wesleysgirl

the spider may or may not still be in my bathroom. i have not looked because i do not want to know.

my writing group at work starts each session with an icebreaker, and today it was "what do you do if you find a spider in your shower". heh.

Full-on, no bullshit, no irony, yes Taco Bell
where I can almost always pull together the
cash to get dinner, at my brokest
scrounging up enough change
for the pillowy warmth of a bean burrito,
extra red sauce, meant to be eaten
behind the steering wheel in a parking lot
or while driving, the wrapper crumpled up
and thrown on the passenger side floor,
leftover napkins stashed in the glovebox.
In high school we’d ditch seventh period
and drive 10 miles down I-5 to the closest town
big enough to have a Taco Bell,
where we’d house as much food as we could
pay for, lounging in the pinkpurplegreen vinyl
or the metal swivel chairs we’d knock knees under,
giving each other dares around fire sauce,
hoarding packets of mild sauce to douse everything.
And forever, my love to the Taco Bell employees,
who took my order when I was drunk or high or crying,
who listened and fed me without too much judgment
through high school and college and my thirties,
and a special love for the two who pushed my car
through the drive-thru, once, when it broke down
mid-order. I couldn’t afford a tow until payday.
They let me leave it in the lot.
This is how I know labor is entitled to all it creates,
and that given a chance most of us are helpers,
we want to help people and to be helped
by people, amidst the absolute and delicious
loveliness of ordinary things.

--"Love Poem to Taco Bell", Rebecca Bornstein

there was a spider in my shower (there maybe still is) and i know this because I WAS ALSO IN THE SHOWER WHEN I SAW IT. WET AND COVERED IN SOAP WITH CONDITIONER IN MY HAIR. (me, not the spider.) you all need to tell me i was very brave because i did NOT run screaming from the bathroom which i really, really wanted to do. i did however rinse off EXTREMELY QUICKLY. i have no idea if the spider is still there and i am not going to go look. i get why it might want to be inside (where it's warm and dry) (well, not if you're in the SHOWER) rather than outside (where it's cold and wet) but still, WHAT THE HELL.

*gets a grip*

so how's your wednesday night going!

yeesh.

happy administrative professionals day to any admins in the audience. i hope your place of work appreciates you. the u - or at least my department - includes all the support staff in their appreciation, so we (admins, it, hr, communications, fiscal) got a lateish breakfast (bagels! lox!) (bagels were yummy altho i've had better lox) and a nice lunch and massages (ouch) and i know my groups appreciate all my hard work but it's not awful when the head of the department says nice things about you and your coworkers. we should be appreciated all the time tho, not just once a year. but it did give me an excuse to stuff my face a lot. i even brought a brownie home. they were big brownies.

the past couple weeks i've been waking up in the middle of the night sweating to death and i do not enjoy it. it's ~the change~ (and middle aged women everywhere nod in understanding). UGH.

today is earth day. enjoy some photos of the big blue marble.

a guy in the uk found his old pokemon card collection in his attic and learned that three of the cards were actually worth a lot, by which i mean they netted him $41k at auction. and now he can pay for his wedding. :D

One bridge and then another over the fisherman’s net
of steel water and high, secreting grasses.

Here the bare cypress trees throw themselves from the banks
like wailing women, their hands scraping at the sky’s silent faces
in the grey rags of Spanish moss.

This home is always shifting, the water reaching up to take
what it will. There are days I cannot find myself

between the steps of my parents’ home and the long sigh
of afternoon rain. Each time I leave

it is the last time. Time passes faster when I am not there
so now she does not know my face

and the house has sunk further into unkempt green.
How far can we carry memory before it is something else?

How long can a man at sea call himself her husband
and not someone who is lost?

Between here and what’s not, I come, as all strangers,
to the door to wait for the stranger who answers.

--"Homecoming", Landis Grenville

my school district - well, not my district since i don't have kids in school - the school district where i live is on break this week and i know that because there were way fewer people on the bus this morning. it's refreshing to not have to start off your day feeling like a sardine.

so chelsea clinton ran the boston marathon, having apparently registered under her married name so people wouldn't figure it out right away. she ran a personal best too. also running was the winner from 1968 and the fact that he's still running marathons after almost sixty years is pretty impressive.

My father read a mountain aloud.

Opened to a page
where a green bird lands on a thunderclap.

Named for the billowing hands of
brittle blue flowers.

As if the unfinished poetry of the paraffin

is pulled aside like scenery,
so that I may write by the only light I know.

My father read only his one life and recited
the last line over and over.

The book is written in giant letters of fog
that wander like goats across the alpine pastures.

The moon is dog-eared as if the treetops looking up
have studied the idea of love too much.

On a page with some scattered pine needles,
a voice goes on calling out to me.

My father learned to read
in a one-room schoolhouse,

and never read a poem.

A little herd of lightning
gets spoken out loud in the dark.

Change
is scenic and sudden.

One year, I came home
and all the leaves fell off my father.

After that,
he was winter.

--"A Bookshelf", Hua Xi

guess how my day started! if you guessed "couldn't get the car door open AGAIN, figured it out, discovered the battery was dead AGAIN," gold star for you! i called the garage and left a very cranky voicemail (they're closed on weekends which i know and let them know i know) because come the fuck on, it's been SIX GOD DAMN WEEKS. and i cannot drive my car. and this is the exact same thing that happened last weekend. and i have plans this coming monday that do not include sitting at home waiting for someone to come and jump the battery like they did this past monday. and i have plans for tonight that i have to cab to.

JESUS FUCK. i just want to be able to drive my car! and not have to worry that it's going to die on me!

*seethe*

i did however manage to make it to the coffee house with the bagel sandwiches (god bless the bus) so i finally satisfied that craving, and i got some sun in and some exercise, and i accomplished about 960 words on the thing i'm doing for writing group, which isn't great but is better than nothing. and i bought quarters and did some laundry. silver lining, silver lining.

today's poem is historically appropriate but very long so i shall cut.

( Listen, my children, and you shall hear )

oh my flist i am so tired. i want to sleep in tomorrow but i have to work from work because i have to set up a lunch. i'll get fed (thai food :D ) which is never a bad thing but at the same time... sleep. why can't i just be independently wealthy. why.

there was a guy on the t coming home who looked a lot like ben whishaw and that was very distracting.

a bunch of states might be able to see the northern lights tomorrow and saturday. sadly mass isn't one of those states. but if your state is you could perhaps see the bright lights and that's pretty cool.

The best ones
I ever ate I ate

that summer, him dead
six months, me not yet

forevered again
to anyone. Tomatoes

the only fever, many-
chambered, jelly-seeded

—probably slicers,
nothing rare. Dissected

into the same glass bowl
night after night for a dinner

date with the pulpy sun
on its way through

my yard. Fayetteville,
Arkansas, city of wreckage.

Mozzarella, basil, salt.
Oil, the August air

humid, nearly liquid.
One evening I sat

on my back stoop
in a puddle of light

and knew I could live
without him, and was.

I ate the same dinner
from the same bowl

until the decision
ceased to be a decision.

--"Tomatoes", Katrina Vandenberg

we get the new york times at work and i must have signed up for their email newsletters at some point because i get them every morning. because today is tax day - think sympathetic thoughts at any tax professionals in your life - the newsletter opened with "it's tax day. i wish you many happy returns." oy.

today was also the big support staff lunch at work, which the admins had to organize. (it was our turn.) that means we order the food (it was delicious, especially the little lemon squares and the rolls) and figure out what to do for half an hour - we've had guest speakers talking about their research before so that's what we did. said guest speaker was someone who works adjacent to one of my groups, which meant i didn't just know her but knew something about the subject of her talk. which is a first! talk was good, food was good, it's always nice to schmooze with my fellow admins, and did i mention the lemon squares? i do love a good lemon square.

i also took a brisk walk with one of the admins m and one of the admins a - it was getting cold and cloudy so the walk was bracing. but fresh air is good for me, so.

All our windows open, steady drizzle on the kudzu’s
broad backs, birds making their music like this isn’t North
Carolina, but a tropical rainforest, and we’re somewhere
deep in the palms and vines. But it’s our own ferns and fiddleheads,
evergreens and sugar maples, trillium blooming, or on the verge,
for no one in particular, for everyone in particular, as if to say,
Go on, enjoy it. Rain, flowers, time on earth. The apple I
hand-picked at the market. Braiding my friend’s hair, silver
in my fingers, how I tie a tiny bow gently at the end
just as the sun comes out. I want to believe this is true power, that
kindness is the only weapon worth wielding, and I wield it,
land blow after blow to my enemies, without mercy.
Mercy. Bring the wine. Set the table for surprise guests.
No matter the plates don’t match and we’ve run out of chairs,
only that there is bread and laughter, enough to go around.
Parades, in spite of—. Pride, in spite of—. Please, someone answer all these
questions I have about hummingbirds and the little futures we are
reaching for, the ones rising above the horizon right before our eyes,
such intoxicating visions, our truest selves, with nothing to hide. Go on.
Trust the child standing barefoot in the rain, her face turned
up to the sky. Trust that crescendo building in your chest is your
voice, singing what you need to hear, the stone-heavy echo
welled from darkest springs. Go ahead. Open the door. No one can
explain how to love the world. It doesn’t happen all at once. But
you can start here. Tonight, with yourself. Someone near you. Let it go
zigzagging town to town. Look, there. It’s already coming back around.

--"Our Book of Delights", Arielle Hebert

the car update is that it was the battery. >.< the guy from the garage who's been working on it this whole time actually came over - i'm around the corner, it's not far - used pliers to get a better grip on the little emergency key that comes with the clicker, got the door open (yay), and popped the hood. where he hooked something up to the battery to learn... it was dead. he charged it enough for me to drive the car over and called towards the end of the day to say the battery - which wasn't even that old - was defective and he put in a new one. so i went back to pick up my car and drive it home. there's still an issue - every time you open the driver's side door you get an alert that the car isn't in park even tho it is - this alert is accompanied by the kind of binging noise the car makes when it wants you to fasten your seatbelt and it is exceptionally annoying - but i'm tired of leaving my car at the garage so i can be told "we don't know what's wrong with it and no it won't be ready by the weekend" so i'll just bring it back some time in the near future. and in any case i have it back and it works and i'm relieved.

that's all the news that's local. :D in exciting international news the good voters of hungary voted authoritarian viktor orban out after sixteen years (and i somehow doubt he was helped by jd vance showing up to stump for him). it was the highest voter turnout since 1989.

watch the artemis ii splashdown if like me you missed it the first time. space travel and return will never not be fabulously cool.

You saved me, you should remember me.

The spring of the year; young men buying tickets for the ferryboats.
Laughter, because the air is full of apple blossoms.

When I woke up, I realized I was capable of the same feeling.

I remember sounds like that from my childhood,
laughter for no cause, simply because the world is beautiful,
something like that.

Lugano. Tables under the apple trees.
Deckhands raising and lowering the colored flags.
And by the lake’s edge, a young man throws his hat into the water;
perhaps his sweetheart has accepted him.

Crucial
sounds or gestures like
a track laid down before the larger themes

and then unused, buried.

Islands in the distance. My mother
holding out a plate of little cakes—

as far as I remember, changed
in no detail, the moment
vivid, intact, having never been
exposed to light, so that I woke elated, at my age
hungry for life, utterly confident—

By the tables, patches of new grass, the pale green
pieced into the dark existing ground.

Surely spring has been returned to me, this time
not as a lover but a messenger of death, yet
it is still spring, it is still meant tenderly.

--"Vita Nova", Louise Glück

so i picked up my car (finally) on friday, right? and saturday i'm all ready to take myself to one of my favorite coffee places for a nice bagel sandwich and some time spent on the story i'm working on for writing group and... i can't get the car door open. for whatever reason the garage needed a second clicker (it's a keyless entry) when they reprogrammed the computer so i have two new clickers and neither works. and i know it's not the clicker batteries. there's a little emergency key in the clicker and that doesn't work either. i'm standing in the parking lot next to my car that sat in a garage for a god damn month and cost me a lot of money to fix and i can't get into it which means i can't drive it. (and also means it wasn't entirely fixed either.) and i need to be able to go places - not just the coffee place which would've been nice but wasn't necessary but i also volunteered in the kitchen for the last bonspiel of the season (so i have to be able to drive half an hour to get to the curling club) and last night i met my sister for dinner and a movie twenty minutes in the other direction. i briefly consider calling aaa and getting them to break me into my car but what if i can't get the door open after i'm done at the curling club? i don't want to have to call them to get me into my car every single time i need to go somewhere. for one thing, it takes an hour for them to get to me and i don't have that kind of time.

so i end up with a rental. for the nth time. tomorrow i get to call the garage and tell them what's up and ask them how they're going to fix it. yay.

so that was my morning and part of the afternoon. kitchen volunteering duty was fine - i washed and dried a lot of dishes and also helped assemble charcuterie plates and prepped chicken for cooking (rinsed, trimmed, patted dry, tossed with seasoning, stuck in the fridge). one of the other volunteers made brownies and the whole kitchen smelled so strongly of brownie that people could smell it out in the main room where they were sitting around snacking and drinking and watching whoever was curling. several people stuck their heads into the kitchen with varying degrees of "do i smell brownies?" why yes, yes you do. :D

the movie was you, me, & tuscany which is a romcom with absolutely zero surprises but a really attractive setting. i mean, tuscany. also regé-jean page with his shirt off. there's a point in the movie where a conflict appears and practically the entire audience went "GASP!" and then we all laughed at ourselves because it was such a loud collective response. the movie was more rom than com - i mean, it wasn't that funny altho it definitely wasn't a drama either - and was overall very light and fluffy and reminded me of while you were sleeping except in tuscany during the summer instead of chicago in the winter.

and today i walked to the grocery store because did i mention i can't get into my car? and did my taxes! ooh. i owed the fed and got a refund from the state and it even almost balanced out. mostly it's done and i don't have to worry until next year. and i didn't wait until the last minute, go me.

two things i must share about the artemis ii crew:

victor glover's message to his wife - it's extremely sweet - and an introduction to the crew as if they were the stars of a "bad 80s sitcom".

Maybe it ruins the story to say at the start that no one was hurt
the day Scotty Forester swung open the door of the family car,
climbed up, put one hand on the wheel and, then, while pushing
and pulling on buttons and knobs, he found and released

the brake, and it started, the silver-blue Mercury, to roll
down Robin Street, best street in the neighborhood for sledding,
for coasting on a bike with arms waving above your head,
Scotty gaining speed on the long sweep of that block, heading

toward the intersection, then into it, then speeding
through, the car beginning to slow as the street leveled out,
although, toward the end, Scotty going fast enough
to jump the curb before stopping, three feet from a gas pump.

Maybe knowing the ending ruins this story, but sometimes
we need a break from dread. We need to know that the car
did not crash, the child did not die. We need to briefly forget
that we live in a world where a car is gaining speed, and

no one seems to be at the wheel. We need to be more
like the dog Scotty drives past, who barks, and runs in circles
as he barks some more, driven by some circuitry we have lost
for loving this dangerous life, living it.

--"Mercury", Suzanne Cleary