vanilla bean

"Marge, tell us all about your interesting life," commands my Aunt (she is one of the tiniest commanding ladies you will ever meet).

"Uhhh....what?"

"You're the only one here who's not married so you have the most interesting life of all of us. Tell us about it."

"Iiiiii don't know that I've got an interesting life." (Also, I'm not sure if that was a sneaky way to ask if I have any dating life at all since I try to tell them nothing about it so I'm not forced to bring boys to dinner before I'm ready.)

I can't blog anymore, I can't keep conversations going anymore because I am feeling like a particularly humdrum person. 

What do I do? I work from home falling down rabbit holes of information or home movies, which is what I love doing. I make sure to get fresh air and see people everyday. I eat, I sleep, I drink lots of water–sometimes in tea form. I periodically delve into family journals and pictures my mom has provided me with. I read an Audrey Hepburn biography while I brush my teeth. I read The Picture of Dorian Gray when I give plasma. 

This has less to do with what I'm actually doing than with the fact that I am not a clever vocal person. My storytelling skills are middling and frequently completely fail me when I am about to open my mouth. I have made an art out of saying the most banal, redundant, or stuttery/confused sentences. I could speak about the things that interest me–how Alicia and I took a walk discussing the protests in Egypt while wheeling grocery carts back to a neighborhood store; or how I discovered what I thought was just a tiny auto lot is actually a barbershop/auto combo. While those might not grab at you immediately, if I could make the right words come out of my brain and mouth you might enjoy them with me.

Instead, I specialize–eh, maybe I'm exaggerating, but a lot of the time, with all but a few people, I specialize in being a mild case of the boring. Loveable, but boring.

In a film that blew my mind the first time I saw it, Chris Marker says through his narrator, "I've been round the world several times and now only banality still interests me."* I loved this, I loved this, I loved this. He and Samuel Becket (and maybe some of you) proved that I should keep trying to be friendly, slow-of-speech me. After all, somebody's got to make fascinating people look good (insert wry smile here).

In other news, today I found a new favorite Buffalo Springfield song, "Hung Upside Down." Make note that my previous favorite BS (ha) song was "Flying on the Ground"





*Sans Soleil (1983)