To all of those people who mistakenly think it doesn't:

Spelling really does matter. Do you know why? Because every time I ask one of the kids I'm tutoring whether they know the definition of "allusion," and then write it down for them just to be extra helpful, they tell me that it's something you think you see that isn't really there. For "anecdote," I either get "ana-what?" or "the cure if you get poisoned."

EMO ME

I am so lonely today. And yesterday. And possibly the day before, and sometime last week. I am ready to stop being lonely now. Okay? Okay. Ready, go.

It's obnoxious. Being bored and being single are things that happen. Not a big deal. And singleness has been...most of my life. You know? And a solid year and a couple of months, this latest go round. And (excepting previous periods of heartache) it generally hasn't been that big a deal. But sometimes, suddenly, it's everything. It's all that matters. I'm not in love and I never will be. I'm not a mom and I never will be. And while we're at it, I'm not gainfully employed and never will be (picture that in "crypt keeper" style font), and I'm not happy AND DAMMIT, NEVER WILL BE. I mean, obviously. Obviously this isn't due to a routine hormone imbalance and messed-up sleep schedule and horrible diet over the past few days. No. Of course not. Couldn't be that.



Wildlife I have seen and/or rescued whilst house sitting for Sara's family this week:
brown rabbit (seen)
opossum (seen)
orangey-skinned turtle (seen and rescued)


Last night (being Thursday night) was my last tutoring session with Suzanne for the foreseeable future. I wrote down the Einstein quote for her: "Everyone is a genius--but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing it is stupid." I'm going to miss that girl.


I forgot the other things.


Edit:

Before going to bed I pulled up my itunes and went to a song that I love: "Table for Two." The lyrics are more apt than I had intended them to be.

Danny and I had another late night over pancakes. We talked about soccer, and how every man's just the same. We made speculation on the whos and the whens of our futures, and how everyone's lonely, but still, we just couldn't complain. And how we just hate being alone. Could I have missed my only chance? And now I'm just wasting my time by looking around.
But you know I know better. I'm not gonna worry about nothing. 'Cause if the birds and the flowers survive, then I'll make it okay. Given a chance and a rock, see which one breaks a window, and see which one keeps me up all night and into the day. 
Because I'm so scared of being alone, that I forget what house I live in. And that it's not my job to wait by the phone for her to call.
This day's been crazy, but everything's happened on schedule: from the rain and the cold to the drink that I spilled on my shirt. 'Cause you knew how you'd save me before I fell dead in the garden, and you knew this day long before you made me out of dirt. And you know the plans that you have for me, and you can't plan the ends, and not plan the means, and so I suppose I just need some peace, just to get me to sleep.

I have too many tabs open.

Weird, I know.


This is a slideshow that looks really excellent, but which I haven't even come close to watching all the way through. Done by the BBC, so it's probably quality.


This is a really great mug that I want to buy. Made in the USA. Please check it out. You will probably laugh, and/or feel smug.


An article from The Onion on the disappearing grown-up.


I want this. Read the description. There's a pretty funny video about it that someone posted on facebook, but I've already closed my facebook tab, so you're sol unless you Youtube it.


Don't believe in evolution? Don't be ridiculous. Open your eyes. (And before you get out your pitchfork, please remember that this sentence is being typed by a Christian type person.) Here are seven animals that are evolving right before our very eyes.


What Spiderman should have been inspired by. I never realized how awesome tarantulas were until just now.



And lastly, the world's smallest stop-motion animation. Now with 3D printing! And quite cute.

The loveliness of metamorphosis

The lanes down which I walked all winter when they were wide and bare and starkly beautiful are now close and warm and lush and full. I've been walking and wondering why I've not been so awestruck by the night sky as I was, and then I realized that it's because I'm so distracted by the glistening arms of the trees reaching out into the road and arching up into the sky, and by the flat lawns and bare forest floor that have suddenly grown up into jungles of tall grass and flowers, and by the tree shadows that have transformed from woodcuts into tissue paper collages, making softly variegated asphalt surfaces each evening. And the loveliest thing about spring and early summer is the puddles--the rain-shined roads and the running ditches, swimming lowlands and storm drains filled to flooding. Tonight I passed a gravel driveway that held a large, still pool, wherein were reflected the dark branches of the trees, and the full moon peering through. I thought it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.


David used to tease me a little about having so many favorites and so many superlatives, but appreciated, at least somewhat, that I was (often) serious about them. I was, and I am. I say "most beautiful" so often, and I know it sounds silly. But there are so many different kinds of beauty. The beauty of that puddle--of the night reflected in the water--can't be compared to the beauty of even simply the day reflected in the water, much less to the beauty of a flower or a newly molted cicada or a towering roller coaster, a much-needed scientific breakthrough or sweet nephew climbing a tree. They are each different, each precious, each superlative.






Something I've been meaning to say:
Lately I have been slowly coming to realize the meaning of the phrase "live without regrets," or at least the way it can apply to myself. Maybe it's different for others, but I have never liked this idea. I have always felt that those who claimed to live without regrets were either delusional or disgustingly lucky. As I said, though, lately my perspective has been shifting. The other day I was listening to a friend talk about past time wasted, and it wasn't the first time. I was beginning to notice a pattern of wallowing in past regrets, and it occurred to me that the only reason that the time in question was "wasted," in my opinion, was that we were still talking about it, rather than accepting it, learning from it, and moving forward. It was still pulling my friend's life into revolution around itself. It was creating more waste. So I have decided: missteps and mistakes happen to everyone--but the only time wasted is time from which I do not learn and grow.

Greatest of the season

Smells:

honeysuckle, rain, damp dirt

and peony and gardenia

fresh cut wood and fresh cut grass

campfire (and burnt marshmallow)

pine forest

tomato plant, and warm, vine-ripened tomato fruit

watermelon and honeydew and a charcoal grill

a house with all windows open

washing brought in from the line

thunderstorm, rain and clean river water.

Sounds:

frogs of all sizes

crickets and cicadas

owls calling from tree to tree, and the almost-imperceptible rustle

and silence of their wide, graceful, dangerous glides.

Rain and river water,

ceiling and box fans

and happy birds in the trees,

distant rolling thunder and working bees

and live outdoor music from down the block,

and children laughing outside.

Things I've been forgetting.

Last week when I was tutoring Layla out on the dock, I saw something white bobbing in the water under the walkway. It looked like one of those soft, white, round mushrooms (which don't grow in the water, of course), but turned out to be a goose egg. Despite my best efforts, I failed to effectively convey to her that the watery sound from inside the egg meant that it was dead, that it was rotten, and so on. Anticipating the smell and fearing the view I didn't want to crack it, but I allowed myself to be convinced. I carried it away and downwind from the house, stood back, and cracked the shell with a stick. I would have let Layla, but she lost her nerve at the last moment. It seemed that somehow water had seeped into the shell, so what came out was a terrible smell, a piece of embryonic sac, and half a shell's worth of grey liquid. Layla spent the next ten or fifteen minutes telling me that I should have cracked it more gently, though I tried to explain that "baby goose eggs" need to be kept warm in their mother's nest; that all of the goslings had already hatched and didn't she remember them?; that floating in the water for weeks will never let an egg live. She said that she had hoped that if I cracked the shell gently enough, it would turn back into a baby goose.



I and my father went to pick my sister up from the Greyhound station the other night, and from the parking lot I looked up into the night sky and saw dozens of bats swooping and gliding through the air above the baseball diamond. In my experience, bats don't usually soar and glide, actually--they flutter around and frequently change direction to go after insects. It's also rare to have such a clear view of their motions, though, so perhaps I just haven't been as observant as I might. The lights from the stadium shone straight up into the air, and I can only assume that the air was filled with enough light-loving nocturnal insects that the bats could just soar straight through the beams and get a mouthful on each pass. Good on ye, bats! I love 'em.


Friday, just before the goose egg incident, Sara and Brian and I went to see the VMFA Picasso exhibit in its dying days. I don't love Picasso particularly, but as ours was the only museum on the East Coast to get the exhibit, and as Mr P is super duper famous and influential and all, I felt that I should go. It was good. I mean, he's talented, you know. Also, he really likes boobs. A lot. Just a heads-up, there.

Saturday S and B and I went to an herb farm and took in a talk about beekeeping and met up with Anna and her friend Amy, who seemed pretty cool. Anna and Amy and I accompanied the beekeeper back to his hives and watched him replace the queen and the observation frame and essentially got another lecture lesson about beekeeping, which was really cool. We ate some lavender iced cream and some honey iced cream and some chocolate iced cream, and I (and possibly Brian, but not while I was looking, not that I was looking often) helped Sara pick out a bunch of herbs and tomato plants and suchness for a hopeful new garden for her family. We got variegated basil, among other things. Not elfin thyme, though, despite my rabid support. Sara and I also bought fricking adorable beeswax candles in the shape of a little bear with his arms around a beehive (the stereotypical old beehive shape, rather than the more practical but significantly less cute boxy hives of today) and with a relatively large bee perched on the outside of the hive. They smell like honey of course, thus making me want to consume honey, and they are unreasonably cute, and I can't understand how Sara plans to actually use hers as a candle. I'm pretty sure I could never set that thing on fire.

Also on Saturday with S and B: impromptu (for us) fish fry; Strawberry Fields Festival where were sold unsprayed strawberries, spinach, kale, and no free kittens. Lovely. And buying cookie dough and cooking cookies not-as-long as the wrapping says, thus producing perfect soft, gooey cookies. And Kelly and Junior happening to be near my house, and being convinced to come over, and Sara and Brian leaving to dinner.

Saturday sans Sara and Brian: Hanging out with Kelly and Junior, and retrieving Chloe from the bus stop whilst they take in Picasso in all his slightly obscene glory.

Sunday: church with Chloe and Junior (who opted to stay, possibly partially because he seems to really, really love the couch in our basement. It really is excellent for sleeping), and an afternoon spent with my excellent cousin Sara (not to be confused with the Sara of Saturday), talking and reading magazines and rifling through items destined for the Goodwill.

All in all, quite a nice weekend.

I think there may have been other stuff, but I am not sure. I may have forgotten still.


Song I've been playing on repeat for a couple of days now (I haven't watched all the way through this video, so I apologize if there is any unforeseen weirdness):

May showers

The longer I live here (and I've nearly always lived here) the more I come to understand the comments of some friends who visited from Arizona, years and years ago: "It's like a jungle." I love the cool wet air of springtime in the evenings, and I love the eternally dripping trees during our month of rain. I love the stereophonic chorus of frogs peeping and croaking happily in the wet. I love the green light that fills the space below the trees, and I love the way the branches of some arch up into a glorious and expansive chlorophyll-ceilinged cathedral. I love the evening sun glowing orange-red through the clouds that gather around the Western horizon, and I love its light shining against those in the East. I love the way solid cloud cover seems to pull the world in close--the way, walking in the evening, the soundscape is suddenly so much richer. Sounds that would float up into a clear sky now swirl through the trees. Frogs sing and birds chatter, car doors close and water bubbles down the creek bed, and thunder rumbles in the distance as I leave the house; cracks and splits the sky open as I make my way back home through the thickening rain. As I pass the creek, church bells chime a mile down the road, and the sweet sound wanders down into the valley to meet me.