Double, double toil and trouble / Fire burn, and cauldron bubble. ~Macbeth Act 4, scene 1, 10–11
Last night I had dinner with my dear friend. We met in the neighborhood for Thai food, and we’d kind of warned each other in advance that we weren’t doing all that well: she was feeling tired and sick with allergies (this warm winter we’re having in NYC is killing the allergy-sufferers!), and I’m worn down and exhausted and post-migrainey with just a hint of the blues (probably from my continuing inability to sleep). So we met with all this advance knowledge and with our appropriately low expectations. We also both believed that seeing each other would help us feel better. We always talk about our thoughts and feelings, our worries, our plans, we ask for and give each other advice, and we laugh and cry. It’s the best part of life, getting to have that with another person.
So we ate our dinner, and we laughed and cried, and we decided to have a cup of tea at her place rather than at the restaurant, since she lives just a couple of blocks from the restaurant. By the time we left the restaurant, I’d been crying a good bit, and my mood and heart were kind of heavy. (Note: that’s not a bad thing, it’s a relief to share sorrows with someone!) We got to her place with an express mission of making a caffeine-free cup of tea, so she opened her cabinet to see what variety of teas she had to offer.
[sidebar comment of note: we are both women of a certain age, though i am more certain than she is.]
ladies' tea
She said:
“Let’s see. I have FatBuster, Women’s Cycle, and Black Cohosh.”
I fell down laughing. I laugh this morning, remembering it.
She looked at me and she started laughing. I laughed seeing her laugh. I couldn’t stop. And my heart lightened so much.
And so another kind of friendship magic happened, another of those moments that are just a bit of crystalline joy — surprise! You can’t make them happen, they come in the midst of time together. This reminds me of the old “quality/quantity time” argument people will make about time with their kids…..usually as a justification for not spending much time with them, “it’s the quality, you know.” Yes, but quantity is critical too, because connection and life happens in a surprise moment like this, and you need a luxury of time, a spread of it, to give space for moments like this.
Lucky me.
edit: this is post #666. of all things. 
Let the rain kiss you / Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops / Let the rain sing you a lullaby / The rain makes still pools on the sidewalk / The rain makes running pools in the gutter / The rain plays a little sleep song on our roof at night / And I love the rain. ~ Langston Hughes
It is an utterly beautiful day to be working at home, one of those that makes me grateful to be a freelancer, grateful to be sitting at my desk in the window, watching the drenching rains, seeing the wind blowing the drops across standing puddles, seeing the lights turn on in apartments across the street as the skies darken. I met a favorite client this morning at my corner Starbucks and proceeded to dump my giant cappuccino all over the table, on our papers, and in my lap. She was kind and gracious as she grabbed napkins and helped me clean up, assuring me with a gentle lie that this happens to her all the time. I came home during one of the brief breaks in the rain, peeled off my coffee-drenched jeans, and pulled on flannel pajamas. Made a big mug of green tea and lightly toasted a sesame bagel. Pulled out my chair, opened my laptop, and took a deep breath. Selected the perfect music: Berliner Messe, by Arvo Pärt, performed by the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir and the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra.
After weeks of not sleeping, I took a pill last night that made me sleep deeply, all night long. It’s not something I can do regularly — the drug is not addictive, but it has dreadful side-effects like weight gain and the potential for tardive dyskinesia — but getting one good night of sleep is enough, for now. Happy Friday, y’all. I hope it’s as peaceful and lovely where you are as it is at my desk.
Here’s a different piece by Arvo Pärt, also perfect for a rainy day:
“Cracked Open in Dunkin’ Donuts” — a Lori story
Brevity in the face of way too much work, y’all (not complaining….exactly….) — but I read this Tom Stoppard piece this afternoon (from Arcadia) and it stopped me cold with its beauty:
We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?
Isn’t that just lovely, and true?
i do love my city. it's heartbreakingly beautiful.
And today I had one of those experiences that are not at all uncommon for me. It’s bitterly cold, and I was about 20 minutes early for an appointment. There was no Starbucks in the neighborhood (what???! No Starbucks in the neighborhood???), but there was a Dunkin Donuts, so I stopped in and bought a small coffee so I could justify sitting at their little table in the window. I was very cold, and the coffee smelled so good, and I sat in the sunlight, smelling the coffee, and looking out the window at the very bright light bouncing off the skyscrapers of midtown Manhattan. I saw the people curled into commas, hunched inside their thick coats against the cold, walking so fast down the sidewalk. And then it hit me, how beautiful the world is, how beautiful the constructed world is, how beautiful the natural world is, how touching it is that we all walk past each other with our struggles and joys, how beautiful winter is, against the other seasons, and I started crying. I felt cracked open by the world, as I often do. I thought “Cracked open in Dunkin Donuts” and that sounded like some kind of nutty short story. And I laughed.
all i want for christmas is you (and his courage)
I want to be his friend — I want to be him. If this doesn’t make you grin like an idiot, get up right now and go slap yourself in the face. Seriously. Lighten up.
When you’re smiling / When you’re smiling / The whole world smiles with you
When you’re laughing / When you’re laughing / The sun comes shining through
COME ON. Smile.
I don’t usually like fan videos – who wants to see someone else’s ideas of images to go with a song. And they’re usually dumb. This works, especially if you relax and let it. Come on, be happy again. (this post is plagiarized from myself, from some random day in December 2010.)
No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace / as I have seen in one autumnal face (~ John Donne)
When we have particularly nice weather here in New York, I always think of my dear daughter Katie, sweltering and cracking with drought in Austin. She and I both hate the breath-removing heat, and she’s been in such a long run of it. So with all my apologies, Katie…..
OH MY it’s gorgeous here. We’re just in this very lovely cool, dry, sunny period right now. The kind of weather that makes you pause, tilt your head, sniff the air a little bit, and go back inside for a scarf. It’s fall, it’s here. The sky is an unbelievably clear blue. For my money, it’s the most glorious time in this part of the world, and makes up for February and March (well…..almost). If I didn’t live here, it’s the time of year I’d miss the most, it’s the thing I’d long for about New York. As I write, it’s 53 degrees — heading to a high of just 65. See?
oh my. perfection.
I just feel a little twinge — it’s really so pretty, I want to do something this weekend, go somewhere, get out in it, revel in it, glory in it. But that would seriously interfere with my knitting time, which is pressing on me, hard. Why can’t there be two of me. Seriously.
I hope it’s gorgeous where you are on this September Friday!
time to listen to the Polyphonic Spree…
The title of this post is yet another AA saying, and it’s one I really love. I like it differently than the Churchill quote there to the left, though they seem to be saying the same thing, generally. Don’t give up before the miracle. And you know, the miracle can be the tiniest thing that just comes from nowhere.
I haven’t been down in the dumps lately, but there have certainly been a number of times in my life when I got awfully close to the bleakest edge you can imagine. I’m so glad that those moments didn’t go the direction they were headed, and that my life force did not give up. I got struck by a tremendous blow of joy this morning. It happened as I was writing my responses to this little list:
- Five things you love about yourself.
- Five things your body can do.
- Five things you’re grateful for.
- Five things that make you happy you’re alive.
- Five people who you love (pets included!).
Well! In a stunning confluence, I became so happy I started crying and just couldn’t stop (the confluence was that the first thing I wrote in response to the first one was that I’m easily moved to tears ). Does this happen to you, you become so embodied with deep, deep happiness — joy, maybe — that you almost feel like you can’t hold it, or maybe it’s kind of like the boundaries of everything disappear and you feel larger than yourself?
See what happens if you make the 5 lists. Just do them in your head, if you like. I wish you joy, too.
happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear sweet marnie, happy birthday to you!
She’s 26 years old, today (exactly half my age!). She’s an artist / weight lifter / thoughtful smart loving funny creative sweet tough genuine amazing authentic person. Marnie has been special from the moment of her birth (and I’m not just kidding here, or using hyperbole or just being her mom) (though I am her mom) (and real proud of it) (and of her too) (because she is a fine, fine human being). If she loves you you’re a very lucky person. I’m a very lucky person. Happy birthday, Marnie my love.
she loves photobooths
she loves nature (though she prefers ants to turtles)
she used to LOVE being fancy and adorable
she loves irony -- (as in, wearing this pink fuzzy sweater ironically)
she loves Tom (me too)
she's one of the smartest people I know (Smith 2006), and i happen to know a bunch of very smart people so that's saying something
and she's freaking aDORable on top of it all
she loves cows
y'all remember this one.
and she loves me.
it’s about time! i’m pleased to introduce you to……
excuse everything about this photo please!
There’s nothing good to say about this picture — my hair is its morning mess, there’s nothing styled here, the sweater is just off the needles and so not yet blocked, and it’s pinned together with yellow-headed pins — but LOOK! My Dark & Stormy sweater [rav link] is a fait accompli! (and p.s., that’s not really a muffin top around my waist, it’s the unblocked sweater pooching out. i swear. )
And do I love it? With the heat of a thousand burning suns. With the calories of a thousand triple-decker chocolate cakes. With the winds of a thousand level 5 tornadoes. With the spit of a thousand tobacco-chewing cowboys. With the seeds of a thousand watermelons. I’d say I do.
Janna, I think you were on to something. I needed to finish something. I haven’t had an FO in months, and finishing this has re-lit the fire in mah belly. Now I just want to grab Eve’s Rib and finish her off. I’m in a tough spot since I came to be crazy about sweater knitting; knitting small things doesn’t thrill me like it used to, but it takes me a long time to finish a sweater so the FOs are fewer and farther between. I’ll have to figure this out.
Au revoir, ennui! Hasta luego, malaise! Hello, new sweater!
three things that choke me up, here on a bitter cold Friday morning
The newest:
How’d they do that without being corny? I was watching it all alone this morning at 6am, kind of steeled against being moved because I’d read that it was moving (like, ‘oh yeah? not me buddy…’) and then there I was with big tears in my eyes.
Next: I know I put this on the Laos blog on Thanksgiving, but I find myself unable to stop thinking about it. When I was a little kid, I was dark. I read too much Kafka and Camus at too young an age, wondered about the meaning of life, blah blah blah, loved to call myself an “existentialist” by which I meant what people usually mean, which seems to be an assumption that it’s all meaningLESS. But of course that’s not what it really means; at least, that’s not the end of it. Existentialism really means that we endow the meaning ourselves, more or less. I once heard Leo Buscaglia say that people who wonder about the meaning of life are really just talking about the experience of life, that the point is to experience life. I’ve become very impatient with people who mope around and say there’s no meaning. FUCK THAT, yes there is. You’re here, we’re here, we get to be here. And here’s the bit I can’t stop thinking about, that I put on my Laos blog, from Cat’s Cradle, The Books of Bokonon (Kurt Vonnegut, of course):
God made mud. God got lonesome. So God said to some of the mud, “Sit up!” “See all I’ve made,” said God, “the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars.” And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around. Lucky me, lucky mud. I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done. Nice going, God. Nobody but you could have done it, God! I certainly couldn’t have. I feel very unimportant compared to You. The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud that didn’t even get to sit up and look around. I got so much, and most mud got so little. Thank you for the honor! Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep. What memories for mud to have! What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met! I loved everything I saw! Good night.”
Yeah. Every day that we get to be here – even for the real shitty stuff – it’s an honor. Lucky us, and I mean that in the most honest, least ironic way.
And finally (since this is just the $200 category), this one always makes me cry and fits well with the Vonnegut passage, for me:
Happy Friday y’all.
we are the world, we are the linguists. we make theories.
I LOVE THIS!!! And Marnie – I see something in here for The Sociologists. Drag Tom over to watch this.
Totally, totally amazing.
I don’t care how Paul Klee said it, I like my version better. Color makes life worth living.
In addition to Walt Whitman, one of my other top-10 favorite poets is Yeats. I enjoy re-reading The Second Coming over and over, but was surprised a couple of years ago to learn that I always misread one word, and always in the same way. Ah, the power of seeing what you think you’re seeing. Here is the actual wording:
…The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep…
For years I always read that as stormy sleep. I once had a pretty substantial online presence as stormysleep, drawn from my misreading. And I also thought Paul Klee said that color (though he’d have said colour) makes life worth living. But in preparing to write this post, I discovered that he didn’t say that. He said these near-misses:
- Color has got me. It has got me for ever. I know it. That is the meaning of this happy hour.
- Color is the place where our brain and the universe meet.
I like “color makes life worth living” better, so I’m going with that. Take that, Paul Klee. Anyway, here’s what prompted that meandering beginning:
madelinetosh vintage - colorway baltic. For my Dark & Stormy KellyinTX birthday sweater! WHEE!!
wow. saturated, glad-i'm-alive color
It’s funny how the current project cycle lives all together on the color wheel, isn’t it. Obviously, the blue is for the Dark and Stormy sweater, as I said in the caption. I want to do the swatching for that tonight, if possible. I’m sure you recognize Eve Shrugged, there at the top. She’s in time out because she was mean to my friend Jocelyn. I’ve kind of lost my punch with it; I’m ready to pick up the sleeves, and it should go quickly, but I don’t know. It’s been one thing after another with that one, and then it didn’t work for Jocelyn. meh. Anyway, the bright red is the beginnings of a swatch for the adorable little Laar sweater, with that great colored yarn called Dragon’s Blood. The purple at the bottom is the Owl Eyes Scarf for my friend Marian.
And here’s my current luxury problem. I wish everyone’s problems were this sweet, I really do: what knitting to take to Laos and Cambodia, of course. That’s my dilemma. The flight from JFK to Hong Kong is like 20 hours. Then we’re in the HK airport for a couple of hours, followed by the flight to Phnom Penh which takes 1.5 hours (I think). So that’s an awful lot of time, right?! However, it’ll be in a cramped Cathay Pacific coach seat, and the cabin will be darkened for most of the flight. I can of course turn on my overhead light without bothering people too much, too. So that’s not the place to do anything that requires a lot of chart-watching, a lot of stitch-counting, a lot of attention-paying. Still. A lot of time. And obviously, I’ll have the same amount of time coming home.
In between, of course, will be in-country traveling, Phnom Penh to Siem Reap to Vientiane and Luang Prabang (Laos) and back. Walking around Angkor Wat, riding in boats up/down the Mekong. Nevertheless, I am lazy and I piddle, so there will be time for knitting.
But as I keep saying, this last giant manuscript isn’t editing itself so I’d better stop this fun piddling and get to it. Happy Friday y’all.
you know how someone can be trying to be real mean to you, but it turns out they’re all wrong and what they’re trying to say about you is actually something you love? Yeah. That happened to me once.
You know this routine? Somebody once presented me with the lyrics to this song in an attempt to be mean and accusatory, but the joke and laugh was on him, because it’s a transcendant song for me, one that speaks right to my spirit and joy. Ha, take that you mean guy.
Imogen Heap is the amazing voice behind Frou Frou, and Let Go is the song I’m talking about. I found this live version and while I miss the pounding beat of the studio version, her voice is just so chilling. No, not chillin’. It’s chilling.
As always, with music and videos, placed here for my own finding-it later. Lyrics after the jump: CLICK to continue reading beauty in the breakdown... Continue reading »
in which we jump for joy
I promise I’m not going to keep going on and on about this, but a photo came in from my daughter Katie’s collection and it’s really how I wanted to end my wedding posting – it says it all. Thank you Katie!
And a couple of Marnie dancing with her parents:
Marnie dances with her dad - this is SO them
Marnie and me, doing our private dance to our song
I hope seeing the pictures makes you feel — even a little bit — some of the joy.
.
i did it! i did it! i did it! i did it!
happy! joy!
SUCH a wonderful, happy day for me! I finished the final little details of my old job, tied up every last loose end, left nothing undone, left on a very high note.
I finished grafting the shawl together, and it LOOKS GREAT! I was so worried that the graft would be obvious and weird, but you know the kitchener stitch is really amazing. It really looks seamless. Now I just have to weave in a couple of ends, then soak it for a bit and do the blocking.
Isn’t it great when the things that hang over you are finished? You know that glorious feeling of liberation and accomplishment and exuberance?
Yeah. I’ve got those going. After I finish the blocking, I think I’ll do the next swatch for Peasy, so I can work on it on the flight later this week. To my daughter’s wedding. Two girls happily married, that’s another great relief, you know?
blocking
.
now and then, the music is a perfect fit to your moment.
There are moments in life when the soundtrack syncs perfectly. Do you know what I mean? One very hot summer night a couple of years ago, I went out for a walk around 10pm, headed toward the Columbia University campus, which is just a couple of blocks up Broadway from my apartment. I walked to the corner of Broadway, and just as I turned left to head toward campus, someone somewhere started playing Summertime on a trumpet. It was haunting, and perfect, and such an incredible New York moment. The living did feel easy; it was a sultry night, the music was perfectly suited and played by someone who had much more emotion than skill, which made it even better, and I was walking in my beloved city. I got goose bumps then, and I always get them when I recall that moment, like I’m doing now. Perfect, and magical.
blue skies and puffy clouds
And today, just now, another moment like that. It’s the first day of summer, the light is dazzling, the sky is blue, the air smells sweet (so far….check back with me later when the air reeks of trash and urine), shopkeepers are spraying their sidewalks so there is a cool mist in the air all along the sidewalk, and I was walking to the UPS shop with my beloved daughter’s wedding dress in my arms, ready to send her.
As always, I was listening to music. As I turned the corner onto Broadway, a string of absolutely PERFECT songs came on my ipod: Beautiful Day, by U2; Feels So Good, by Chuck Mangione; and Boogie Shoes, by who else – K.C. and the Sunshine Band. I felt my feet leave the ground. And, of course, I cried. That’s so me. You can’t give someone else your synchronicity, but in case you also like these songs, and they fit your day, here they are:
Also: yodeling, banjo music, and laughter in a lot of different languages. Things that add to my feeling that it is fine to be a human being in this world.
ok go does it again – joy all around.
remember the guys who did that great video with treadmills? check this out:
Watch the whole thing – it made me laugh out loud a number of times, and feel happy to be alive.
on the pleasures of making shit
A few days ago, I was thinking about the different names for creative people – artist, craftsman, artisan, crafter, and then the specifics, like knitter, quilter, furniture maker, etc. Today I am sewing, working on my daughter’s wedding dress, and the living room is my messy workspace. As I was stepping around papers spread on the floor, I glanced at my Shaker box on the coffee table and was just filled with pleasure, the pleasure of the colors, the yarn, the textures, the messy pile. And I saw my sunny sewing table and felt such happiness. And the dress pieces, stacked on the table waiting for me.
beautiful, beautiful projects in mid-making
such a lovely place to sew
beautiful green Italian linen, waiting to be sewn
And I didn’t care one little bit what I call myself, or what it is I do. I make shit. And that makes me happier than I can possibly say.
lift your heart
Bliss out, man.
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