Salsa

This was a comment on another site that got too long~

A really healthy marriage is about being defenders of each other's solitude.

Occasionally taking a selfish day, and being given it, gladly.

Never taking it for granted. Always being grateful, and generous. It takes a zenlike attentiveness. Done well, the burden is lighter, never heavier.

Unless the beloved is suffering, and I cannot help. Then, it is unbearable.

But on a more prosaic note~



D and I cannot shop. Especially not for food. We walk into a grocery store, and cannot figure out what we want to make for dinner, what food to have in the house. It comes in part from living a block away from a large grocery store for many years. Several trips in a day to finally, actually, get what we talked about needing the night before, was not unusual.

The rule about not going shopping hungry doesn't work for us. Today we had a lovely lunch at India Quality, then stopped for groceries. It took a great deal of will to walk out with makings for dinner. Had we just come out with mustard, a roll of paper towels and a lemon, it would not have been unusual.

There was a phase where we kept thinking we had salsa, so didn't buy any, only to get home and we were out. So, over the next week or so, we remembered salsa. Wound up with four jars in the fridge, each time exclaiming,

"Oh, yeah, we finally did get salsa."

To this day, when in the grocery store, if we seem to be starting this cycle of confusion again (it has happened with other items, to a lesser extent) we say, "Yeah, but do we have salsa?"

This may have also been the time I couldn't get the jar open, and tried the trick of turning the jar over and hitting the lid on the counter. Only I must have slanted it a bit, and it shattered into a shower of glass and salsa and, indistinguishably, my blood. It was shocking, and very funny.

We do, in fact have three jars of salsa right now, but that is variety, not brain cramp. Really.


(Still having to stand to write, so these are patchy posts, scrabbled writing. Moby's eye looking better, D's knee will have a scar, but is healing. I can sit through lunch, which is a vast improvement. When normal service resumes, assume I am feeling all well.)

Veterinarian

It's been a rough week on all three of us. Tuesday, Moby started having one eye tear, and open less than the other. Calls to the vet suggested a wait and see approach. Yesterday at work I tried to call D, and left a message. Then I got this email:


Moby's eye is looking more swollen than it was, so I'm going to take him to the vet. I hate to make him go through it, but I'm starting to worry about it getting worse, and I want to take care of it in case it needs something besides just waiting for it to clear up.

Since it's mid-day, the waiting room may not be so crowded with dogs, and maybe we won't have to wait so long.

I love you. I hope your day is going OK.
-----------------------------
And not too much later:

We're back from the vet. Moby was about as unhappy about getting into the carrier as you can imagine. It took a few very exciting minutes to get him in it, and in his struggle to stay out, he gave me a 4" scratch on my right knee. Ouch.

He meowed the whole trip to the MSPCA, but he calmed down once we were there. The Dr. who saw Moby was really good with him, and he said that Moby acted more like a dog than a cat, by which I assume he meant that Moby didn't have to be restrained while being examined. Yet another indication that Moby is, in fact, the Best Cat Ever.

There weren't any indications of any more serious illness, which is good. He gave me a tube of a topical antibiotic that needs to go on Moby's eye 3 times a day, and he showed me how to put it on (which is going to be quite a trick).

Moby actually got back into the carrier fairly easily, and he was pretty quiet waiting for the cab. He meowed again on the way back, but not too badly. It was a shorter and slightly smoother trip.

He's stretched out on the carpet right now, and he seems much happier.

I hope things are going well. I love you.
-----------------

Moby is taking the ointment better than expected, and his eye is looking less swollen today, though with a fair amount of discharge. He seems to be generally feeling better.

Poor wee cat.

D's scratch is looking better.

Who

My mother and I sang together. Pop songs, old songs, hymns and carols, children's songs. The record player was a turntable in a small case. Her classical records were kept in her bedroom closet, brought out to look at, but rarely played. Ballet music, I think.

I was allowed the turntable, and access to my children's albums, in my room, and when the older brothers left home, their leftovers. Mom refused to make the record player easier to access for the stated reason that my father would listen all day long to a single country record. She detested Grand Ole Opry. The explanation had the ring of bitter truth. He had no music in him, and rusted out a pair of songs, in bits.

"I love you a bushel and a peck. A bushel and a peck and a hug around the neck."
and,
"Mademoiselle from Amentiers, parlez vous. Mademoiselle from Amentiers, parlez vous. Hasn't been kissed in forty years, hinky dinky parlez vous."

That was it. In indecipherable tunelessness.

I devoured what recorded music I had. The soundtrack for Mary Poppins. (Loved the deliciously ironic Stay Awake.) Later, the left-behinds. A Crosby Stills Nash and Young live album. And Tommy, The Who. The latter, I had memorized. Tended to skip the long guitar solos, since I couldn't sing along. I had very few records of my own, an expense not often indulged. A couple of John Denver albums - I had a friend who was obsessed, a huge fan, so I picked it up to have common ground.

What I really loved was folk music, what is now called international music. Difficult to find then. Lively, minor key, complicated rhythms, the odd, the unusual, the genuine un-processed sounds. I went along with pop because it was easy, omnipresent, I could sing along, a subject of conversation. I interned at a NICE radio station when I was going through broadcasting school. I couldn't stomach it today. Such pap, musical cheese-whiz.

When I met D, found out he was a guitarist, and a big fan of The Who. And here I was, with one of their albums in my head. I learned to appreciate guitar solos. He learned to like Klezmer. Both of our tastes have changed and grown. We have days of music, MP3s, today. Much of it is mine.

No taking the easy paths to nowhere.

Pins

I have not written. I cannot sit long. I am standing now, the laptop on the high counter, leaning against a barstool.

Almost a year ago, I had a little incident, wherein I was beaten up in order to restore breath and life. The subsequent pain has crawled around my body, in no small part emotional, omnipresent, to greater or lesser degree. I am heartily tired of it. I have chased it hard, with massage, chiropractors, and exercise when possible, heat, cold, rest, stretching, drugs. All at a time and sequentially. Nothing seems to help deeply, or for long. More migraines than I have had for a decade - but that may just be the hormonal changes of the mid 40's. At my wit's end, I am reaching out to a different modality. Not shots and surgery, this is too amorphous, too chronic for Western trauma, reactive medicine.

I have been dreaming about sticking needles into the current sore spots, so electric is the pain. This made me consider when I got an invite from a newly opening office with both massage, and acupuncture. Well, I began chiropractic to immense relief about 7 years ago , in another state, for exactly the same reason. An ad in the mail, when I was home nursing my spasming back. It turned my life around, without exaggeration. The chiropractors I have seen here are not up to the job. Some relief, but no progress, no deep improvement, bare maintenance.

Life has often quietly offered me answers to my problems. When I have been attentive and tried, I have found ease and friendship and the path through. When I ignore the whispered hints, I wind up in deep, sticky mud. Looking back, I am not sure if I missed an offer, or if I am only now ready to need it.

I'll let you know next year if this was the right choice. It does take a while to know. But the idea of being a pincushion is appealing right now, and that can't be right, unless it is right.

Urban (Photos)

Drag

I'm waiting to see Transamerica. I am not sure I will like it. I really didn't like Pricilla Queen of the Desert, gone to on the recommendation of a friend who thought it hilarious. She is gay, and I took it as a test of my openmindedness. I failed. I don't get transvestites, in particular the over the top performers. The public performance by men of female stereotypes, as though they as men could DO women, better than women, always struck me as insulting. Blackface.

The performance transvestite man is recreating, mocking, the whore woman, the woman created to entice men, and as such, is my sticking point. I have had to realize it is not so simple, that the motivations behind the female impersonators are not clear cut, not all the same. Still. I am no fan. I feel ridiculed and offended. I don't get what is so funny. Then I turn it around in my mind again, and remember Dolly Parton. Who I have always liked. She takes that set of flamboyances and gives 'em a big wet hug.

I have softened my opinion about female impersonators over the decades, let go of taking it as a personal affront. Dave Foley of Kids in the Hall, acts out female characters that are not Milton Berle hashes, or even the Monty Python harridans. He makes himself into a normal looking woman, trying to be attractive without prostituting the image, then finding the comedy.

It's not about minding a man who has a fetish - none of my business, whatever floats boats and all. And I am cool with men who feel female, and try to live outside, the way they feel inside. Even more understanding for the transgendered, ambiguous and androgynous, from either end of the spectrum. Human sexuality and gender are bendy fluid and peculiar.

I don't put men in a rigid set of behaviour box, and I will not go in one myself. I think this is the heart of feminism, a feminism that says we are all human, a feminism that takes the mother's view that all humans are from her body, and are all beloved. None are to be judged by genitals first and last. I heard the criticisms of Gloria Steinem, a joke woman, a man hater, bra burner, and did not question it much, until I heard her on the radio myself. She was utterly rational, reasonable, humane, and funny. I began to understand the fight she was up against as she jerked at the assumptions of her society. No man hater, a truly compassionate and brilliantly political human who shouldered a huge heap of blame and anxiety.

I would today change my self-defined word to Androgynist, to clarify. To draw back from wrenching the once male-defined toward the female-defined just to get it out of the extreme position, and closer to the middle. More subtle adjustments are needful now. Gender bigotry is still defended, often with religion, sometimes with limited liberality. This is what I scent in my own attitude, that I will go this far, but that is beyond the pale.

Maybe the Drag Show will eventually fade into the obscurity of the once seemingly unkillable TV variety shows, I Love Lucy reruns, Rocky sequels, and yes, minstrel shows. Anachronistic holdouts, but eventually evolution wins. If it doesn't, I will accept that it is not what I thought, and look at it from another, perhaps queerer, angle.

Bed (Photo)

Moby Talks.

Wild

But first, Qarrtsiluni has graciously put up a short short of mine, Fish. Better yet, an image Skyfishin response that proves that the picture is worth more than 100 words.




Wednesday, on the way to the dentist, I took the shorter walk through the park to the single train stop, rather than the three line hub. Through the Fenway.

All the geese were standing there, perhaps 40 of them, across the lawn, in the water, along the path, spaced about a meter apart and looking left. All of them. I am nervous around geese. When I was 10, I went to pet one at Sea World, despite being warned, and got a painful nip to teach me this was a wild creature capable of defense. I excused myself, out loud to the phalanx of geese, and felt the hot hostility as I crossed their picket. Great relief after passing through unscathed.

Thursday morning, I did the same, in the cool of 0600 after night storms. There was a new orange ball in a gutter puddle, and I picked it up. Only a little grimy, one of those novelty gel things, and I walked with it across the street, tried to bounce it. It bounced badly, but took the slope and scampered off down toward the basketball courts, looking like it was happily running home.

I stopped on the poohstick bridge and watched a half dozen foot and a half long carp like fish swimming in the current for several minutes. Missing a train, of course. But the next came soon enough, and beside me on the window crawled an orange Ladybug. At the transfer station, I watched a tiny, mud grey mouse on the tracks.

Last evening, I walked back the same way, and watched dragonflies skimming the still surface of the muddy water, and a turtle poking it's nose up.

I feel blessed.

Status

This week I have seen two young men on the train with Official Baseball Hats. I know this, because they'd left the stickers on the brims. Neither looked at all 'cool,' putting me in mind of Minnie Pearl instead - unwilling to remove any of the decoration, including the price tag, from her hat. Minnie, of course, was the stage persona of a talented, savvy woman. These sad young men were searching for acceptance and admiration from a holographic sticker. Proof that they had the cash to buy, or the cajones to steal, the Real Thing, to be part of a professional team, a powerful and popular institution.

I know women who love burberry. Ugly plaid, I think, although quite distinctive. I see it all over the place, and think of those who sport it - how pretentious. How status conscious. What do they think other's think? Do they imagine I notice their pricey item, and envy them? Proof, in my mind, that we never really know what is in another mind. Neither mockery nor admiration.

I discovered that a certain brand name designer really does make clothes that are flattering on me, because of a discount store I have access to these days. I like the quality, well sewn, soft durable fabric. I cut off labels, and hide the prestige. Is this better? I am not sure, although I will wear these clothes when I am home alone as often as when I am in public.

D has expressed dismay at his own standing, in his mid thirties, compared to fellow grad students who have trod a more common road. They will be managers and administrators. D will not, nor does he want to be, but he still feels... compared is perhaps the word. Floating outside a definable form.

I can appreciate this. I do find some ease in having a recognizable profession. But I know when I say "I'm a surgical nurse," that the image in their minds has little to do with my reality, probably. Like when we tell people we are married, with a relationship that seems little like the stereotypical image of marriage. No house, no car, no kids, what do we think we are playing at? But I refer to him as husband in impersonal social situations - it saves time and effort, and pointless explanation. Shorthand sufficient for the interaction. Simplification to the point of inaccuracy.

I don't know what is really in those young men's minds as they sport their Minnie Pearl decorations. Could they both be making a reference to that Grand Ole Opry star? They may pity drab, unfashionable, aging me, if they even notice me. All I know for sure, is that I am walking my own road, with all my heart. Whilst secretly wearing last year's designer styles.

Saint (Photo)

I love 'tobacco cards' - for a burnt martyr.

Canada

On Canada Day, we walked the Boston Freedom Trail. There was a fork near the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial. There were re-enactors at the Old City Hall, and on the site of the Boston Massacre. There were tourists in rainbow shirts at the Franklin memorial (not his grave, that's in Philly.)

Band (Photo)

Paper (Photo)

We are settling in so well here.  Moby is happy.  We were having a  long spate of rain that was making getting out to get litter a massive, insurmountable chore. We decided to  order it delivered.   It was cheaper than a cab ride, put it that way.  Regardless,  the box and long strip of  packing paper has been a delight for creative cat play.  He got up on the footstool and leapt into it, like a kid on a diving board,  several times. Chases the erasermice through the labyrinth of the crinkles, hides under it, surely invisible.   Some people would think a few yards of brown paper in the living room is at best questionable decor.  I am not one of them.