27 January 2012

it is banality that interests me

My new (old, hey $2.90 at the thrift-e-store) favorite flannel shirt smells faintly of waffles. I am content.


Yesterday someone asked me how my life was and since I don't enjoy that strain of conversation I made some jokes about parking tickets. Today I realized that through voiceless gchat it must have sounded sad but I am not sad. I don't know how to tell you in seriousness the things I am enjoying right now because I don't know how to sell quotidian. I don't have my own words for this, I only have the words of others.





Over Christmas visits at previous haunts someone told me my life is passing me by. My silent cry is But it is not passing me by! I am living it. Maybe I am slow at it, but I am slow and we have always known that I am slow.


I took tommyrot down because that wasn't quite right. I feel more like this: 
(which is hanging on my wall, written on a scrap of paper in the scrawl of a friend, and which came by post)


Remember to retire into this little territory of thy own, and above all do not distract or strain thyself, but be free, and look at things as a man, as a human being, as a citizen, as a mortal. But among the things readiest to thy hand to which thou shalt turn, let there be these, which are two. One is that things do not touch the soul, for they are external and remain immoveable; but our perturbations come only from the opinion which is within. The other is that all these things, which thou seest, change immediately and will no longer be and constantly bear in mind how many of these changes thou hast already witnessed. The universe is transformation: life is opinion.Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, book 4, no. 3


I'm toying around with a lot of decisions about what to do later this year and a conversation keeps coming unbidden to me and it kind of makes me chuckle.


My sister's father-in-law: Are you going to school for a career or to have an education (before/in process of getting married)?
Me: (this is a question?) A career.


Is there anything more strange than a relationship? They happen unbidden or they remain illusive. Can you hunt one down, make one happen? Sometimes I feel I could really dig in here but there are two things missing and I am fairly certain neither are to be found here. One could keep me wandering the globe yet you must stay in one place because you, too, need to be found. The second is easy, I know where to go to find people who enjoy food like I do.


I do not know how this has escaped my journal, whose silent private pages I've been turning to. I think I just wanted to tell you how my pretty flannel smelled of the waffles I made this morning.