I am a northern girl and I do lean forward when I walk, as if the viscosity of the world required a daily fight. but I don't lead with my shoulders so much as my forehead. it is, after all, the biggest and most solid part of my upper body, so I go around crashing into everything headfirst.
but I've been trying to walk better lately. not more sedately, because nothing I do is particularly calm or dignified to begin with, but more fully upright. I am, after all, a modern human, what with the constant arsenal of electronic devices kept within an eight-inch radius of my body. so as I walk to and from the subway station, or around the inside of the grocery store, or up and down the stairs at the gym, I imagine a plumb line suspended from the top of my skull and dropping through my body to my ankles. the line has to stay inside my neck, between my lungs, inside my pelvis, and between my knees before it grazes the ground beside my feet. too often I lose my concentration and the line swings out through my breastbone or even my chin, and I have to straighten up to make it disappear back inside my core.
it does feel different. with my backpack on I feel like I can sense the exact direction that gravity pulls toward the center of the earth, as the straps bear down on my shoulders like two tiny force vectors. and with my gaze kept self-consciously level I imagine I can see the stream of photons coming at me, in a line perfectly perpendicular to the horizon, long before they make it to my retinas.
if I bother to think about it, I still try to chew my food to mush before I swallow it, and I try to floss my teeth at least four times a week (any more and I find my tongue swimming in a constant pool of sublingual blood). but both of these self-improvement efforts have passed beyond the realm of obsession into mere good intentions. they've been replaced by the perennial hallmark of compulsion: handwashing.
teaching makes your hands very dirty. teaching science makes your hands especially dirty. the chalk-dust pall is bad enough, but earth science demands that you dig through trays of soil and sand and pebbles, or sort rocks and minerals, or clean up beakers that have been coated in a slick of vegetable oil. so I wash my hands after every class, before and after lunch, and pretty much any other time that I go around touching things. since the internet says you should sing a song while you scrub to make sure you've done a thorough job, I always whisper happy birthday to you until I've got a handful of lather. of course, since I am a northern girl who rushes into everything headlong, my tendency is to sing "happy birthday" at a chipmunk-esque 45 rpm speed. to counteract that, I conjure the only slow, languid version of "happy birthday" that I know.
and that is how I ended up standing with perfect ramrod-straight posture at the lab room sink, surrounded by grimy glassware and dripping test tubes, breathily murmuring happy birthday... mister president... until soap bubbles slid down my forearms and into the rolled-up sleeves of my sweater.
[ 26.1.06] · [ ]
wow! that was fun. I had no idea so many people from my past lives in past cities were still aware of my existence, let alone checking up on me. you should all say hello more often, and then poor tom wouldn't have to listen to my baleful recitations of all the friends I used to have but never hear from anymore.
speaking of tom, we did laundry yesterday. we loaded up our three bags of dirty laundry and rolled them to the laundromat, where we separated everything into four loads (lights, darks, blue/greens, red/purples), fed the machines seven dollars worth of quarters, and settled into a pair of dirty plastic chairs to wait for the end of the last spin cycle.
after the machines clicked off and I was dragging handfuls of wet, cold clothes into my laundry cart, tom stood at an adjacent washer, gravely studying the uncapped bottles of detergent that we had left sitting there.
"did you put any detergent in?"
"no... I thought you were doing that."
he picked up the cap, still full of measured blue liquid, and emptied it back into the bottle. "nope."
we sniffed our soaked undergarments and decided that, while they didn't exactly smell like a spring breeze, they didn't smell dirty. plus there was probably some soap residue left in the washers before we ran them. plus we didn't want to spend another seven dollars and thirty minutes on clothes that had already been thoroughly rinsed. so off to the dryers they went.
by the time everything was done, we were the last people in the laundromat, and the proprietor was standing pensively at the door, waiting for us to walk through it so he could lock up for the night. we stuffed everything haphazardly back into the bags and balanced them in a vertical stack that teetered over the edges of our little wheelie-cart. it took both of us to stabilize the laundry while I pushed the cart down the sidewalk, and when we got to an unforgiving curb after crossing the street, tom grabbed the front of the cart to help me lift it up. ready, he asked, and when I said yes he initiated the countdown from three. at zero he lifted it straight up, meaning to pick the whole cart up, while I pulled it backwards to try and lever it over the curb's edge on its back wheels. our competing forces sent the back wheels slamming into the curb while the metal cage scraped over the edge and I juggled an armload of toppling laundry bags.
so overall, it was a bit of a dysfunctional laundering escapade.
our trip home, though, reminded me of when I was little and my parents would fly me over the crosswalks and streetcorners of manhattan. I stood between them and they each grabbed an arm, and then we all counted: one, two, three, wheee! and in unison they lifted me and swung me up to the sky, trotting to catch up with the arc of my momentum before my feet brought me back to the sidewalk. that was the best part about walks when all three of us were out together, that I would be set flying. two parents to lift me up. of all the things my family did together, that was one that we seemed to do perfectly every single time.
[ 19.1.06] · [ ]
this time I am, in fact, begging you to post a comment
someone decided that it's delurking week, and while at first I thought I was supposed to be too cool for things like "delurking week," the truth is I spend a lot of time mourning the days when people used to respond to me, when the internet felt like a place where we made connections instead of just gawking at each other. (for some people it still is. I guess I've been around too long. old equals boring.) the truth is sometimes I want to come here and post in all caps: WHO ARE YOU PEOPLE AND WHY DON'T YOU WRITE BACK TO ME?!
but if I did that, it would be really, really embarassing for everyone, which is just one reason that I don't. the other, more important, reason is that if people prefer to lurk I guess that should be allowed. I don't want to start some kind of mutual admiration society here, because that's way creepier than the hundred-odd people who visit each day and never, ever say anything. I'm shy. I understand the lurker mentality. and if you come out to talk to me, it should be because I said something worth talking about, not because I am pathetically fishing for validation.
that's the rational philosophy, at least. the moody, girly, reality is that I truly wish I knew more, and heard more, from the people who visit. comments don't have to be debates or even conversations. comments that say, "I'm a real person reading and I had this thought," or "I can empathize," or even just "hi!" ... those are why I do this in public instead of in a private journal. if I didn't care, the comments woudln't exist. I do care. I want you to talk to me.
if you are out there and you'd like to make me happy, leave a note. tell me something. why are you here? what do you want? if you ran into me on the street, would you say hello? do you wish I still wrote for the sake of writing? because I do.
[ 12.1.06] · [ ]
the birds came out to play today. once they get to know each other, two parrots are so much more entertaining than just one. anyone who knows them would be utterly unsurprised to see that poppy is the loud, hyper bully of the pair. sugah just hangs out and hopes she won't be possessed by the spirit of flight, because that seriously freaks her out. she lifts up into the air with her wings and tail splayed akimbo, and a thunderous flapping fills the room while she twists in a circle. when she finally makes it back to solid ground, she trembles and pants and flutters her eyelids like she's seen the rapture and she wasn't ready.
as if that weren't traumatic enough, then she has to contend with a little green torpedo that zips down from across the room and tries to land on her shoulders. life is tough when you're sugah.
[ 8.1.06] · [ ]
here's a fun exercise in narcissism: twelve self-portraits from 2005, justified because it's all about the community. as if I don't take hundreds of pictures of myself every year, even when there are other things around to photograph. 2005, though, might turn out to be a more interesting year than most for self-portraiture, because of my successively shorter haircuts.
for once I don't seem to have anything to say about the newness of the year. I've been writing the date on the blackboard every day without the usual date-change confusion. maybe the linearity of time has finally sunk in to my entangled brain.
[ 5.1.06] · [ ]
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