first & nineteenth
spontaneous overflow without tranquilityV. What the thunder said
There is not even silence in the mountains / But dry sterile thunder without rain.
California is burning again, and I am listening to Death Cab’s ‘Grapevine Fires,’ and as I peddle to work through the smoky air I think of how part of this country is under water and part is on fire. Strange, to think of the small lightnings licking at the trees in our dry heat, and then the trees flaring up into flames.
media consumption
I learned today from eMarketer that the average American watches 6.1 hours of video (including TV, video games, online video, movies) per day. This astounds me. Not only because I am one of those TV nay-sayers, but also because I honestly can hardly fathom a mass of people who actually have that much time in their day, let alone (as it is an average), those who have far more.
My own video consumption probably hovers around .5 hours a day. I tend to watch in fits and spurts–I will go a week or so without looking at anything, and then spend a few days where I watch a good 2 hours a day. Only on extremely rare occasions–i.e. perhaps five or six times in my life–have I watched more than 6 hours of video in one day.
Anyway, quite impressive, America. eMarketer’s predictions are that the average will surpass 8 hours a day around 2013. Again I find this unbelievable. Given my 9 to 6 job, this would mean that I would have to watch TV from 6 to 2 in the morning every day after work. Or, if I chose to go to bed at the more reasonable 1 am, I would have to watch 11.5 hours a day over the weekend to make up for my weekday laxness.
Seriously, where do these people live?
Say, sea, / Take me!
Emily Dickinson, who has been chanting in my head for months and months now, used to be my least favorite poet. This was before I had any ear for poetry, and loved it merely due to the socked-in-the-stomach feeling I got whenever I ran across a particularly shocking image.
I loved the corporeal in poetry: I wanted Walt Whitman’s holy armpit sweat, or the flushed breasts of Octavio Paz’s lover, or the crippled oak trees in the Psalms. Dickinson’s spare, cryptic verses left much to be desired.
But then I learned to listen, and fell in love with Gerard Manley Hopkins’ tortured spondees, with Theodore Roethke’s lilting melodic verse, and Dickinson followed close on their heels.
Now meter is the thing I respond to most powerfully in a poem; and Dickinson, like many of my favorite poets, has a peculiar light way of playing with the silence in a poem through her breathy dashes and hymn-like pauses. Just as music allows for wordless stretches, because something else fills the air, Dickinson’s poetry admits silence easily, while making it into a part of the whole that the words also participate in. I can’t quite explain it, but oh, I love it!
yay california
California Supreme Court just overturned the ban on gay and lesbian marriage. And while my own feelings on the matter are somewhat complicated, I can’t help but feel a rush of pride on behalf of the state I live in. Go California!
Note, a bit later: I still remember the heady rush back in 2004 when Mayor Gavin Newsom took things into his own hands. People cavorting everywhere on campus, and the sense of being part of something deliciously new.
stealing beauty
Makes me want to go live in a art colony in the hills of Tuscany. I wonder how much Italian real estate goes for…?
this picture
The one used as the header of my blog, is actually representative of what my life is going to be like for a little while! It’s not just an oh-how-I-wish-I-were-there-instead-of-here picture, because in little over a month I am going to get on a plane and fly with my husband to Cancun, Mexico, where we’re going to loll around for six weeks. We’re also going to loll in Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica, if all goes well. (Sorry, El Salvador!)
I am convinced that it is impossible to look at pictures of Isla Mujeres (the island we’ll be staying on for the first bit) without drooling wildly. At least this has been my own experience thus far.
leaving california
The sun is going down, turning my room all golden in its usual way. I’m listening to Chris Thile’s ‘Bridal Veil Falls,’ and thinking of the new life I’m hastening towards. Only seventeen days left in California, and then–who knows?–I may never live here again. Only thirty-six more days left as an unmarried woman, and then I step into a new life under a new name.
Leaving California feels so funny. I remember only vaguely how I thought of it when I moved here–liberalism, Hollywood, surfers, perpetual sunshine. I leave myself a ‘liberal;’ I have a Californian’s typical division of the state into the lower part, with Hollywood and surfers, and the upper part, with technology geeks and modern hippies. (However, I still think it’s a land of perpetual sunshine–coming from Seattle, it’s hard not to.) Now it’s more home than anywhere else: this is where the me that is now came into being.
Getting married feels somewhat funny too. I’ll be a ‘Mrs.’ soon. I don’t know if it will be much different from my life now (I suspect it will be), but I have vague images of myself washing lots of pretty dishes, hanging up crisp laundry, wearing an apron. (I think a little bit like Snow White cleaning up in her cottage.) What a ridiculous vision!
But I’m extremely excited for both changes–although incomparably the latter. I used to think I wanted to marry when I was older, so that I could have a chance to ‘live life’ a little before I settled down. Now I’m excited that I’m still so young and getting married, so that I can have more years (God willing!) with someone I love so ecstatically.
pluots
I just had a pluot (a hybrid between a plum and an apricot) with dinner, and am musing on the way categories affect our perceptions. The pluot was delicious, but my mind had trouble accepting it as a fruit in its own right–I continued to taste first the plummy part, and then the apricoty part, thinking about the two parent fruits. But if I hadn’t been told it was a pluot, I might have appreciated this as its own separate species of fruit, instead of dividing it in my mind as I ate. (I’m not sure, it did taste very plummy, but it’s hard to tell how much my tastebuds were influenced by my mind’s readiness to sense the different fruits.)
remarks on dogs
Dogs live very undignified lives. They are made to live in small spaces and to beg for tiny biscuits. They are encouraged to fetch sticks but reprimanded for chasing squirrels or cats. They are dragged away from other dogs by leashes.
