The Song

It's a funny thing about having Artist's Disease
- my momentary obsessions view like a movie that quickly fades to black.
The credits roll and I don't recognize any of the names.
The film score is familiar,
I know every crescendo and resolution,
but it's as if I'd heard it before in a dream or with different ears.
The melody becomes more important than the message,
which simply doesn't make sense any more.
I can blame it on that song.

Queen Can Sing

You look at Queen Latifah and you don't expect for her to sing as well as she does.

Beauty comes from the least expected sources sometimes. My new roommate, Ouida, is a BRILLIANT artist. She told me about a contest she entered in high school: the objective was to draw the most beautiful thing imaginable. Of course there were butterflies and birds and blablabla. Ouida decided to draw a life-sized warthog. A warthog. It was ugly but so well done she won. The most authentic was judged to be the most beautiful.

I don't know.

I'm definitely not comparing Queen Latifah to a warthog.

Life is too short to go to bed thinking you chose the wrong ice cream flavor.

Dang it.

Post Just to Post

I have no reason to write.
I could sit here all night.
Valentine's Day?
I have nothing to say.
No profound observation,
Just making conversation.


Did a game this morning, got a good run in. I get to see my daddy tomorrow. It's raining outside. I just cooked dinner for my roommates, they were complimentary as always.

Life in general is happening. Things are much more calm than they've been in the past.

And I'm glad.

When Ambien and Peanut Butter Collide...

You get up and run three miles in the freezing cold.

Nothing

My heart palpitates.
It's hard to breath.
Shoulders feel heavy.
Fight or flight response activated.

But this fountain doesn't care.
The clouds shrug and turn away.
The wind still slithers through the leaves of the trees.
Cars race past, occupied by other lives, headed to other destinations.

The worry builds up in my head,
like the lid of a boiling pot of rice.
It's going to bubble over any second.
Any second now.

Then I think:
In a week, this will be
nothing.

This too shall pass.
It always works out.
God is in control.
God is in control.

My heart will keep beating.
My lungs will expand and contract.
My burden will be lifted
and I'll realize there is nothing to confront or flee from.

This fountain doesn't care.
The clouds shrug, wind blows, cars pass.

I am not the only one.
Something,
Everything,
can become
Nothing.
Or was all along.

This too shall pass.
It always works out.
God is in control.
God is in control.

What Is All This?

What is all this? I wake up and rub my eyes and can't help but notice the floaters in the corners. Ya know, floaters, they look like amebas when you look up into the blue sky and see them run down your line of site. This eye-rubbing feels good, until I realize that I'm raising my eyebrows to really get into it, and this means I'm wrinkling my forehead. Rats. A few years ago I was sitting in a chair at the Bobby Brown counter at Saks and the girl applying my powder and lipstick said I was too young to have such pronounced wrinkles in my forehead and told me to quit raising my eyebrows. I decided to love myself enough to accept my wrinkly forehead.

Did I mention the gray hairs? I have at least two gray hairs on my head. They are short so relatively new, and I'd be willing to bet I know where they came from. I had a friend who started getting them in college and would systematically seek and destroy these tail-tale signs of aging. She had gorgeous, thick healthy hair and I thought the little gray strands here and there added character and were just beautiful. But what did I know until it started happening to me?

Yes, I am now one of those women who is disturbed by the aging process.

Love, Actually

I always cry at the end when Colin Firth proposes to the Portuguese girl in the restaurant. The light is beautiful and the gravity of what he's clumsily yet endearingly saying to her has everyone in the place spellbound. Just to be close to that, just to be in the same room as something like that, that's good enough for me. I just want to be one of the people in the restaurant who happen to be there when he walks in and makes his speech to her. Love is all around me, in all its forms, and it's okay if someone else doesn't need me the way I think I need them, at the same time, in the same place. It's okay.

I love Love, and it's okay if it doesn't love me back the way I think I want it to. I love Love just the way it is, even though it's tired of me mishandling it every time it comes around, and even though Love has been cruel to me at times, too. Love is pretty much done with me, but is willing to just be friends. We crossed the line too many times and it just didn't work out. It's all water under the bridge now though, and we're cool. It really isn't too weird. I'll always care about Love, but it belongs with someone else.

Love and me, we weren't meant to be.