Lucy's Spleen

Come out for a visit here

I find Joanna Newsom almost endlessly make-fun-of-able for her singing. I recall mornings cleaning up after big parties cleaning up with the girlfriends and wailing frustratedly back at Joanna about how she was exacerbating my hangover. But even I have to admit there are moments when the girl just gets the job done. One such example being rainy mornings in a wooden house on a tree-blanketed hillside with a bowl of cranberry and toasted-pecan oatmeal, a cup of dandelion tea and a small, sympathetic dog in your lap. I am a modern-day lady of the canyon and Newsom is my indie Joni Mitchell. It's been such a rare feeling lately that I'm caught off guard by my own contentment.

Poor Stan. Sometimes I'm just not fun enough for Boundless Energy Guy. This is particularly true when I'm ridin' the crimson tide, as I am now. At this time of the month I think mightily and feel highly creative but I can't speak or look people in the eye. The first few days that I have my period the ideal thing for me to do is to tuck in, keep comfortable and get really, really introspective. I have tended to think of it as serendipitous that my episodic reclusion tends to coincide with the times when Stan requires strong social involvement. At home in SLC that has meant nights of reprieve for me; he could go out and blow off steam with our friends and I could stay in and do... whatever it is that I do- putter, I suppose. Unfortunately for both of us we don't really have friends here yet, so on nights like these we're kind of up in the air, not to mention all up in each other's shit.

Tonight was rough. Stan was dying to go do something, and I couldn't get him out of the house fast enough. It's hard for a guy like me, a born helpmeet and involved and compassionate partner,* to endure seeing someone you care about experiencing genuine need and to not only not be able to help them out with it but to find yourself wishing they would get out of your face already. It doesn't sit well to feel such boundless empathy but to know my hands are tied, metaphorically speaking, in virtue of having little control over my physiological state. Anyway I could control it somewhat with the use of birth control, but I choose not to because I'm a filthy hippie and find my natural cycle to be beautiful and invigorating and essential for my well-being. 

Anyway my point is that this was not an issue at home, where we were so close with our friends that we could get together with them, the two of us in our disparate states, and be just fine, and have a lovely dinner party because those are the kinds of friends we have at home- friends who KNOW us. But not here. So that's a new angle on an old thing we have to contend with. I think we're handing it pretty well so far, though. He's out now, and I'm here doing exactly what I want to be doing. Tomorrow he'll be gone all day doing smartypants school stuff, I will be home all day doing home stuff and reading, and by the time he gets home we'll have missed each other desperately.

I did it! This is the final day of NaBloPoMo.

* Eaux, vile. The urge to type "helpmeet" emerged from some deep, old and sweet understanding I have held of the concept since my religious days, but I can't hold to it because if you go and Google it, like I did, the results you'll get will be extravagantly dissimilar to the concept I intended. I also searched for "helpmeet + feminism" with no more promising results, there's too much fanaticism on both sides. This was kind of a fun literary review, however.

Honk, Cough, Snort

I am home from work today. I'm still sick with this yucky cold and was up all night with a croupy little-kid cough moaning and snorking and dozing and waking up stuck in a messed-up dream place not sure whether I was me in my bed or whether I was my cousin's poor asthmatic toddler at our family reunion. Finally I woke up genuinely distressed with that can't-breathe feeling and started shuffling around coughing and rasping and finally drove poor Stan to go sleep on the couch (yay that we have one!) while I did the only thing I could think of which was give myself The Treatment.

The Treatment is what my singing teacher used to when I was studying with her and living in her house in Kansas and would get a bad cold that went to my head and chest like this one has. It involves the afflicted individual having a big swipe of mentholatum rubbed on her upper lip and hot wet washcloths applied to her face and covered with layers of towels to keep the heat and moisture in. You/she, the afflicted,  must also have many blankets pulled up high and tight under your/her chin. I did my best to duplicate The Treatment last night but I didn't have any mentholatum (fine by me, I think it's the nast) and I didn't have Rachel to sit at the edge of the bed and rub my chest and talk to me for what seemed like hours under my towel tent. My washcloths weren't as warm as hers nor my efforts so soothing; the whole exercise made me miss her terribly- now I am crying about it and can't see what I'm typing. She claimed The Treatment cured her husband of the seasonal allergies he had suffered all his life and while I don't know about that I do know it relieved me enough last night that I could get back to sleep after a while and then Stan came in and held me; we slept in late like that and that was a good and different kind of comforting.

I don't know what to do with myself at home all day with no responsibilities. I have managed to utterly waste the first half of the day doing absolutely nothing but I'm not good at doing nothing with impunity, I prefer to do wedge in my time-suck activities in a way that makes it feel like I'm shirking my other duties. Also it is early in my days at work and I'm not supposed to be taking days off yet so I'm uncomfortable with staying home. I'm an odd sort of workaholic in that I tend to put in too much time but not necessarily enough organized effort. There are times when I know I could work more efficiently and not stay through lunch, but somehow I just never do it; then I find myself in a sudden flurry of productivity right at 5:30 when I ought to be heading home. Anyway I've started to really like the team of people I'm working with and I feel rather tenderly about our little codependencies and the ways they wind up needing me. I have this possessive thing that makes it tough to go a weekday with license to not worry about them. What if they need something? Like to have a document printed or a meeting added to their calendars or a flight booked somewhere? Even if they have nothing pressing come up today I still feel I should be in the office if only to keep up the routine. It just doesn't look right for me to not be there. Besides, there are projects I've been drawing out to which I could be half-attending!

I was so guilty and weirded out by staying home at first that I thought I couldn't give myself permission to do anything if I didn't go out and buy a humidifier first because by God, if I'm going to convalesce I'm going to put some effort into it! I turned on the computer with plans to figure out the nearest store that I could get to with the least effort to pick up said humidifier and that's when the distractions began. Now I am thoroughly caught up on the lives of both Jen and Erin and on what several people are saying to one another on MySpace. I could shower, but that sounds too cold even though it would be good for my lungs and sinus and our shower runs out of hot too fast anyway. I did eat breakfast just now finally. I mean to have oatmeal because I'm trying to get a lot of post-Turkey Day fiber but then I saw that we have Happy Thanksgiving Cranberry Breakfast Cake which I'm not entirely sure is really meant for breakfasts but it has cranberries and walnuts just like my oatmeal so I figured that's breakfast and cut myself a giant slice to go with my latte. Yes I know coffee is not good for colds and flu but what kind of Satanist are you that you would deny me my latte when our double-shot portafilter basket just started working again after being mysteriously irreparably clogged for the past two weeks? Anyway the coffee may just allow me to make a move and get some of our laundry done as long as I am in and that would be miraculous. Also the house could stand a little cleaning since we didn't do it over the weekend and now the fine layer of millions of Stan's tiny black hairs that typically carpet our floors have been interwoven with millions of long black hairs from Leonard and it's starting to be noticeable so I'm thinking maybe I should do something.

Incidentally, this ephalump is the humidifier of my hearts desiring:

It may be for kids but it's still better than some boring blue clinical box. Plus I like ephalumps, especially the ultrasonic ones.

(Actually, while we're at it, THIS is the true humidifier I would choose as part of my Ultimate Yuppie Lifestyle:

but it costs more than the next piece of furniture I'm going to buy so ephalumps it is, I hope. (P.S. Plus Minus Zero's space heater design is equally gorgeous if anybody cares and can afford it.))

Now you know everything about me.

P.S. I've been wanting a bird so bad but now I'm stricken with insecurity about my bird-caring qualities because I just left a dry Teflon pot burning on the stove and made our horrible shrieking smoke alarm go crazy and if we had a budgie it'd be dead by now for sure. (I hope the ladybugs are okay!)

I am a November blogging mofo.

Eaux I am so bored with writing about myself. I can't believe how complainingly I am making it through this month. I was going to write that day nineteen is like the Wednesday of November, but then I realized that I have felt that way through all of the -teen days, making the point proportional, but uninteresting. Stan and I are both struggling with our writing tonight; he's been working on a paper for the past couple of days and can't get enough distance from it to discern what it needs at this point, kind of like how I can't see past the fact that I'm blogging now more for the sake of achieving this wacky ambition than for the pleasure of writing.

Of course I could fall to the next obvious option which would be writing an entry for x365, but my bad mood has persisted through today meaning I lack the compassion required in writing about other people. Thus I'm left with writing boringly about my boring thoughts on how boring my writing is. Have you stopped reading yet? (Now Stan is listening to his laptop read his paper aloud to him in its robot voice. Speaking of boring...) It's hard to want to reveal your thoughts when you're feeling mentally stunted. (Now the robot voice is swearing and singing about Santa "Klowss," it's no longer boring, but speaking of mentally stunted...)

You know what I need? I need to get outside for a while, commune with nature and whatnot. That must be why I've got the dog lust going on so bad, it's because I'm lacking the Holy and Unaffected in my life. I'm spending too much time cooped up under the fluorescents with a bunch of civilized types concerned about what to buy next and what other people are thinking about them. I've been in this frame of mind before, but I note that I didn't get there last year and I credit the farm with all its funny animals and the kids I encountered in my work at the Youth Brigade. What's missing from my life is rawness and unselfconsciousness and innocence. These things aren't easy to come by in the big city.

I will show some photos of the kinds of things I mean:

I am a participant in NaBloPoMo.

 

Ode to Butter Lettuce

Damn.
You're so tender and sweet
I don't even have to chew.
That's how smooth you go down baby.
You rock my world.
And when it's over
I get to say-
Yeah,
I ate the whole head.

P.S. Stan's neice and nephew didn't really appreciate me singing it the entire time the three of us were doing the egg/dye bit of Easter together, but I vow that MY children will know every word to and participate in (annual, minimum) performances of The Egg Song, despite the song's lyrical bias favoring whiteness as a positive attribute. In fact, at Easter we'll modify the lyrics according to our liberal dye preferences. Our version will go, "Eggs! Get your eggs here. Fresh and MAUVE (teal, puce, marigold), eggs are here!"

Ah, poor future children. It will likely be a terrible burden on them, being so socially-conscientious while at the same time being so dork-tacular. I guess I should start putting away all the money I save by not getting therapy myself to pay the bill for theirs...

Egg

Have you ever blown up an egg in the microwave? It's quite thrilling, and a total pain in the ass to clean up. I just 'sploded my first. It had an attractive turquoise-and-lavender exterior and I was very much looking forward to eating it. Fortunately, there are about eighty-seven more (eggs/color combinations) where that came from. They're in the refrigerator in a carton labeled in my handwriting: EGGS.   HARD, BOLD.

So my new thing is to be old and have dark circles at the inner corners of my eyes.

Awesome.

Wherein I Loll and Muse

MAN has it ever been raining over here on this coast. It rained so much and for so many days that all I felt I could do was stumble through the many grey days in little lurches and starts between long sessions of lolling around the house musing. It was just too troubling and wet and bothersome to try to go out anywhere. I figured I should make some use of all my staying-at-home-musing time, so I took a bunch of pictures of myself in the mirror, including a few experimental arm-extension photos attempting to capture the depth of my lolling, yea the very essence of my musing.

Here's one in which I appear somewhat bemused, rather than musing:

There. This one turned out somewhat more muse-ish:

I muse in profile:

Here's a picture of me with our plant:

Why yes, that is my ugly bedspread! And behind it is my ugly carpeting! Bring on the emmer-effing rain, my friend! For the ugliness is all around us, can't you see it? May as well loll and muse resignedly, like so:

I am no longer amused:

So I did this for a while, and then the sun came out, and suddenly- ta da! I'm leaving the house again, taking my walks- I'm telling you, one sunny afternoon in this place and you forget you ever saw a cloud in your life- it's that beautiful.

What's more, we got to have a sleepover with MALCOLM! We fetched and we wrestled and a couple of times Malcolm got so excited/nervous that he couldn't help but whiz a little,  then we settled in for a delightsome night of snuggling, thusly:

(Thanks again to Grace for the loan of the sweetness!)

Now I will do product promotion:

Say, folks, have you ever been blue? Lolled around and mused like a highschooler? I know I have. I used to muse and loll for days, but then I discovered yerba mate. You can drink it from a gourd! This popular botanical formulation is said to be second* only to cocaine in the therapeutic areas of appetite reduction, getting cranked, having a good mood and, always a favorite, shitting!

[cue children's voices: "Thank you, Latin America!"]

Whether you're dropping a dress size, or waiting out a wrist-slittingly rainy season, yerba mate will give you a BOOST! So what are you waiting for? Try yerba mate- today!

* A distant second.

Pistil Whipped

I woke up at 4:00 a.m. this morning and couldn't get back to sleep for thinking about those damn urinals. At first it was because I got a little ticked, thinking how men get to pee practically anywhere they want already to so why pick on the flowers for heaven's sake? That's just perverse. Then, reflecting on a time I attempted to write my own name in the snow, I put aside my frustration and moved on to concerns both aesthetic and practical. For example, although many of the urinal designs are quite lovely, the display- white walls, sterile rows of flowers, exposed plumbing- leaves a great deal to be desired. I mean, why not a bouquet? You could group three or four urinals together to form a sweet little nosegay; the perfect centerpiece for the men's room at your local 24-Hour Fitness! Of course with the blooms clustered that way there may be a concern with issues of male self-consciousness. The customary dick-size comparison ritual will assume a new level of intimidation when guys step up to the urinal and GET A LOAD OF THE SIZE OF THAT PISTIL!

With urinals this daunting, it's not likely anybody would do any peeing on the flowers after all. And so, mollified by this thought, I drifted happily to sleep again.