Love

StoryCorps Danny & Annie Video

A little birdie sent this to me, saying “kind of a reminder about the true love we don’t see a lot in media or even our friends sometimes but that we are all worthy of receiving – and giving.”

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Getting what I need

Sometimes I get exactly what I need.  Like a mocha from Open Eye that has a pretty leaf design on top.  And a late night conversation with a new/old friend Sarah to inspire me to keep writing and get disciplined.  I think I have a new partner in crime. And a poetry group.  Sarah gave me the gift of this great image metaphor of what it’s like to try to be a writer.  All these sheets are just tumbling down, tangled around her and she can’t sort them out because if she stops to do that she’ll just keep getting lost in them.  So all she can do is try to fold them and put them away and then one day she’ll be able to lay them all out and look at them and… see what they say.  I like this image because that’s how I feel, and because sheets are less threatening than other metaphors for all the word/idea mess.

Oh, and you know how some days you just want to crawl under a rock and not come out?  Maybe hide under the covers and hope that the day will start over or just be over?  That happened to me yesterday but then I called my friend B.  I was going to try to hide the fact that I was a total mess and falling apart, but I remembered that she would probably not judge me too much for it and may in fact help. So I called her and tried to play it off with my typical laugh-haha of course this thing happened to me, but ended up babbling a little about staying up until 3 worrying and feeling bad and sleeping past my alarm…  And she was not only non-judgmental, she told me that I was doing a good job and she didn’t see why I didn’t have mini-meltdowns more often.  Which actually made me feel better, like maybe I am a mess but I do a pretty damn good job with the keeping-going part.

Once I did decide to face the world, I wore a green necklace Iimay gave me, and 3 people told me how much they liked it.  And I thanked them and told them my friend gave it to me.  Which is like saying “yeah, someone loves me and knows me really well.”  Which is a really great thing to be able to say.

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Olfactory Joy

There’s one particular apartment beside the walkway to mine that smells like clean, fresh laundry about a fourth of the time I pass it.  It always makes me think of that line from the Richard Wilbur poem Love Calls Us to the Things of This World where the soul cries, “let there be nothing on earth but laundry.”

Yesterday, when I was coming home after being out all day, the air from the apartment smelled distinctly of just-baked sugar cookies.  I was like a happy doggy hanging out the car window–I sniffed and sniffed the air trying to figure out if I was hallucinating; I couldn’t get enough of that smell.  And today, wouldn’t you know, it smelled like homemade bread.

Who are these people and how do they fill the air with such goodness?  I want to post a note on their door and thank them, just like I want to thank the neighbors across the way for having hummingbird feeders that brought the hummingbirds that brought me so much joy.

(PS- aforementioned poem can be read at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=171793)

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A wee little joy

I was watching a show on Hulu, and the advertisement literally caused me to get up before I could finish watching, spit the water I was trying to drink into the sink (so that I wouldn’t spew it all over the computer, the chair, or myself) and laugh out loud.

The ending not so funny, but c’mon, didn’t the image of the piggy out the window and the sound of that Weeee! it make you at least give a silent (wee) chuckle?

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Thank you to:

• whoever decided to put Boy Meets World on air at 7 am
• nice and talented phlebotomy person
• Karen at the desk who agrees with me about some people
• person who made the best unnecessarily kind and sincere phone call I’ll ever get from someone who didn’t hire me
• woman who said have a blessed day and really meant it
• barista who wanted to spell my name correctly on my coffee cup
• Brittany, study buddy and story-sharer
• whoever invented Nutter Butters
• whoever invented good instant coffee
• people who fill out reference forms
• Eric Hutchinson
• Dr. Pepper, and my mom who sent it my way
• Catherine, for escorting large bug out of my apartment last time. (Seriously, thanks.)
• Dad, for telling me that my endeavors are important and worthy of time, and for saying what I needed to hear but not just because he thought I needed to hear it
• whoever invented rubber kitchen gloves
• Mary, for making me feel better about the cockroach-in-plastic-wrap-box situation (PS, I forgot to ask for your method of removal)
• the person who gave me this hair cut a month ago.  it’s the small things, really.
• humming birds, and my neighbor who put up the favored feeders
• Lastly for now, and unrelated to the actual hummingbirds:
  hummingbird cake.

Who or what are your thanks to at this moment?

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