My first quasi-non-bland meal in two weeks: fresh angel hair pasta tossed with browned butter with toasted garlic, drizzled with citron olive oil and sprinkled with fleur de sel and mizithra, with sliced tomatoes and balsamic vinegar.


Let it be said that if this meal kills me, then it is because I love balsamic vinegar more than life itself.

livin la vida anorexia!

listen to a song over and over until it is so familiar you don't hear the words. it becomes a feeling. it becomes a feeling and you can sketch it out with crumbling crayons and burnish it to a shine with candy wrappers and lacquer. a grotesque parody.

identity is a tenuous thing. we're more conduits than generators. emotion comes to us through another person, or an event, an incitement, fucks everything up inside us a little bit, like radiation, and passes out the other side to fuck up some other poor soul, the first one our eyes meet, unfortunate to have spoken. then we are empty again until the process repeats.

what does that reduce identity to? nothing so profound; habits and morals and tastes. wearing some favorite sweater twice a week. idiosyncrasies. i love discovering people's idiosyncrasies, but they're largely superficial characteristics of personality.

what's left: a museum of sadnesses. loss is the only emotion that does not pass. it is sustained by memory, because the logic of loss is flawlessly persistent.

i know fuck-all about being human. i am defined by absences.

music is lovely because i can, however briefly, snatch the brilliant emotions of others out of the air, tuck them to my chest, and pretend that they are mine.

When I'm not pensive, I find myself narrating everything I do or see happening. I start to form descriptive narrative of people I study on the bus or the escalator. I can't stop myself from reading text if my eyes come in contact with it. My life is textual. I need to learn more about semiotics, I think, because I read the world.

Anyway, this was all leading to a point. A dumb one. I woke up from a dream that was not only entirely text-on-paper narrative, but asinine. I transcribed it as well as memory would allow.

--

“No, no, no! This very error here: drought, not trout! Nobody would ever die because of widespread trout.”
“It might happen,” he glared reproachfully at the editor’s chair, which was as close to glaring at the editor as he could come without experiencing an untimely termination.
“Why would they starve when they could just eat trout?”
“I don’t like trout.”
“If you were starving you might.”
“That I very much doubt.”
“You are an imbecile. Rewrite this about the drought in Zimbabwe, not trout. Now go on, get out!”
As the crumpled journalistic rout hit the back of his head he began to pout. What a loathsome lout, he thought to himself. Bet he loves trout.

--

As you can see, my subconscious has a poor idea of what humor might be. Similar dream attempts at humor include:

-Lord Byron changing his name to Lord Bison and wandering the world over to update this, in pencil, in every copy of his works.
-The large-sword-crazy-hair JRPG archetypal hero Cloud Strife distraught over a missing sandwich. This was in fact the plot of the dream.

Those are the most notable offenses. My dreams are usually ultimately depressing or revolting, or both.

Do you narrate? Is that why you keep a journal? Or is that a byproduct of keeping a journal? As for the latter two, I may never know. I learned to read and write very young, and have been keeping some sort of journal since, but I don't feel like the basics have deviated much from "I hate my sister, I dreamt a lot, and I still want a dog."

Everything else is conjecture.

It feels like it should bother me somehow, make me feel some way, when I realize that most of the time I don't feel much at all. My doctor switched up my birth control for a month and I went from my usual background hum of emptiness to a roller-coaster ride from hell. Now I'm back down again, off the estrogen (terrible stuff), and it's just... echoes. It's oddly peaceful, in the way I picture Dante's limbo. Between that and the half-light and rain of autumn here it's an almost perfect representation. I don't feel much. I don't really have any goals or creative aspirations. It should bother me, but it doesn't.

I feel like all emotions I experience are artificial, engineered by either the chemicals in my body or the music I shuffle all day long. Any strong emotions I may encounter I distrust and compartmentalize, examine and discard. I didn't use to be this way.

I used to be dionysian; now I'm utterly controlled. I don't know when or how that happened. I went from fire to neon in two short years and I think I'm happy, but I am as dull as dirt.

Laughable, isn't it? I resent my own contentment.

At least I stay amused.

Went back and started reading the LJ of a friend who died a few years ago. Wish you were here. I'd mail you a postcard, but I don't know the address.

Life never stops breaking your heart, does it?

As I am about to become incredibly poor -- which I will explain in time -- it has become clear that certain luxuries I enjoy are now going to be financially unavailable to me. As such, they are now in the realm of things I would love to receive as gifts.

Things I Can No Longer Afford

1. Saffron.
2. Kumamoto oysters, raw.
3. Pine nuts.
4. Wool roving (for spinning).
5. Ritrovo 6-year aged balsamic vinegar.
6. Castelvetrano olives.
7. Cheese, including, but not limited to, the following: Beecher's reserve, double-cream Gouda, panerello, asiago fresco, pecorino, chevre, mozzarella fresca, brie, and Cotswold cheddar.
8. Raw milk.
9. Pre de Provence soap, Agrumes .
10. Pilot Precise V5 and V7 pens, black ink.
11. Your Mom.

This poverty will also serve to curb my book-buying habit, which will in turn force me to read all the Wilde and Proust I have lying around. It will be good for me. It always is.

Turns out spinning is a lot easier than I thought it would be. Now I just have to learn some smooth crochet moves to justify all my sweet, sweet yarn.

Tasty things I have made lately:
-rough-hewn pesto with sockeye and pasta
-pasta with fresh peas, parsley, and julienne garlic in lemon and olive oil
-chicken quinoa casserole with fontina and chantrelles
-sopa de tortilla with black beans, rice, and delicatta squash

tonight: either apple pancakes with honey and bacon, or sole with lemon butter and baby spinach in parchment and curried squash and fresh persian cucumbers, depending on the temperament of the boy.

I have infected Roxy with a love of good food! I am thrilled. I think loving food is an integral part of loving life, and having a meal with people you care about is one of the best parts of life.

I apparently have a PS3 now, and I played Flower through in the first sitting. I was practically in tears by the end, and not from sadness. It's not a game, really, so much as an experience. But I'm grateful to have had it and know that I can go back to it when the world makes me feel heavy and fearful.

I'm also learning Blazblue. There are a few characters that I find interesting to play, so I'm taking the time to memorize the moves and learn some chaining. Interestingly, based on what I can gather from story-mode, I have coincidentally chosen a cursed pair of lovers -- Arakune and Litchi. Not that it has any significance.

Haruki Murakami keeps sucking me into his worlds, and I get very attached to his characters. But his endings leave me with a lingering sense of unfinished business, like bad sex. Maybe it's a non-Western thing. I still very much like his work, and it is not unlike another favorite author of mine, Pelevin. Omon Ra has a hanging ending, even though the main plot is resolved. Kafka on the Shore is a very dense, metaphor-laden mindfuck and I'm still trying to suss out the plot. It is very different from Hardboiled Wonderland, which still leaves you hanging but has a much more straightforward, non-metaphorical format. Still in all, very good writing. I will probably have to read it again. It is good to have contemporary writers of the literature fantastic.

My life is very dull and as a consequence, fairly pleasant. I am not creating anything profound (and have my strong doubts as to whether I ever did), not even anything that could stand as a candidate. I can't be idle, so I teach myself new skills. At least there's that. I miss school. It gave fucking off a sense of purpose. Stolen time, so I had better make good use of it. Now I feel like I'm distracting myself from time itself and I detest this.

I love Joel and will not leave him, but part of me feels like life ground to a standstill when I moved in with him. I went places that were unplanned. I took risks. Joel does neither of those things. A life where everything is planned feels a bit like death. And the stench of it is so hard to get out of things.

Ugh. Back to the purgatory of dishwater I go.

it used to be
like a rail ran through me
shaking everything like doomsday
on the quarter hour;
not that frail echo now,
antique glass breaking, brittle,
bottom-heavy, long-overdue --
i do not want to know
that this thundering sickness,
that my minute brilliance
housed in a distant room,
rampant with decay,
that is to say, cured -- was only you.

If anyone ever told me I'd spend almost all of two and a half years with one person and never get sick of them, I would have shot at them on the spot. And by shot, I mean scoffed. But the main thing is, Joel and I have a blast together.

Today we woke up early (noon!) and headed down to the Junction for their Bonanzathingy, looking to shed more cash. We got our wish: Sugar Rush cupcakes, Partybots t-shirts from Twilight, and a bunch of rare, bizarre books from our friendly, neighborhood bat-shit-insane used-bookseller, bless her addled heart.

Having wasted approximately enough time to slip into Mashiko minutes after they opened, we scored two seats at the bar by Hajime, who got Joel to eat nothing but raw fish for his whole meal. As they had Kumamoto oysters for $2.50 apiece (fifty cents cheaper than the Brooklyn, where I'd planned to go for the same thing), I decided to man up and try one. The experience was sublime, and I decided to repeat it a half dozen times, which seemed to please the master chef. Joel even tried one, and while it wasn't his favorite thing in the world, he agreed that it was an experience like no other. I, on the other hand, will never be sated in my newfound love of oysters. We also had a piece of rainbow trout, which was far tastier than I expected, and had none of the muddiness I had come to associate with trout. It was light, delicate, and sweet, a perfect piece of fish.

After this we trekked to REI to seek out many things, none of which we actually bought, because they did not have our size (Vibram Five Fingers shoes and a super-neat Nutcase helmet). But we did get Chukar cherries and chocolates, which Joel scoffed at first and now won't stop snarfling.

And now my roast chicken is done, a succulent 160 degrees Fahrenheit, stuffed with thyme and surrounded by delicious roast potatoes. Life is so good I hardly know what to do with myself.

Tomorrow, if my knee is back to its normal size (o HAY according to my MRI, I have a cyst in my tendon! how strange) we will tackle the Arboretum, and, I don't know, maybe a Chinese seafood restaurant. Black bean cod! Oh yes. Life is delicious.

I anxiously await the arrival of my drop spindle and batts. I promise to withhold nothing of the humiliating experience to follow.

Edit: I feel the need to stress that by Twilight I am referring to The Twilight Artist Collective, not sparkly vampires.

HELP I'M BECOMING A WOMAN. At last.

I invested in a bunch of really crazy whacked out batt and a drop spindle, and we'll see how that goes. I just finished crocheting a hat:

( hat )

I cannot fight the ancient urge to twist animal hair into long strands and make clothes from them for every person I know. And what is that, anyway? Am I going to start ripping skins off things and tanning them next? Or, god forbid, purchase a sewing machine?

That actually doesn't sound like a bad idea.

Also I'm becoming entrenched deeper and deeper into the world of cooking, and not only that, but cooking fancy. Here is a sample meal plan:

Breakfast: French pressed Caffe Umbria with milk, fruit.
Lunch: Kobe beef sliders with sharp cheddar cheese.
Dinner: Roast chicken rubbed with sage, thyme, garlic. Fine balsamic for dipping. Roasted yukon gold potatoes with olive oil and kosher salt. Castelvetrano olives and cherry tomatoes.
Dessert: Fresh cream and Frog Hollow peaches, blackberries.

Tomorrow I am cooking game hens with prosciutto, saffron, thyme, and more Castelvetrano olives; creamy parmesan and white wine risotto, and herb salad with balsamic vinaigrette. Monday I will be making chicken noodle soup with tarragon and celeriac. Last night I made keta salmon fillets with dill and pepper. WHERE WILL IT ALL END?! Probably with me passed out in a balsamic post-coital embrace with a turducken. Wait and see.

Spinning, crocheting, cooking, reading, writing, and creating load files. Nerdcore, yarncore, foodcore. I might be becoming a cliche. At least I'm not some polyamorous steampunk twat. I have some intellect left, yet.

i think maybe
i'm a radio receiver
yes, i hear you,
passively, quietly
and i'm recording it. i'm filtering you rays.
you won't remember
what you thought and said and did in two days
but i'm an overcrowded ark
and still they come, two by two by two.
come in, love. there is room for you.

you're all emeralds,
you burn the eyes with your rarity
all your planes and bevels make me dizzy.
i eat them all, cataloging
the ways in which you shine
and all the shades of green
but me, i just have empathy.
i think how it must hurt
to be so pretty.

i think i'm a receiver
not a transmitter,
not learned, but automatic.
an absorber, not an emitter
because i write
and i write
and i write

and i write static.

Joel's work switched his days around so that he had four days off and then worked ten, so I opted to take Monday and today off too. It's been a wonderfully relaxing little vacation, with no relatives to stress us out.

Friday night I cooked chicken karaage, enough to feed an army. Saturday we spruced up the place and I set up a spot to do some crafty things, painting and collaging some stuff from newspapers and candy wrappers. Josiah came over in the evening and had Le Fin du Monde and corned beef, and we had a lively debate about the value of religion, lasting well into the morning hours, eating sliced Frog Hollow peaches and listening to Beethoven's Seventh Symphony.

On Saturday, Joel and I discovered a forested path down to Alki and biked two or three miles around to Constellation Park, where we watched the sun set. Sunday, it rained, so we hung out at Freshy's downstairs and rented a bunch of movies. For dinner, we made rahmnudeln, a homemade rolled egg-milk noodle stuffed with a mix of cream cheese and sour cream, and steam fried with salt and butter. So good! We tried to eat it with cabbage and bratwurst, but the rahmnudeln eclipses all.

Today, we went to Mashiko, where I had Joel taste my sockeye salmon temaki. He then proceeded to eat all of it. I was thrilled! Finally, a raw form of fish that Joel loves. Of course, who wouldn't love sockeye in any form? It's good enough for bears, it's good enough for me.

After, we went to Husky Deli for some homemade ice cream and imported random candies. And that brings us to now, when Joel walked out on the balcony, leaned over the edge and drew a smiley face in the grime on the window that my desk faces.

I hardly need to mention that life is good.

One thing that Josiah and I discussed was the importance of food, and in a more general sense, mealtime. We talked about the fact that some of the best memories we have are of sitting around a table full of people, talking and drinking wine and eating good food. The communal meal is a lost art, one that I intend to keep alive. With that in mind I'm going to try to bring back the big dinner parties with more determination. And a bigger cast iron pot.

I have been thinking about how I could finance a bottle of real balsamic vinegar.

Between A General Theory of Love, the neurological look at emotions, and Clarence Brown and WS Merwin's translation of Osip Mandelstam's poetry, I have struck something of a personal revelation.

It occurred at the precise moment that I read this line:

Poetry, you put storms to good use.

In A General Theory of Love, I read a couple weeks ago the following passage:

Only the latest of the three brains traffics in logic and reason, and it alone can utilize the abstract symbols we know as words. The emotional brain, although inarticulate and unreasoning, can be expressive and intuitive. Like the art it is responsible for inspiring, the limbic brain can move us in ways beyond logic that have only the most inexact translations in a language that the neocortex can comprehend.

The verbal rendition of emotional material thus demands a difficult transmutation. And so people must strain to force a strong feeling into the straitjacket of verbal expression. Often, as emotionality rises, so do sputtering, gesticulation, and mute frustration. Poetry, a bridge between the neocortical and limbic brains, is simultaneously improbable and powerful.

Combined with reading Snow Crash last week, this leaves me with a very strong impression which I can only inelegantly describe as hacking the limbic brain.

If you read poetry and you don't get much out of it, here's why: it's a rational expression of irrational substance. Don't read it looking for literal meaning. A poem is how one person attempts to express an emotion to the world, an emotion too profound for literal translation into rational speech.

To quote Mandelstam once more:

how poor is the language of happiness!
Everything's happened before and will happen again,
but still the moment of each meeting is sweet.

For me, having this understanding is profound. I have found meaning in something that I love. I have not experienced joy such as this for a very long time.

Coworker X, at lunch today, got into the Morale Committee's box of plastic plates and utensils to get a plate and fork for her lunch. We have a full set of ceramic and stainless steel dishes at our disposal.

Me: Hey, why are you using that?
X: I don't wanna wash my dishes...
Me: I will gladly wash your dishes if you just use the non-disposable ones.
X: But... they're covered in germs...
Me: I'll wash you one fresh, right now!
X: Just leave me alone.
Me: It's just going to go sit in a landfill.
X: [triumpantly] But it's going to anyway, right? I mean, they already bought it.
Me: Yeah, but if you use that one, then they'll just have to buy more.
X: [Stops listening and uses plastic dishes anyway]

If we destroy this planet through sheer laziness, I hope it ends our species, because we sure as fuck have it coming.

The universe works on a math equation
that never even ever really ends in the end
Infinity spirals out creation
We're on the tip of its tongue, and it is saying
We aint sure where you stand
You aint machines and you aint land
And the plants and the animals, they are linked
And the plants and the animals eat each other

I went to visit my sister, who was living in a greenhouse filled with bees. Her bed was in the center, white linen and bamboo, on a dais surrounded by plants.

"That bastard stung me," she said, pointing to a burly black bee with less yellow markings than the others. "That one, right there."
"I'm sure he didn't mean to," I said.
"Tell that to my elbow," she held up the red, welted arm for me to see.

It doesn't take a dream symbolism expert to tell me that this is an elegant metaphor for my sister, uncomprehending the consequences of her bad decisions and laying the blame at the feet of others.

--

My mother wishes I would spend more time with my sister. She doesn't understand that I've always hated my sister, at least a little, for her self-centered, willfully naive, superstitious, ignorant behaviors. I don't understand how we can be related. We were raised in the same household, but treated very differently. My parents were gentle with her; harsh with me. I have since forgiven them for this favoritism, but only because it has given me a determination my sister was never able to develop. I would pity her, but she has everything she needs to make the right decisions and climb out of the hole she's dug, but she chooses not to do so. So I have no pity for her, and no forgiveness. As such, I find I have very little to discuss with her when we're together, so I avoid being with her.

I wish I knew more intelligent, ethical atheists. I wish Richard Dawkins would be my friend. I am tired of religion, and I 'm tired of being told that as a good atheist I should be silent about my beliefs, especially around religious people. I think that such behavior gives a sense of sacredness to religion that I do not think it should have.

More than anything, people that I would otherwise respect are, mind-bogglingly, religious, and I can neither fathom why, nor understand how intelligence can coexist in the same mind as religion. It inevitably leads me to believe that my previous assumption of a person's intelligence was wrong. Religion. Is. Stupid. There's no nice way of saying it. It's a palliative for the ignorant, but for the intelligent, there is no excuse.

I am told I tend to isolate myself from people. Perhaps I just need to find the right type of people. I don't know. They might not like me.

Today I stayed home and assembled my anatomical model of the human ear. Now I will go roast a chicken, and some little red potatoes. And read Snow Crash, because I promised Joel I would.

Joel and I spent much of the weekend discussing what meaning, if any, our lives had, why we are together, why we are afraid to die, and how we intend to cope with it. He is the right one. He may never share my literary tastes, or appreciate poetry, but he understands the really important parts. We share the important understandings, like Modest Mouse and Radiohead and bees and worms and how very tiny we are, and how thinking is so evolutionarily new and how no species has really found a way to cope with death. We know what we don't understand, and we understand we may never know. But I'm so glad he and I can talk about those things. I'm so glad he understands the pernicious delusions of mysticism and religion, and that those things never even enter into these conversations other than to summarily dismiss them.

These are the things that matter. Everything else is a matter of taste. He is the only person I have met whose ethics are derived not from an outward structure, borrowed from someone else's thinking, but from his own reasoning. He may not be producing anything exciting or prodigious at the moment, but at least I can respect him.

I do my best thinking when I'm wandering blindly around the city, sweating buckets in my asscrack, bumping into elderly Chinese women and tripping over garbage. There's a particular pragmatism that comes from it, not a solution to my problem, but at least a coping mechanism. The only coping mechanism we've successfully managed so far.

I spend a lot of time zoomed out, so to speak. I take the long view, as obsessed with time as I am, and when you're at that level your awareness of time passing becomes hyperreal. I have a great deal of anxiety about time passing (chronophobia?) and it's been steadily eating away at my ability to enjoy life.

There is an aphorism: "Take things one day at a time." I think that while it's the king of cliches, it's what I'll have to force myself to do, or I'll spend my whole life on the outside, watching and waiting and unable to feel happiness. I do not want to become nothing; I do not want to die. I can't bring myself to believe in anything that cannot be empirically proven, so I can't find comfort in imagining anything but death as a permanent state of nonexistence. But I think I can try to cope if I set my plans for the long future in motion, and then forget about them.

I've been writing a lot of stories about time and cyborgs lately, which serve to explore my feelings both about time, as described above, and about purposelessness, and artifical intelligence who do not know or understand their function. I have a lot of sympathy for machines. And perhaps some envy as well.

Modest Mouse is helping, too.

Today I watched an Iranian woman, shot in the heart, bleed to death while her father tried to save her. I have never witnessed the death of another human before. I don't know how anybody who has seen such a thing could ever allow it to happen again.

I was very heartsick all day, essentially crying until I slept, sedated, then woke up and threw up some. So much for my plans today. I called my father and we talked about people who use religion to support their creeds of hatred, and those who crave power because they believe that only their way is right, and because they are greedy. I am glad my father is not one such person. He is still religious to a degree, but he understands that peace is the most important thing. That we can agree upon.

Tomorrow (and tomorrow, and tomorrow) I will make my herb garden, perhaps make some zelenii borsht, and some blini to eat during the week. My life feels fake somehow. Too good to be true, too calm to make sense. 

I'm trying to find out what I can do to help. But mostly I'm holding my breath. We all are.