Friday, September 17, 2010

Thursday at the beach

First, let's get this David stuff out of the way:

I keep wanting to ask him something along the lines of "am I  right in thinking that you've always felt this way? That even when I was thinking that things were great, you were thinking that we shouldn't be together? Maybe I'm just getting paranoid, but now that I think back I remember you making the odd comment to that effect..."

This occurs to me with some regularity, lately. But then, every time, I wonder (as though planning), "So in what situation exactly would I like this conversation to take place? On the phone? In person? Via text?" And of course, I don't want it to happen in any of those situations. That's aside, of course, from the fact that there's no way in hell I want to here his answer to that question. When I was thinking about it yesterday in the car on the way down to the beach, and thought of the implications of what seems like the probable answer (these being that there is little to no chance of there being any "me and David" ever again), I seriously considered vomiting out the window. I decided though that this would make Kelly uncomfortable.*

I was catching up on another blog tonight when I came across an entry about a tearful airport goodbye, which unsurprisingly took me back to the day I had to leave Turkey, and, secondarily, the day David left for Turkey. It took me what may have been several minutes to push through the tightness in my chest enough to remember a) that we aren't actually dating and therefore this maybe shouldn't affect me so strongly and b) that I left Turkey almost three years ago. Cool.



Less depressing/possibly more interesting topic: Terry Pratchett.

I love him. Perhaps I have mentioned this.

I finished reading "Making Money" tonight on the drive home (Kelly cannot stand to ride as a passenger for any length of time, whereas I don't particularly like to drive for any length of time), and it was brilliant. BRILLIANT. I wasn't too taken with a literally nauseating recurring and somewhat graphic reference to gangrene, but it all worked well in context. I just don't like having to control my stomach. But it was brilliant. I swear I had more to say about this five minutes ago...

Oh! Alright. I was going to discuss the humor of Terry Pratchett which is, as I am coming to realize, rather cerebral. I love this. I love that he loves words, and turns of phrase, and he makes them turn flips for him. I love the way he picks up on tiny details of human behavior and hangs entire plot lines on them. I love the way he will parody absolutely anything, including mythology, any brand of science he can get his hands on, and any element of culture he can spin into the tapestries of his fiction. I read one where he referenced the death of Napoleon on Elba, and there are others where he hit shopping malls, rock music, quantum physics, insurance.. (Incidentally, how does one end a list like this? There isn't really a good way. "Etc" is vague and obnoxious. "And the list goes on" seems almost asinine to me at the moment. I'm floundering here.) The one I just finished made economics funny. Also, here is one clue (probably not sufficiently convoluted, but one can hope) that I will leave with you as you (hopefully) read "Making Money": Rain Man.



Lastly, while I was swimming I was, obviously, thinking about the ocean. It occurred to me that if you think about the physics of waves, what's really going on is that when the ocean tries to climb the beach, it trips over its own feet**.  So then I started thinking about common metaphors for the ocean and adding my own. Ocean as mother is pretty well broken-in, and ocean as man (Old Man in/of the Sea; Poseidon/Triton), but what about the ocean as a child tripping over its own feet, or as a pack of little boys rushing at the shore? Then, of course, a storm at sea becomes a tantrum rather than wrath--that brings up its own set of problems. (Mainly in that a tantrum is petty, and a storm at sea is serious business.)
Lastly, the sea, or at least the shallows, almost as a jester, turning somersaults on the sand.































*Sometimes when I write things like that, I wonder whether they come off as an attempt at dark humor when they aren't. I like making people laugh, but usually when I do it is either subconscious or completely inadvertent.

**Think about it. When you trip it's because you were moving forward, and then something dramatically slowed your feet--slowed them so quickly that the rest of your body couldn't catch up in time, as it were--so you fell forward. When the ocean rushes into the land, the sand slows the bottom layer of the water fairly quickly, but the top layer keeps moving fast and falls over the slower moving water.

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