Showing posts with label quotidian. Show all posts
Showing posts with label quotidian. Show all posts

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.

29 October 2010

Can I tell you something? Even if I may be repeating myself?

What scared me about the auto accident in Paraguay was how completely I fell apart. J, who was experiencing the same thing, had to take care of me. I couldn't stop crying until I fell asleep in the crazy van ride back to Asuncion. The next day I couldn't stop crying for hours. Sometimes I still cry now and I'm not sure why.

I wrote a paper for my English class about how I didn't know how to deal with this because it's so dramatic. I live for cinema but I don't want to be living grandiose cinematic moments. Life is absurdist, life is banal and I love every bit of that. It's all I want.

A few years ago a friend ask me to watch Elephant (2003). It's about a school shooting, but the shooting doesn't happen until the last 15 minutes of the film. The first hour just follows average high schoolers through their average day. S asked me to watch with him because I was the only person he knew that could be happy and find meaning if the whole film were nothing but quotidian. It's true. I just wanted to keep watching the kids in photo journalism developing their prints. I didn't ever want to get to the climactic moment.

This isn't to say I'm still a complete wreck. I no longer feel shaky like everything could dissolve at any moment to leave me floating in a lonely fog, I no longer hold my breath when I go over a bump in a car, I no longer stare dumbly at people when they ask me to tell them stories of Paraguay. I can even talk about the accident out loud now if I have to.

I just still don't know what to think. I just still feel vulnerable as h. I feel how much I need people which is a weird thing for a recluse like me. 

Can I also tell you how much I love you?

sincerely,
Marge