Things Remembered and Unfinished Thoughts

Remember the "I'm not listening game"? I used it a lot in elementary school. It's a game for two. The first player plugs their ears so that they can't hear, and then sings, or shouts in a sing-songy sort of way, "I'm not listening!" The second player attempts to tell the first a piece of information that the he/she would rather not hear. For example, Tommy's mom wants him to clean his room. Tommy doesn't want to clean his room, so he decides to play the "I'm not listening game" with his mom. In certain circumstances, player one will succeed in blocking out the unwanted information, but it's a bit of a gamble. For example, if Tommy's mother gets tired of the game, like player two almost always does, then she may decide to give him a time-out. She may even warn Tommy that if he doesn't stop singing, he will have to go in time-out, but since Timmy's ears are plugged, he will not hear this warning. In this scenario, player one loses, and player two takes the victory.

Remember jell pens? When sparkly pink words locked in top secret diaries were the only ones that mattered, like adding glitter or color made your middle school thoughts any more important. I liked holding my collection of jell pens in my hand and admiring all the colors together. Blue jell for when i was sad or sleepy or when the weather was rainy. Red for the summer, for when I painted my toenails with mom's Avon polish and framed my newly decorated feet in a crisp clean pair of Old Navy flops. Pink was the basic color for everyday writing because as a middle school girl, most days are pink, scandalous and exciting. There were jell pens that smelled too, scented pens. Or multi-colored jellies. The color might change from orange to purple mid-word. I always liked the way tie-dye jell pens looked, but writing with them was too ambiguous. I wanted to write LOVE in all caps with red jell pen not pink, and I couldn't sit around scribbling waiting for red to come out of my tie-dye pen. There was too much to say to waste that kind of time.

Traveling

The road was so long and smooth, so subtle in each curve and turn, that it felt more like floating than driving, like somehow being empty and full of purpose at the same time, like all we had to do was wait, float through space, and eventually we would accomplish something: eventually we'd be somewhere.

On a Thursday

I had eggs and bacon for breakfast this morning, and I colored another dinosaur in the coloring book on the kitchen table before watching Loony Tunes. After that it was 3 o'clock. It rained all afternoon, and that's about all that happened. It was a damp evening, cool, thick, and breezy from the rain that had fallen earlier. There was still thunder in the air, coming from all directions, ricocheting off the mountains, and filling the valley with the sound of grumbling: it wasn't here or there, but everywhere all at once. I had the idea, looking out the window at the mist and the rumbling, that I belonged somewhere else, on a grey suspension bridge, half-way between one peak and another with grey blue water passing below my dangling feet, bare feet, pale over the dark current.

A Home is Not a Heart

Think about a house, a person's home. You wouldn't say that a person is their home. Their home may certainly say something about them: the way they decorate, the level of order and overall cleanliness, the smell, the sounds that fill it. But a person is not their home. In the same way that a person is not their home, is not a house, a person is not their body either. A body is a home for the soul, and like a house is says something about the person living inside. The way they wear their hair, the colors they decorate themself with, their smell, the way they sound, the words they use. But your body is not who you are anymore than your house is.

Wednesday morning Meditations

Good morning Wednesday. Tomorrow will be my last full day here and then I get to go home! I've always thought about vacations and trips in this way, organizing a countdown of days into words that make home seem decievingly closer than it is. I'm having fun; I usually do on vacations, but for some reason, in the back of my mind, I'm counting down the days, even the hours within those days (It's 11am! Only one more hour until the day is half over), until I leave for home. I think I've even done this at home, counted down the hours until tomorrow. I don't know what I'm always waiting for. I wish I would stop it, enjoy where I am for a goddamn minute, but then I see a clock and I can't help but do the math. This morning, I woke up early (and I mean early in the summer sense of the word), 8am. I didn't want to get up, so instead I laid in bed and tossed in and out of sleep, dreaming about Jason and Sarah and wild animals escaped from tall barbed wire fences in an industrial kind of zoo, gypsies and genies and Jenna was there. Dominik passed me in a middle eastern market, and finally Nathan's voice rang out, disturbing whatever connections my brain had formed between all these images, events, and people, asking if I wanted pancakes. It was 10am. Only 2 more hours and then the day was half over! I did a small fist pump and stumbled upstairs to eat my pancakes.

The people I'm staying with like to watch TV. As a group, we don't have a whole lot in common besides the fact that we're all living together, so I can see where the television would seem like a quick way to relieve any social tension or awkwardness. I'm just not a TV person. What's the benefit of sitting in front of a screen, watching re-runs and movies (with vulgar humor, I might add) and commercials for hours on end? Not that TV can't be informative. I think it certainly can be, and I've been thoroughly inspired by movies and TV specials already. There's just so much you're missing inside with the TV on. Not to mention that the content of some of these shows and movies is as uninformative, uninspiring, and unintelligent as I've seen: Step Brothers with Will Ferrel, I don't know if I've ever hated a movie so much.

This morning, the group is watching the movie Miracle which they've all seen before. Why watch it again? Not that I haven't watched movies twice, three times over, but in this beautiful place, with limited time, while the sun is shining. Why now? I decided to use everyone else's pre-occupation with the TV to re-charge, have a little time to myself. I brough my book onto the porch and got into the first 20 pages of Animal Vegetable Miracle by Barbar Kingsolver. I feel earthy just holding the thing, a green paperback book that looks like it was born of the earth rather than picked off a shelf and printed at a press. I want to be earthy. To some degree I guess I am, but there's so much I don't know about nature; it makes me angry that as humans we are so far removed from it. We came from nature. We are part of nature, and yet we shut ourselves in houses and buildings, and we close our windows and we shut our blinds and look down on nature as if it's below us, as if we personally outsmarted it, when in reality, most of us wouldn't last a day without modern conveniences, alone with mother nature. You think you'd survive? Better do a little research on what you're facing. It's brutal out there. Don't take my word for it; there are reality TV shows about this kind of thing.
Don't take what I'm saying the wrong way. I don't want to go back to the jungle. I understand and appreciate the luxury of a warm comfortable home. When you don't have to focus all of your energy on staying alive, there are a lot of amazing things that happen. I doubt that I would be writing this now if humans lived with animals as equals in the wild. People wouldn't sit around and discuss the meaning of life or the possibilites of death; they'd be too busy looking for their next meal, like the squirrel I've been watching from the porch here. I don't know what squirrels eat. I know they hoard nuts, but on a day-to-day basis, I'm not sure. This one climbs up a tree, skuttles around the top brances, taking dramatic pauses every so often to look around; for what, I'm not sure. Then he's down, spiraling around the trunk at a 90 degree angle to the ground. A bush rustles; the leaves move, and he's up another tree, skittering scratching, climbing, pausing, returning to the ground. I've been playing this game where I try to guess which tree he'll climb next the way you try to guess which hole that wicked little beaver they call a mole will pop up out of in your wack-a-mole dreams, except I'm not attempting to wack him with a rubber hammer.


I bet they have wack-a-squirrel shows on TV.