Summer’s Eve
July 17, 2009 at 5:43 am (diary) (appreciation, carrying on, facebook, high school, nice guys, nostalgia, prose, random, real life, sensibility, the great plan)
First, we attempt the bath.
Yay, baths, I suspect there’s nothing better on a hot night than a lukewarm bath with a clever picture book. Well. I’m sure there are better things, but darlings, that is what I had and I didn’t mind it at all.
Putting music on my mother’s Ipod. Trying to pick things that are cheerful and bright, but not abrasive for her to listen to while she’s studying her genealogy. This is very strange to me, because it makes her sound so human. Which isn’t to say that I didn’t think my mother was human, it’s just odd to see her dig things and want to do things. She’s…something’s mellowed in her and something’s gotten into her head where it doesn’t all feel like such a big fucking deal that has to be controlled and wow, it occurs to me that maybe what she’s given up I’ve taken up like some kind of torch of martyrdom that nobody ever asks for, but the hell if you’re going to to be the one to let it go out. At any rate, we’re sidestepping the Liz Phair for mother.
We are going to Much Ado About Nothing. I am quite delighted. Shakespeare outside, in the free air. I plan to get a bit slippy and praise our beloved, problematic, sisterless except in the soul, Mr. Shakespeare. He must be all in wonderment that here we all still are, finding meat on his folio of carcasses. That’s later this month, though. It provides a decent something to look forward to when I’m foggy and wanting a good rope and a long nap instead of the strength to soldier on.
I should really start this earlier. I only get half way into it and then I feel really tired and ready for bed and I start to get very choppy in my thoughts and sentences. I start doing things for laughs that under other circumstances, I would try and be more circumspect and restrain. I start getting mushy and nostalgic in a creepy, Rose for Emily sort of way. I start yearning for sepulchres and reliquaries. An old friend from high school said hi on facebook. It’s weird to consider how you used to consider friendships and levels of friendships back then and what was acceptable given the social castes involved and now it’s just Hey. Hey. How are you? Great, fine. How’ve you been? Wow, wonderful. Been a long time. Yeah.
There’s just this collective befuddlement that the world’s somehow sustained us all for the most part. Even more bizarre is that he’s married. This is a gangly kid I used to know who never talked to anyone. Knew since elementary school. For fuck’s sake.
I know what this is. This wavering in my stomach. This is the quarter-life crisis, the storm that’s coming and I am suddenly, to quote a wise sage, smack in the middle of it. I’ve been solving it so far by drinking hard lemonade, buying pink vibrators, going to concerts and Shakespeare and sobbing over how hard my work is and traipsing hither and thither as I dodge bullets and creepiness of all orders and manners of being.
I don’t know if it’s working, but this is what I have. And tonight, I don’t mind it much.
Bread and Roses
July 10, 2009 at 6:01 am (diary) (appreciation, boys, carrying on, creepy guys, delight, hope, love, minor plans, real life, waxing poetic)
Strange day. I feel kind of at ease in a way I didn’t yesterday, or maybe haven’t for a while now. It feels like summer, it feels joyful. It feels like how John Denver felt in Aspen. Like there’s air in the lungs and all is worthy of our praise or at least our kindest set of eyes. This includes ourselves. And yet, that air and that praise is spurring me on and bringing me here to the page where I was sure I would be too exhausted to do anything of worth. Maybe that’s true, but I’m here.
Oh, the beauty in the world.
I am wanting to go to the Shakespeare Festival this year. I’ve said this for ages, but I am longing for it. I am longing for the beautiful air and that outdoor stage and that wit so crisp and bright and like a dancing star. I want to go with some nice guy, but there’s a serious shortage of those about these days so I’ll have to go with one of the usual knuckleheads. I saw A Midsummer Night’s Dream there as a child, as a guest of my father’s friends. I felt so grownup and giddy with the atmosphere and the play. It was a 50′s inspired version – Puck as the Fonz – this gorgeous sequence where a girl falls asleep to an old-fashioned radio on a porch swing opened the play and I was drunk on the tipple of it all. It was memorable in every way.
We’re talking about going to the renaissance festival tomorrow. This is traditional. I’m going to wear my dress and get my palm read or my cards read and not worry too much about the rest. I want certain experiences to be certain ways and when they’re not, I get kind of hatesy and bitchy and miserable and a few of these blog postings are reason enough for you to encourage me to stay mellow and just enjoy the cleavage and boys in tragically awkward leather harnesses traipsing across the faire grounds in 90 degree heat and mispronouncing privies. PRY-VEES, you say, m’lord?
It may be said that this is where I got the amber for my magical, eh, not so much?, necklace. Maybe it needs to go back home to be activated. But it was Baltic amber and frankly, I don’t got the airfare, magick necklace so commence with the love powers or GTFO.
Really, I think tonight in my exhaustion (I hung around to make a minor fool of myself at the city council meeting, but what else is new?), I’m feeling fairly good-natured about my situation on the whole.
There’s all these parties to look forward to throughout the summer, too. Galas, second proms, steampunk balls, picnics, barbecues, artist receptions. One where I need a glittering gold dress, in fact. It is a little bit exciting, isn’t it? Even if you’re an invisible girl, it is quite a social calendar to maintain. I’m focusing on the fact that I’ll be able to have whatever time I want to have at all of these things and I can dread them and hide or I can just go.
I can just go.
