This makes me very happy and a good way to start the new year.
12/31/2009
12/27/2009
We all churn inside
I recently re-found this gem and remembered how much I love it.
Consider the hummingbird for a long moment. A hummingbird's heart beats ten times a second. A hummingbird's heart is the size of a pencil eraser. A hummingbird's heart is a lot of the hummingbird. Joyas voladoras, flying jewels, the first white explorers in the Americas called them, and the white men had never seen such creatures, for hummingbirds came into the world only in the Americas, nowhere else in the universe, more than three hundred species of them whirring and zooming and nectaring in hummer time zones nine times removed from ours, their hearts hammering faster than we could clearly hear if we pressed our elephantine ears to their infinitesimal chests.
Each one visits a thousand flowers a day. They can dive at sixty miles an hour. They can fly backwards. They can fly more than five hundred miles without pausing to rest. But when they rest they come close to death: on frigid nights, or when they are starving, they retreat into torpor, their metabolic rate slowing to a fifteenth of their normal sleep rate, their hearts sludging nearly to a halt, barely beating, and if they are not soon warmed, if they do not soon find that which is sweet, their hearts grow cold, and they cease to be. Consider for a moment those hummingbirds who did not open their eyes again today, this very day, in the Americas: bearded helmetcrests and booted racket-tails, violet-tailed sylphs and violet-capped woodnymphs, crimson topazes and purple-crowned fairies, red-tailed comets and amethyst woodstars, rainbow-bearded thornbills and glittering-bellied emeralds, velvet-purple coronets and golden-bellied star-frontlets, fiery-tailed awlbills and Andean hillstars, spatuletails and pufflegs, each the most amazing thing you have never seen, each thunderous wild heart the size of an infant's fingernail, each mad heart silent, a brilliant music stilled.
Hummingbirds, like all flying birds but more so, have incredible enormous immense ferocious metabolisms. To drive those metabolisms they have race-car hearts that eat oxygen at an eye-popping rate. Their hearts are built of thinner, leaner fibers than ours. Their arteries are stiffer and more taut. They have more mitochondria in their heart muscles -- anything to gulp more oxygen. Their hearts are stripped to the skin for the war against gravity and inertia, the mad search for food, the insane idea of flight. The price of their ambition is a life closer to death; they suffer heart attacks and aneurysms and ruptures more than any other living creature. It's expensive to fly. You burn out. You fry the machine. You melt the engine. Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You can spend them slowly, like a tortoise, and live to be two hundred years old, or you can spend them fast, like a hummingbird, and live to be two years old.
The biggest heart in the world is inside the blue whale. It weighs more than seven tons. It's as big as a room. It is a room, with four chambers. A child could walk around in it, head high, bending only to step through the valves. The valves are as big as the swinging doors in a saloon. This house of a heart drives a creature a hundred feet long. When this creature is born it is twenty feet long and weighs four tons. It is waaaaay bigger than your car. It drinks a hundred gallons of milk from its mama every day and gains two hundred pounds a day and when it is seven or eight years old it endures an unimaginable puberty and then it essentially disappears from human ken, for next to nothing is known of the mating habits, travel patterns, diet, social life, language, social structure, diseases, spirituality, wars, stories, despairs, and arts of the blue whale. There are perhaps ten thousand blue whales in the world, living in every ocean on earth, and of the largest mammal who ever lived we know nearly nothing. But we know this: the animals with the largest hearts in the world generally travel in pairs, and their penetrating moaning cries, their piercing yearning tongue, can be heard underwater for miles and miles.
Mammals and birds have hearts with four chambers. Reptiles and turtles have hearts with three chambers. Fish have hearts with two chambers. Insects and mollusks have hearts with one chamber. Worms have hearts with one chamber, although they may have as many as eleven single-chambered hearts. Unicellular bacteria have no hearts at all; but even they have fluid eternally in motion, washing from one side of the cell to the other, swirling and whirling. No living being is without interior liquid motion. We all churn inside.
So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one, in the end -- not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman's second glance, a child's apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words "I have something to tell you", a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother's papery ancient hand in a thicket of your hair, the memory of your father's voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.
- Brian Doyle - Joyas Valodores
Consider the hummingbird for a long moment. A hummingbird's heart beats ten times a second. A hummingbird's heart is the size of a pencil eraser. A hummingbird's heart is a lot of the hummingbird. Joyas voladoras, flying jewels, the first white explorers in the Americas called them, and the white men had never seen such creatures, for hummingbirds came into the world only in the Americas, nowhere else in the universe, more than three hundred species of them whirring and zooming and nectaring in hummer time zones nine times removed from ours, their hearts hammering faster than we could clearly hear if we pressed our elephantine ears to their infinitesimal chests.
Each one visits a thousand flowers a day. They can dive at sixty miles an hour. They can fly backwards. They can fly more than five hundred miles without pausing to rest. But when they rest they come close to death: on frigid nights, or when they are starving, they retreat into torpor, their metabolic rate slowing to a fifteenth of their normal sleep rate, their hearts sludging nearly to a halt, barely beating, and if they are not soon warmed, if they do not soon find that which is sweet, their hearts grow cold, and they cease to be. Consider for a moment those hummingbirds who did not open their eyes again today, this very day, in the Americas: bearded helmetcrests and booted racket-tails, violet-tailed sylphs and violet-capped woodnymphs, crimson topazes and purple-crowned fairies, red-tailed comets and amethyst woodstars, rainbow-bearded thornbills and glittering-bellied emeralds, velvet-purple coronets and golden-bellied star-frontlets, fiery-tailed awlbills and Andean hillstars, spatuletails and pufflegs, each the most amazing thing you have never seen, each thunderous wild heart the size of an infant's fingernail, each mad heart silent, a brilliant music stilled.
Hummingbirds, like all flying birds but more so, have incredible enormous immense ferocious metabolisms. To drive those metabolisms they have race-car hearts that eat oxygen at an eye-popping rate. Their hearts are built of thinner, leaner fibers than ours. Their arteries are stiffer and more taut. They have more mitochondria in their heart muscles -- anything to gulp more oxygen. Their hearts are stripped to the skin for the war against gravity and inertia, the mad search for food, the insane idea of flight. The price of their ambition is a life closer to death; they suffer heart attacks and aneurysms and ruptures more than any other living creature. It's expensive to fly. You burn out. You fry the machine. You melt the engine. Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You can spend them slowly, like a tortoise, and live to be two hundred years old, or you can spend them fast, like a hummingbird, and live to be two years old.
The biggest heart in the world is inside the blue whale. It weighs more than seven tons. It's as big as a room. It is a room, with four chambers. A child could walk around in it, head high, bending only to step through the valves. The valves are as big as the swinging doors in a saloon. This house of a heart drives a creature a hundred feet long. When this creature is born it is twenty feet long and weighs four tons. It is waaaaay bigger than your car. It drinks a hundred gallons of milk from its mama every day and gains two hundred pounds a day and when it is seven or eight years old it endures an unimaginable puberty and then it essentially disappears from human ken, for next to nothing is known of the mating habits, travel patterns, diet, social life, language, social structure, diseases, spirituality, wars, stories, despairs, and arts of the blue whale. There are perhaps ten thousand blue whales in the world, living in every ocean on earth, and of the largest mammal who ever lived we know nearly nothing. But we know this: the animals with the largest hearts in the world generally travel in pairs, and their penetrating moaning cries, their piercing yearning tongue, can be heard underwater for miles and miles.
Mammals and birds have hearts with four chambers. Reptiles and turtles have hearts with three chambers. Fish have hearts with two chambers. Insects and mollusks have hearts with one chamber. Worms have hearts with one chamber, although they may have as many as eleven single-chambered hearts. Unicellular bacteria have no hearts at all; but even they have fluid eternally in motion, washing from one side of the cell to the other, swirling and whirling. No living being is without interior liquid motion. We all churn inside.
So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one, in the end -- not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman's second glance, a child's apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words "I have something to tell you", a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother's papery ancient hand in a thicket of your hair, the memory of your father's voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.
- Brian Doyle - Joyas Valodores
12/25/2009
Yule feel better in the morning
I am burning a nutmeg candle in this two bedroom apartment in DC and it doesn't smell like Christmas or feel like Christmas. There is still snow on the ground and I do have a place to go later today, with friends, for some kind of eating/drinking situation so there is that. There are no lights or trees or single strands of tinsel that they probably no longer sell because of some lawsuit brought by an unfortunate death. I kind of miss helping untangle lights to find the one bulb that is the partypooper and replacing it with one that shines brighter than the rest. A red one for sure. I wrapped some presents for a family of three girls, adopted by our group for the holidays. Hannah Montana is still apparently a thing. As is pink. I suppose the good thing is that there isn't a family dinner where once again I am designated dish washer and we all drink because it made it more bearable to be around each other. No more after gift opening goodbyes thinking 'well, what do we do now?'. One of these days I'm going to get Christmas back or make it into something a little bit better/different.
12/18/2009
Who wants cake?
While I'm thinking about it and waiting for our epic snowstorm, here are a few things I wish someone would invent and/also some random observations I made while serving time in prison. In no particular order:
1. Is there a way to block getting your Facebook friends' incessant updates on their Farmville progress in your newsfeed? If I have to read about another friend finding a lonely lost calf wandering in their field, I will defriend post haste. Invent this ASAP or give me the dets of how to STOP THE FARMVILLE MADNESS. Thank you. (ETA: I found the secret to hiding the fuck out of this application on FB just now. My fool friends are lucky)
2. I also want a new iPhone app and Tweetdeck modification that will allow me to follow these damn lists I have created because Twitter offered that handy option. I need this on my mobile situation so I don't have to go to the Twitter page to follow a list because hello how else am I going to follow the #eastcoaststormofthecentury at work/metro/in bed? Make this happen someone.
3. Could I please get a volunteer to go upstairs and tell my neighbor that her footfalls make her sound fat? Is that mean? Yes, yes it is but after 6 months of hearing her insist upon walking around in her own apt, I think it is warranted. I never claimed to be kind.
4. I recently came out. Like tonight. Yes I Am Finding Kristen Stewart Hot These Days Sue Me. I care not about her actressy skills or the fact that she is half my age. *cough* Have you seen the trailer for Runaways? I rest my case and also never claimed not to have a thing for bad girls. Fine whatever.
5. I suppose no one cares that I am in the playoffs for my fantasy football league but me. Don't come calling when I win that 150 bucks. Now I ain't saying you a gold digger...
My final thought for the evening is this: Lady GaGa - fan of ugly, things that are free, drama, designing criminals, horror/psycho, fashion, and vertical sticks. Oh and also love + romance, esp of the bad variety.
ETA: Snow pictures from this morning. Prob 10" at this point and still coming down.
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ETA #2: Dogs in snow
1. Is there a way to block getting your Facebook friends' incessant updates on their Farmville progress in your newsfeed? If I have to read about another friend finding a lonely lost calf wandering in their field, I will defriend post haste. Invent this ASAP or give me the dets of how to STOP THE FARMVILLE MADNESS. Thank you. (ETA: I found the secret to hiding the fuck out of this application on FB just now. My fool friends are lucky)
2. I also want a new iPhone app and Tweetdeck modification that will allow me to follow these damn lists I have created because Twitter offered that handy option. I need this on my mobile situation so I don't have to go to the Twitter page to follow a list because hello how else am I going to follow the #eastcoaststormofthecentury at work/metro/in bed? Make this happen someone.
3. Could I please get a volunteer to go upstairs and tell my neighbor that her footfalls make her sound fat? Is that mean? Yes, yes it is but after 6 months of hearing her insist upon walking around in her own apt, I think it is warranted. I never claimed to be kind.
4. I recently came out. Like tonight. Yes I Am Finding Kristen Stewart Hot These Days Sue Me. I care not about her actressy skills or the fact that she is half my age. *cough* Have you seen the trailer for Runaways? I rest my case and also never claimed not to have a thing for bad girls. Fine whatever.
5. I suppose no one cares that I am in the playoffs for my fantasy football league but me. Don't come calling when I win that 150 bucks. Now I ain't saying you a gold digger...
My final thought for the evening is this: Lady GaGa - fan of ugly, things that are free, drama, designing criminals, horror/psycho, fashion, and vertical sticks. Oh and also love + romance, esp of the bad variety.
ETA: Snow pictures from this morning. Prob 10" at this point and still coming down.
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ETA #2: Dogs in snow
12/11/2009
Devi
Is that Tataka?
"And give up this face and this firm, strong body?
Sadly, only my old buddy Deb7 will appreciate this.
"And give up this face and this firm, strong body?
Sadly, only my old buddy Deb7 will appreciate this.
12/10/2009
They've never shined so bright
Hello to you. Have you recovered from the blizzard that affected 2/3rds of the country but completely missed us with just a few rain showers? I want to be in the path of a blizzard again. Just FYI.
Let's see, what else? I think last time I posted I was in the grip of a bout of insouciance re: my fellow man, myself, and everyone I know. I am slowly pulling myself out of that by focusing on a tiny little light at the end of an east coast tunnel. Also scotch. We all have our coping mechanisms. I am hoping real soon to make something good happen.
(Hint: I *may* be called upon to service the ladies of Lilith Fair. Again. Yes, it's true - I was once the concubine on tour, being passed back and forth like a joint between Amy Ray and Natalie Merchant. Oh the sights I saw! So you can imagine my surprise to hear from the Canadian via parcel post. No, not that Canadian, the other one. You may have assumed Ms. McLachlan was busy raising babies and doing whatever else it is she does when not singing, but no. She has been ever steadfast in wooing me back on tour all this time. There is a reason it took 10 years for LF to happen again. I have a long memory and my experiences with Rickie Lee Jones haunt me to this day. After my class action suit on behalf of myself and several woodlawn animals was settled a few months ago, I felt ready to hit the road again. No artist would agree until I was placed firmly in the tour rider and so it came to pass. A new generation of young lesbians can now experience the wonders of unfettered estrogen that LF brings due to my generosity and/or many skills. No need to thank me, I know.)
I apologize for going on, it has been a long day of planning to quit my job and daydreaming about my life elsewhere. I also played a shitload of Texas Hold Em on my iPhone, if you must know. I am now in what could be called Senioritis wherein I have ceased to care about this thing they call "work" and this "job". I am counting the days! You shall be the first to know if it comes to pass or if I must place myself in front of the Metro!
Until then, here is a song that you will like:
Crocodile - This Town Needs Guns
Let's see, what else? I think last time I posted I was in the grip of a bout of insouciance re: my fellow man, myself, and everyone I know. I am slowly pulling myself out of that by focusing on a tiny little light at the end of an east coast tunnel. Also scotch. We all have our coping mechanisms. I am hoping real soon to make something good happen.
(Hint: I *may* be called upon to service the ladies of Lilith Fair. Again. Yes, it's true - I was once the concubine on tour, being passed back and forth like a joint between Amy Ray and Natalie Merchant. Oh the sights I saw! So you can imagine my surprise to hear from the Canadian via parcel post. No, not that Canadian, the other one. You may have assumed Ms. McLachlan was busy raising babies and doing whatever else it is she does when not singing, but no. She has been ever steadfast in wooing me back on tour all this time. There is a reason it took 10 years for LF to happen again. I have a long memory and my experiences with Rickie Lee Jones haunt me to this day. After my class action suit on behalf of myself and several woodlawn animals was settled a few months ago, I felt ready to hit the road again. No artist would agree until I was placed firmly in the tour rider and so it came to pass. A new generation of young lesbians can now experience the wonders of unfettered estrogen that LF brings due to my generosity and/or many skills. No need to thank me, I know.)
I apologize for going on, it has been a long day of planning to quit my job and daydreaming about my life elsewhere. I also played a shitload of Texas Hold Em on my iPhone, if you must know. I am now in what could be called Senioritis wherein I have ceased to care about this thing they call "work" and this "job". I am counting the days! You shall be the first to know if it comes to pass or if I must place myself in front of the Metro!
Until then, here is a song that you will like:
Crocodile - This Town Needs Guns
12/02/2009
And a pinch of apathy!
So I am back from a trip to the country. Re-acclimating myself to being a bitch in the city. Nah, I'm kidding. I'm a ray of sunshine these days. As a result, I have decided to cancel my trip to Cleveland this weekend because I really can't deal with traveling again, need a weekend to recover/deal/cope/etc.
I'm starting to feel as if I have nothing left to say on this blog. I can't really bear to discuss pop culture or politics - those topics are already a 24/7 intrusion as it is. Plus also I'm sort of not feeling like talking about myself much either which was like 99.5% of the content of this blog I think so that leaves me with trying to find & stretch .5% worth of content unrelated to me/myself/I.
Puppies! Kittens! Rainbows! Infinity! Ennui! Torpor! Etc!
I'm starting to feel as if I have nothing left to say on this blog. I can't really bear to discuss pop culture or politics - those topics are already a 24/7 intrusion as it is. Plus also I'm sort of not feeling like talking about myself much either which was like 99.5% of the content of this blog I think so that leaves me with trying to find & stretch .5% worth of content unrelated to me/myself/I.
Puppies! Kittens! Rainbows! Infinity! Ennui! Torpor! Etc!
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