three little pigs in which the wolves and the pigs were kind of rival families in a Godfather way, and first the wolves were holding the pigs hostage in the basement! But then the police came in and shot all the wolves! Every last one! Even the wolf's baby sister! They were all ::tongue out, flattened pose:: All of them! And then the pigs became police too, and they had guns!

It's so hard not to draw foriegn policy metaphors of some kind from this.

4) She still loves tofu. When she was six months old, we would sit down (her tied to a chair with a kitchen towel, since we didn't own a high chair) and she would go through an entire box of tofu, eating it faster than I could cut it into cubes.

love,
alex

Everything for everyone.

2005-06-21T18:45:00.000-07:00

Zapatistas.

The actual text of the alert is hella strong, but then, I imagine most military pronouncements are. I remember that first spark of hell-yeah, before age and an understanding of history set in, that military excitement, that sense of finally the right people have the guns. That's partially me being first world; revolution is a videogame to me, it will not kill anyone I know. That's partially that insane idealism that clings to the least little chance. I'm not giving that part up.

love,
alex

Self-righteousness has killed more people than smoking.

2005-06-19T06:31:00.000-07:00

Another set of wierd dreams, brought on by my dad hammering in the attic from 5 a.m. onward. Leaving secret messages on the bulletin board at Burger King. Universities as islands of wealth (less like my hometown and more like Winchester, Mass) in this strange dusty back-country post-industrial sea of absolute poverty. The twisted love lives of friends. (And one dream of being compelled to attack each other, Matrix-style, except luckily it's hard to get a kick to connect in dreams.) It's mostly that feeling of driving through the rusted gas stations and oil-slick fields to my safe-harbor little college suburb that stayed with me as I woke up. And behold, first thing, my brother wants a gaming computer and my father wants an LCD projector and my mother wants a luxury refrigerator and everyone agrees we need a new DVD player (the old one needs cleaning, but is perfectly functional). I am preaching to my blog because preaching to my family is pretty arrogant of me. After all, I have stuff too.

love,
alex

But the dreamers of the day are dangerous people

2005-06-18T19:08:00.000-07:00

(if only I was one of those)

Dreams last night: At mass, urged to take communion/blessing. But I'm not Catholic! Frantic dream of wanting to impress someone. Truthout-ad style, they offer me a cigarette. But I don't smoke! I used to have the dream of the passed sacrament, the bonding ritual I refused, the that one thing that made them a plural and me a singular. The blessing passed by. (The feeling, infatuation-like, of the desperate pull to the group, to the center, and the strange not-feeling of turning away.)

Dale's right. We could all use more blessings.

love,
alex

Yo ya no soy yo. Por su menos no soy el mismo yo anterior.

2005-06-14T17:27:00.000-07:00

Bad transcription aside, I have officially ended things with Elijah Wood. Gael Garcia Bernal is my new googly-eyed, semi-philisophical, suspiciously-young-looking celebrity boyfriend. I hope Señor Bernal understands the honor that has been conferred upon him.

I realized today that my goals have changed. My life is no longer dreamed from the safe if boring harbor of home and suburb. My life is happening right now. It is coming at me. It is scary. For one thing, I need to figure out how exactly a gringo lives in Honduras.

but it is something, at least.

love
alex

In which I try to explain blogger politics to my mother.

2005-06-13T18:18:00.000-07:00

Charlie's star is rising after the furor over on Daily Kos.

Summary:

Ad on Kos' sidebar: "Women throwing pies at each other is funny. Ha ha! They're wearing bikinis! And groping!"
Several people who emailed Kos: "Actually, that's kind of offensive."
Kos: "Blow me, hairy-legged women's studies majors!"
The feminist blogosphere: "Well, I guess we know where we stand now. Thanks for your support, you bastard."

This would be so great done with Bendos.

Obviously, both Kos' supporters and Kos' detractors (where the heck does the apostrophe go? Ko!s!!!) are mistaking something a blogger said for the position of the entire democratic party. I'm not going to boost his hits by wandering over there to investigate, to be honest, but apparently it did bring the sexist-bastard wing of the Party crawling out of the woodwork. It is hard when the frat-boy democrats show up. Whatever wave of feminism we're on now, it contains a lot of women ('feminist' or not) who really don't expect sexist behavior, and it's always a shock to see it from people who you always assumed gave a shit about your gender.

Simultaneously:

The Daily Kos is not my blog-god. If I need lefty blogging from a big name, I hit Atrios, but I do that about twice a year. For things that matter to me, I go to Bitch Ph. D or something on her blogroll. When the question arises "where are all the women bloggers?" the answer is usually, we're all here, standing around, talking to each other. Just like all the men bloggers are standing on the other side of the room, talking to each other. The blogosphere has the intergender dynamics of a middle school dance.

Now, this is a tempest in a teapot, and I mean that in the nicest possible way. Blogs are built for little teapot-sized tempests, and in a year or two I will find this one adorable. Democratic men have acted far more appallingly in the senate, in the mainstream press, and to our faces during everyday life. But the re-alignment of loyalties that resulted from it made me wonder about blog popularity. We all want readers, commentators, attention, otherwise we wouldn't be online. Maybe the people that read me are more forgiving, but all it would really take to make blogrolls is a solid stream of analysis and opinion, combined with a love for making news stories into a coherant ideological narrative. I can do that. I can even be funny. (Yes I can. No, watch me. I'll crack a joke... any second now.) But once that happens, what happens to my dear, incoherant little journal here? (With its coffee-stained wallpaper and long history of Over!Dramatic!Angst!) The inconsistancies of the heart (or maybe just mood) of one no-longer-teenager do not make for a huge readership. But that's really more what I want to write about than the kind of hard-nosed ready-to-brawl commentary Bitch Ph.D is so good at.

I could be famous! Really! I choose not to be!

That's all. I'm going away now. Really.

love,
alex

Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.

2005-06-10T09:01:00.000-07:00

Note: Any title that looks like a quote or reference is. They are all Google-able so I feel no compulsion to footnote.

1) Friend One did something unfortunate but not strictly stupid. The interesting part is the communication afterwards.

2) Friend Two did something pretty stupid but her life sure isn't mine.

3) I did something incredibly and unconcionably stupid, with the main result of increasing my own misery factor while giving someone else a great deal of emotional satisfaction. It would have been good strategy if I had been prepared to act on my own idiocy, but I wasn't.

It's not like I wasn't unhappy before. I just found a way to hyper-concentrate it and go from lonely and sad to massively unhappy.

once more, fuck this shit.

alex.

*!#

2005-06-09T11:10:00.000-07:00

Fuck this shit.

No, seriously.

Gardening is all very nice, but I am bored and I am lonely, and I hate being bored and I hate being lonely. It is 92 degrees outside and 90% humid. I want to be back in Boone. Maybe I was bored and lonely there too, but at least I could _get_ places and _do_ things if I wanted to. Cowardice is one thing. Being stuck a sidewalkless ten miles from town is quite another.

The thing is, there's nothing to do here. If you're an awesome downtown person then you go to shows and you hula hoop on the co-op lawn and you go to movies and you have friends but if you're out in the suburbs with no car it seems like you only go downtown to snort coke with other people from your high school's graduating class.

I didn't realize how much having a boyfriend - not only that, a boyfriend in another state who I could visit and get the hell out of here - kept me afloat last year. I don't want a new one - especially in this college town meat market - even though a bf with an apartment downtown would be just the ticket.

Maybe I should learn to drive. You think?

love,
alex

Thursday garden blogging!

2005-06-09T08:51:00.000-07:00

I just got the camera to work again. It has been on the fritz since it (and I) took a 16-foot, bumpy slide down a hill in Honduras. Apparently, what it needed was some rubber bands wrapped tightly around the battery hatch. If only I'd known sooner.

Expect the excess prolificism to wind down as I figure out how to use this photo server thing, by the way. Thanks and have a nice evening.

love,
alex

Birds!

2005-06-09T08:50:00.001-07:00

2005-06-09T08:50:00.000-07:00

These extraordinarily photogenic flowers, by the way, smell like Lemon Pledge.

2005-06-09T08:49:00.000-07:00

In case there was any doubt I lived in the South.

2005-06-09T08:48:00.000-07:00

A certain relative would let the house burn down to rescue the iris plants.

2005-06-09T08:47:00.000-07:00

Monster Squash. I did not plant this.

A Long List of Random Things

2005-06-08T17:56:00.000-07:00

1) Cold, cold, go away, come again another day, little sally wants to LEAVE THIS FRIGGIN CUL DE SAC one day.

2) Today is the first day that I have genuinely not wanted to do my job. Still, I played basketball and ping pong and small-talked with the other nannies and did not plop the kid in front of his new Winnie the Pooh video. Go me.

3) Am I the only one who catches a really wierd vibe from Disney Princesses? (I tried bringing this up with my siblings, and apparently there's hentai devoted to the topic (DO NOT GOOGLE OH GOD). Also apparently, discussing either feminism or pron with the 16-year-old brother is a bad plan. In my case, because I come from a family of people who can not shut up.)

4) Tipped Bitch PhD a news story today and feel all famous and participatory. I don't strictly agree with her analysis, but she does a better job than I could have. If nothing else, I'm not willing to brawl with commentators on that level. I got one troll once and it still bothers me.

Subtopics:

Amaranth: Amaranth is a grain native to the Americas. Pros: It is rich in protein, mild in flavor, and is frankly fun to chew. In a nut-butter thickened porridge (try almond butter, vanilla and maple extracts, maple syrup, cardamom and raisin broth) it is glistening, firm, and easy to cook. Cons: it is impossible to find in bulk, and (for a grain) can get expensive. It is also lighter than water when raw; therefore, one little spill and you're picking amaranth out of the corners of your counters for days.

Malaria Therapy: According to Mental Floss Magazine, they used to infect syphilis patients with malaria on purpose. The malaria fever killed the syphilis, and quinine controlled or cured the malaria. Viennese neurologist Wagner von Jauregg got a Nobel Prize for this; I think it's quite clever.

Children: I have recently realized that I am charmed by small, dark-haired, gregarious children, where I am doomed to have a tall, pale, painfully shy child. I have also been reading scary news articles and considering that when I make my no doubt inevitable foray into single motherhood, I might need to flee the country or else be Margaret-Atwood-ed. Scary times.

In connection with the above, I am developing a child-raising and educational philosophy. It is, as usual (I like to develop philosophies) marred by a total lack of actual experience with child-raising. Nannying doesn't count. Still, I am proceeding from my optimistic postulates: 1) People like to work 2) People (especially children) like to learn. However, 1a) Most work we do right now is soulless 1b) Children are isolated from the world of 'fun' work - cooking, crafting, singing, writing, gardening - by schooling and the 60-hour-work-week lifestyle. In theory, all you'd have to do is 1) become wealthy enough to quit your job 2) live like a proper smelly hippie and 3) you'd have educated children.

Actual parents, feel free to laugh at me now. It's okay. I figure I'll laugh at me too in about eight years.

That ends this particular ramble.

I had a meeting with one of my professors Saturday morning which I'm not even prepared to begin to deal with here.

love,
alex

and peace like an ever-flowing stream?

2005-06-05T11:12:00.000-07:00

I've been struggling with some stuff lately. Mainly, I've been struggling with the fact that there are other people out there and that those people seem to persist in having opinions that do not match mine. I put my fingers over my ears and yell LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU, but then I sign onto the internet anyway.
Latest: the philisophical wankery here. (Can he tell I gave into his demands? Hopefully not.)

Now, I am an atheist in about the way that my dad is a Christian; we both believe in the basic tenants of our given philosophies more or less (we're both wishy-washy on the existance of the divine; we're also both leery about empiricism as the be-all and end-all of understanding). But we both refuse to label ourselves as such because all the atheists/Christians we seem to run into are primarily 1) bigoted 2) intolerant of others 3) fanatical.

I realize I'm tarring with a very wide brush here. I will admit I know a lot more decent Christians than I know decent atheists; that's probably because most of the decent Christians I know are devoutly religious and most of the decent atheists I know are so secular it never comes up. For me, right now, the existance or non-existance of God, and the formulation of beliefs, is not the important bits. I have religious rituals that bring me comfort; perhaps they exist only to give me comfort. I might concede that they have a wider purpose, without empirical proof, because I don't worship the scientific process either. I believe in humans, in the middle of their world, making sense of their world their own way. I believe in the multitude of patterns of sense and thought and practice that people live, in the middle of, as cultures and religions. I believe that the ultimate test of a system of thought is not how well another system of thought can make sense of it (if chemistry can make sense of Songhay sorcery, or Christianity make sense of paleontology) but how well it leads people to live. The standards of subjective; I am subjective, you are subjective. Long live the relative.

All this, of course, will be invalid in a week when I become an Epsicopalian or something equally strange. A foolish consistancy is the hobgoblin of little minds, after all, said the Unitarian sage.

love,
alex

I realize the lip-smacking moral smugness of this essay, btw. Letting it go, letting it go.

victory is writing a blog entry with no keyboard just because you can

2005-06-02T19:28:00.000-07:00

defeat is being unable to stick to one side of the parent/child divide for an entire evening.

1) family is better because bigger fights than mine have taken precedence for the evening. Though it really is hard not to restart.

2) If I were to say the following sentance: "It will never stop raining again" without the Magical Quotation Marks of Jinx Immunity, the drought this summer would totally be my fault.

I am tired of hunting out letters on the screen keyboard now so goodnight.

love
alex

Unworthy, adolescent kvetching.

2005-06-01T18:37:00.000-07:00

1) My little sister wanted to let me know that feminists, and I quote "should stop whining and throwing fits" because "things aren't perfect."

2) My parents and I got into a real shit-flinging match over the subject of parental/grand-parental response to (hypothetical) teenage pregnancy. My father is of the opinion that he wouldn't kick a pregnant daughter and (later) her baby out of the house on the condition that she drop out of high school and get a job. Because the path to independence and mother-child health is paved with minimum wage jobs with no health care. Because single mothers with GEDs are apparently less of a drain on him and society than paying a sitter for two to three years until college/ married student housing/ campus daycare. (brief tangent about how minimum wage jobs in our area = you and your baby sleep in a car, or you live with your family until you die.) (I realize that this is not the situation of the teenage mother your aunt's friend's sister knew, but the single mothers we know are still middle-class literati like us. Once priviledge really gets going it has some momentum.) This shouldn't have devolved into the dramatic fits that it did; I called him a heartless, soulless bastard and he threw something in my face that I never, ever expected him to use against me, especially in something as basic as a political argument that got out of control.

IT IS FUCKING IMPOSSIBLE TO LET THINGS GO. This is helping, unworthy though it is to me to pour out my family's internal troubles to the internet, but in general, every nerve in my body wants to go track them down (both of them) and yell at them and grind their souls down into a little pulp that is incapable of disagreement. I want to make them suffer, oh god do I want to make them suffer. I hate it when people are wrong. There is nothing I hate more than a high-handed opinion based on bad analysis, unless it's mine.

CALMING THE FUCK DOWN AND GOING AWAY.
REALLY THE INTERNET CAN DO WITHOUT ME FOR A BIT.
THANKS FOR LISTENING, INTERNET.

alex.

Freddie Fish and the Case of the Missing Kelp Seeds.

2005-06-01T08:22:00.000-07:00

No, really.

All morning, the kid begged and pleaded to go out (in the rain) to play ping pong at the community center. We tried once, to find the gate locked. "So," the kid said, eyeing the padlock on the gate, his four-year-old face gone sly. "what do we do about this?" He advocated going over or under the fence, or possibly getting his dad's wire-clippers. When I suggested that subversion was not actually part of my job, he decided to stage a sit in instead, planting his little nylon-shorted butt on the edge of the wet muddy boardwalk and refusing to move. Luckily this is one of the distractible ones (the tenacious, capital-letter Kid is still in school) and throwing him over my shoulder and yelling still works.

Next up (still raining) I started teaching him to play hacky sack, partially to keep myself moving in my post-doritos stupor. Something about being in a house with a kid makes me crave junk food, in a serious he's-out-of-the-room-quick-stuff-face sort of way. I'm starting to realize why none of my pants fit last summer. Still, I'm not sure how the parents will feel about the hacky-sack. Next I'll teach him about renaissance faires and scary hemp pants.

The kid is telling me about when he went to see Jeff Gordon at the Coca-Cola 600. I wonder if he'll remember that when he's my age. Kids do remind you that people change, and that's always a useful thing to know.

love,
alex

Ladies and Gentlemen, We Are Now Exiting Stepford.

2005-05-31T15:03:00.000-07:00

Pool parents. Pulled-together parents, intimidating in their two-tone khaki ensembles and full makeup in the middle of the day. County parents, big and brassy, with tans and cleavage. Local parents, on the other end of middle age, wrinkly, buff, PhD'd. Parents with dyed hair and tattoos. Parents who may be rock stars.

It's strange to be back with the Kid. There's no taking up where we left off; it's been a year, kids grow up. He's mellowed; the baby's grown more obnoxious. That's okay. They're good kids. I'm just nervous trying to talk to them.

That's about it.

love,
alex

citric acid, sodium citrate, sodium benzoate.

2005-05-29T13:22:00.000-07:00

3 12-oz cups of sprite while working basketball concessions = 500 calories of high fructose corn syrup.

I coulda eaten two slices of cake for that.

alex.

"I will remember to stay in the two feet and I can float now and I will not drown!"

2005-05-27T12:41:00.000-07:00

- four year old I babysit. Thanks, kid!

don't let them take you ALIVE.

2005-05-27T09:10:00.000-07:00

I meant to write this, too. The new kids at church are so hipster-ish, so ready to go, it's so good to look at the middle schoolers moving up and think, hell yeah you've got your problems. You're a unitarian kid. You shine. You believe in turning this world and yourself inside out a thousand times before you graduate.

It's painful for me to be in that building, too. I'm trying to pay attention, these days, to the bodily sensation of emotions, the pain in the chest, the lump in the throat - being in that church hurts worse than breaking up with the Him did. It's so wierd to change.

love,
alex

I will henceforth eat no fish of fortune's buttering.

2005-05-27T08:56:00.000-07:00

(- the clown, All's Well that Ends Well, Act 5 scene 2.)

There are good things about being sick - third-world water kind of sick, trespass not in the bathroom kind of sick, going to sleep at six in the evening kind of sick. I found - I am better now - that during the three days of my isolation, my senses were amplified. I could smell not just the tree but the bark and flowers on the tree; the sky was many colors crossing, not just blue. Vicarious senses worked overtime too. When the Gilmore Girls sat down and shared a box of donuts, I could taste the donuts, I could feel the powdery sugar under my fingers, I could smell them and feel the weight of the person sitting on the couch beside me eating them. My first response to illness is usually a profound oversensitivity - for the first day, I didn't know what was wrong, only that the slightest breeze or the touch of my shirt hurt my skin - but this is the first time it's been so interesting.

The hitchhiking boy, unafraid of flu, came back through and slept at our house last night. He also smells good, of sweat and bikes and a little exhaust. One thing that I miss about Boone is people who smell like people, breathing their pheremones, all those mammalian senses - are they well? are they stressed? that are so crippled in the deodorant culture. People just smell so good, and it's spring and is supposed to be about smells, flower smells, earth smells, human smells.

A minor perversity: I am now down to my first target weight. I will try to maintain it, then. The fact that I'm still too queasy to eat regularly should help.

love,
alex

Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.

2005-05-25T11:41:00.000-07:00

I am in love with a three hundred dollar dress. Also, I have decided the following: tans are cliché. What is not cliché, and could in fact be fashionable in such a dress, or in good clothes in general: pale, freckles, good tattoos (none of this clipart rose-on-the-cleavage crap), mocha-latte or creamy or very dark. In short, natural skin tones or artistic renderings are in. I have seen enough terrible orange tans in the last so often that I have decided the profound tan is not really highbrow.

love and shallowly yours,
alex

I've got a two hundred megawatt pulse cannon in the forward cargo bay that says otherwise!

2005-05-25T07:16:00.000-07:00

1) The dog picked a fight with a rabid racoon yesterday. Flashbacks to Old Yeller aside, all this means right now is that the vet came by and stuck her with a needle and she's now lying prostate on the floor trembling and looking at me with the how could you do that to me??? eyes.

2) Flu thing? Who knows!

3) Was supposed to start working today but have not as may be contagious with flu thing.

4) Thinking I might link up my old blog and this.

love,
alex

For no man well of such a salve can speak,

2005-05-22T06:50:00.000-07:00

That heals the wound, and cures not the disgrace:
Nor can thy shame give physic to my grief;

1) The He (he deserves better from me than to ever find his name on the internet) believes that it's my parents that drove us apart. I realize that this is probably because he has to assign blame somewhere besides me. I also realize that while it is nice not to be villified by an ex, there is no possible relationship with someone who feels antagonistic against my parents.

2) My mother said a good thing. She asked me how I would want to be treated if I was in love with someone who wanted to move on. I realized that I am wracking up the relationship karma here and that I am old enough not to want to be strung along.

3) It breaks my heart to break his. Here is proof of how 'breaking up and staying friends' sometimes means that 'breaking up' just doesn't stick. I am sick of doing this over and over.

love,
alex

Que le vaya bien, amigos.

2005-05-21T08:29:00.000-07:00

hineh matov uma na'im...

2005-05-20T18:53:00.000-07:00

The Wataugans are headed out tomorrow. Important discoveries: first, that I like having them in my house. It's that feeling I used to have last year when Laura and Anna were making tea in the bathroom before I woke up; that feeling of an old marriage, of comfortable company. Second, no ideal can stay, but my roommate and I are friends for ever or a good long time.

We had a good conversation walking into town, I want to remember that. B was antsy the whole day; turns out he wanted to be on the road (be where you are, B; tell people what's going on, B.) It's nice to have him here, out of context, without the sometimes suffocating structure of Watauga around. It's also nice to acknowledge that not only are people not what you make them to be in your head, they have no responsibility to be. I am glad and I honor him. (I am also sad, because I always want to be the center of the universe and SOMETIMES I'M JUST NOT. Okay I don't have to be the exact center of Watauga, but I don't like not being a part of the pull, a part of the solar system.)

Of my roommate J, I don't think I even realized what a friendship we were building. It is extraordinarily good to see her. I am pleased.

I am also tired and sad. I have liked having them in my life here. To them this a stopping place between events; to me, it is the event. That's an important distinction.

Nonetheless, I have had a little bit of Watauga, I have kidnapped it (stolen it rather, whole minutes of it) and held onto it for myself. I will not let the slight bitterness I feel at passing back out of the orbit slow me down.

love,
alex

cover the light of open months with your aroma

2005-05-19T19:05:00.000-07:00

The Lovies are here, two gangly, smelly, tan people from my dormitory, arrived on bicycles, departing on bicycles. brave, in love, nowhere. They make me feel adventurous, quick, loving, even though my last year in that dormitory was cowardly, and closed off, and slow. They remind me that I can be something.

It really is like a visit from fairyland. There is always this fantasy, this dream I have, that down in the basement, up in the attic, over that next hill - always over the next hill - lies some extraordinary world. They are living in it, traveling in it right through the center of my house and onward. They are just two twenty-somethings, tan, dirty, full of muscle and sinew and heart, full of infatuations, foolishnesses, love. That's all.

love,
alex

A i mohio a Hohepa ki ona tuakana, ko ratou ia kihai i mohio ki a ia.

2005-05-16T19:24:00.000-07:00

I refuse. Take it back. I will not look on your face, I will not stare into your eyes. You are the beloved alien. The touch of your hand, the minute vibrations of your voice makes my skin crawl. I will not be torn from myself. I do not believe in you; I am not of you.

I refuse. Take it back. Maybe I have to be practical; maybe I am twenty, and sensible, with a housefrau bun and modest clothing and a habit of working too much. Maybe I am accomodating, bourgeoise, counter-revolutionary. Still, I refuse. There are more things in heaven and earth and the human soul, Horatio.

You brothers, you Americans, you soul raised close to mine under the shelter of the same flag - I will not let your fundamentalisms tear you down, and I cannot stop loving you, beloved other, American, brother. I cannot argue with you wrapped in that flag. I cannot look you in the face as you advocate a world without hope. I don't know what to do, brother. We are from the same people.

love,
alex

alba, banksiae, carolina, centifolia, parvifolia, pomponia, mutabillis.

2005-05-13T18:25:00.000-07:00

There are two ways to eat the nectar of a honeysuckle: first, to pinch the green remnant of stem, and draw out the stamen through the base of the flower, glistening with a single droplet of sweet. Second, to bite it off at that basal neck, whole handfuls at a time (an exotic invasive, strumpeting itself across the neighbor's shrubs) while the sister waits, foot tapping, for you to finish.

There are two basic kinds of roses, the old rose and the tea rose. Over the juniper bushes at the base of the hill grows a rose - old or new - with vast red blossoms the size of saucers. When fresh and tight, they smell of grape kool-aid. Exploded open, they smell like the meaning of wine. Wine-roses.

love,
alex

de Alto Cedro voy para Marcan...

2005-05-13T12:01:00.000-07:00

This song sends chills up my spine. It makes me want to lift myself towards Nicaragua, wrists-first, in love. It makes me feel every strength and beauty of my body and life as a reflection of gasoline dust and graffiti and palm trees, mango trees, open against a Nicaraguan sky. I want to love the world, from the front porch of a house in Montesteppe. I want to love the world. I want a third-world world of just enough, of bags of rice and beans in every kitchen. I want a third-world world of southern light, of lamplight against sweating concrete, of worlds within worlds on the shadowed illuminated porches. I want a third-world world of education and vaccination and hope, and none of this twentieth-century nonsense of frozen dinners.

I want to lift myself towards the hero-body, towards the hero-soul, towards the socialist martyr woman, Elaina with a face beautiful and stark out of a Leninist poster. I want to lift myself towards the prayer-faces of the dreadlocked saints, towards the water ever running through the dry land. I want to pray, I want to pray and sing and lift myself wrists-first towards revolutionary dawn. I want to believe.

love,
alex

Tatter and lime

2005-05-12T20:08:00.000-07:00

I will hold onto the last frayed remnants of myself and my love and the sky shooting down rain brilliant over the city. I will hold onto myself if it is the last thing I do.

love,
alex

vaster than empires and the sound of box fans.

2005-05-12T13:10:00.000-07:00

Poems are born of this, this (before the storm) heat, this box-fan-rattling heat, this sound like the musty hotel rooms of the world, rattling down a Managua dawn, rattling down the smell of Chapel Hill traffic, rattling down right here right now in a bundle of words and a bouquet of wilting agrostemma. Poems are born of this right here with the possibility of thunderstorm drifting peaceful down the spine and the heavy beautiful sound of the world waiting. waiting. I wish the world would wait for this.

love,
alex

So Watauga.

2005-05-12T12:46:00.000-07:00

A kid from my program just signed an email to the entire Watauga class - "missing you like the desert misses the rain".

I was never that in love with the place, but there's that part of me, that excitement in my chest, that wants the pagan dance amidst the trees of the mountain, that wants the long soft summers. People fall in love with Watauga their freshman year. I have been there two years; it has been the major relationship of the last two years of my life. It wasn't everything I wanted it to be. It wasn't perfect.

Last night, I dreamed that we were down in the dining hall, and it was that moment in the music when someone decides, heck, we may as well dance. And I was going to join them - three years of Wataugans, whirling across the dance floor - but I thought of my absent boyfriend back in the dorm, and the moment died in me, and I didn't dance.

When I return it will be the pagan dance in the mountains. It will not end.

Some part of me is seperate from this family and this place, and also free from my classes and the unhappy strain of that last year of school. Some part of me is free to see beauty and be transparent/reflective to it. Some part of me is missed like the desert misses the rain.

love,
alex