tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16866163091028106262024-03-12T19:02:02.545-07:00W * A * T* C* H *Exploring raw materials of existence surrounding the intake of energy, and observing later self-composition.
Gallstone Recovery Experience ExperimentUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger44125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1686616309102810626.post-51741166319336218582013-01-09T05:10:00.002-08:002013-01-09T05:11:26.787-08:002012 in foodwatching<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Pachycadia. I don't think that is a word but it came to mind. Perhaps it means falling into rhythm with elephants. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">As I take a swig of now cold coffee from the Indian print cup that I got at a thrift store during the fall fashion period of 2012 that I thought of as "the thing where indian prints are in fashion temporarily," I realize that I spent 2012 unconsciously. No food consciousness is not an ordinary state for me. I typically recall and capture food with emotions naturally just as I typically capture dreams in the morning and analyze them as I awake. This year was one of the most sedentary and lethargic in that aspect. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Turning backward I begin to think of the food. I think of the tiny kitchen that I don't feel comfortable in and I realize that Suzanne's kitchen(in the house we rent) is very small and in some sense probably inspires an anxiety that forces one to cram food into one's mouth. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">There were noteworthy moments connected to food.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Great meals of 2012 revisited:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">1) Pozole with Alexis, Sam, Stephanie, Sean, Joseph. I made a broth and took hominy, lettuce, fried tortilla strips, fresh lime, fresh jalapeño, chicken off of bone, avocado, and radish. I was happy to serve up these dishes to friends with a big bunch of flowers on the table.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">2) I placed two cups of tequila under and vase of flowers on the day of the dead. There they sat evaporating, while the flowers slowly lost their carnation, marigold, simple zinnia orange in the way time slowly takes from the essence of any living thing and lets it melt away.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">3) A tomato crust soup with John and William. Two unlikely companions, the 1st and the 8th of my siblings rode bikes up from fells Point to get their Alpaca wool socks from our mother. John studies Political Theory at University of Dallas. I hadn't really spoken to him since his divorce. He was much better. William had started riding in the past year and lost 2/3 of his body weight. He lives in Massachusetts. But the two of them rode in bitter wind. As they arrived I cooked garlic in oil with a new garam masala i had crushed in my new mortar. I added tomato crush, leeks, and some left over spiral ham and more pepper and salt. I sauteed the leftover stale french bread from the christmas party and served the tomato leek soup with the croutons on top with the remainder of cold weather thyme from my garden while we sat talking briefly. A delight.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">4) New Years day. Rula served Mansuf on her huge platter with tons of chicken cooked in yoghurt over rice. We sat with Tod, Kristen Forbes, Dave, Pablo, and friends of Pablo with children. Some drank wine. Later we played music and read I Ching. I brought paper and twine and calligraphy pens to record the I Ching readings for people and I rolled them with twine and green colored Indian paper. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">5) This has been the year of cupcakes. Celeste has been a baking fiend. We made so many cupcakes together. But her birthday I promised to have a tea party. I bought a little cake from Hamilton Bakery, one with a yellow flower on top. We sang happy birthday, and I took down the pretty porcelin music box that plays happy birthday tune, and had a tea party in the little butterfly teacups. I read her a fancy nancy story about a tea party and she was delighted. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">6) On our anniversary we had planned to eat thanksgiving dinner at 4 with Joe's parents and cousins. This was not exactly a romantic idea. I had prepared cranberry sauce, salad, and more. But I also prepared a chocolate peanut butter cake. Still, the idea of sharing the cake and the romantic moment with a couple that embodies the worst feeling I can have about what happens to marriages, was dulling, Also, Erica, Joes' cousin wanted a Tarot reading. That would mean our anniversary would be about time at a place where my mother-in-law- often tries to place us sitting apart, or discourages our romanticism. Her way of saying "your husband" or "your wife" drains it of what feels good. So I dreaded going. Luckily we talked about it, arrived late, and then went and sat by the fire at Todd's house with Matt, Dina, and another couple. We had cake, tequila, and played music. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">I shall continue to think on this year with fond recollections. Celeste's second year of life blending into her third. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">There was much wine. There was not enough raw food.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">But there was a deepening of love, many, many oranges, clementines, apples, cups of coffee...</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">We began 2013 talking, drinking a real poppy bottle of sparkling. We had grapes, and toasted Celeste who got into the spirit with a cup of ginger-ale.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Fondly I recall the New Years dinner in Mexico 2007-2008 with the vasquez-gomez when we were first married by Lorena's father. We ate grapes in the hallway after the goat baracoa, and then they married us. Late into the evening our last night there we danced in the bones of the house they were building. Somehow I know we have another life down in Mexico with another realm of food and dreams. I hope to go this year, with Celeste. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1686616309102810626.post-4702163801462246522012-07-04T14:16:00.001-07:002012-07-04T14:16:04.262-07:00Ie dz<br />
LUnknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1686616309102810626.post-11107196093256654662012-06-26T15:36:00.001-07:002012-06-26T16:50:40.847-07:00Indigenous Herbs, Bitter brew, healthy gall As I listen to the radio in the evening, I get the fuzzy half-listening tracer on a story about students studying Afro-Cuban music before taking a trip south. I am preparing a few bitters for consumption; inspired by the four dollar book on herbs recently acquired. <br />
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Being familiar with dandelion root tea as a liver detoxifier and cholegogue( bile stimulant) but never having harvested my own, I decided to go pull some dandelions for their roots, and also brew some plantain tea. This is because they are both bitters.<br />
Bitters are apparently helpful in digestion because they stimulate gastrin production, serotonin production in the gut, and ground people who are airy, vatta types in Ayurvedic terms. In other words, bitters are good for people who think excessively instead of acting instinctually.<br />
I have a cup of tea brewing in the red pot I got from Lars back in 2008. My mood is stable. I am sore from soccer/ running/ and giving massages. I will document how it goes.<br />
The book(shown below), an herbal almanac claims that plantain has helpful benefits for the colon, the kidneys, the bladder, the respiratory system, and that it cleans the blood. One is to drink 2-5 cups a day. Well, there is plenty of plantain in my backyard of two known varieties, <i>Plantago major, </i>and <i>Plantago lanceolota.</i> I have known that plantain is edible all my life. When we were children it was pointed out and then sort of spread via the web of minds that was our collective hive of heads. It is just that it is so, ...bitter. This is what is so good about it. In fact, it seems as though <i>tasting it</i> is part of it's benefit. We have 25 different receptors for bitterness on our tongues. Bitterness is in coffee, swiss chard, pak choi, cabbage, uncured olives, unsweetened chocolate, hops, turnip, radish, jicama, cauliflower, broccoli, miso, kale, soy, dandelion greens, dandelion roots, plantain, zuchini, hoseradish, ginseng,asparagus, brussel sprouts, arugula, orange peel, endive, and of course, bitters. <br />
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Apparently the German doctor, Johann Siegart, who emigrated to Bolivia expressly to aid Simon Bolivar fight the Spanish conquistadors created a signature brew of bitters, now famously used throughout the world in its bars. Angostura was the town bitters were manufactured in in 1830 and the tonic was so acclaimed that Emperor Franz Josef of Vienna has his picture on the bottle after a medal was given to the substance at the World Fair in 1873. Today Angostura bitters are lovingly dashed into manhattans, mojitos, and lemon-lime pop/soda. I will have to try this instead of lemonade.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTZBjL3BFJafKX8EOrzCCBikXuU_b28yMWCI2CsXlXX7QSaz-KYHlSGB3vR0hyrEzPJmlSXS7xJPboz7Mvd4aJsoQHpDxSg5jmNmjytZ9UhE6cg_4RgHI_QVmvYPjUoFGhB3MHDtaut8I/s640/blogger-image--1891673549.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTZBjL3BFJafKX8EOrzCCBikXuU_b28yMWCI2CsXlXX7QSaz-KYHlSGB3vR0hyrEzPJmlSXS7xJPboz7Mvd4aJsoQHpDxSg5jmNmjytZ9UhE6cg_4RgHI_QVmvYPjUoFGhB3MHDtaut8I/s640/blogger-image--1891673549.jpg" /></a></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1686616309102810626.post-20428546497799597212012-05-24T12:43:00.001-07:002012-05-24T12:43:28.891-07:00Gallstones still not a problemAre you Worried and Suffering from Gallstones? No, but I wish they would dissolve, t'would be nice.<br />
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Gallstones aren't much of a problem for me. I lay on my side and massaged my belly while I read an article about healing for Continuing ed credits for my L.M.T. relicensing. It's an astounding and comprehensive piece by Andrew Bernay-Roman. Today I had a really nice couple of cups of coffee that were helped along by a sweet note by Joe about how the coffee maker was acting funny. It must have been user error. Still, I read it and felt good. I sat and read and thought about my eeking in of dreams finally. We moved upstairs finally after months of waiting...long...story. I ate an Aunt sophie egg in the basket and drank water. Late she had a homeade apple orange juice popsicle and I worked on the new pillows for the outside party this weekend. Lunch was leftover stirfry and leftover chili and rice. THis made a little bit of a mess. I cleaned the floor with Celeste with two sponges and a blue bucket of fabuloso lavender soap. It was sweet and joyous and sucessious. I poured olive oil on my head and wrapped my hair in a pair of old little baby pants(which make a perfect headwrap) Jackson came down with lice, and even though we didn't find any, the olive oil can't hurt, and apparently it can suffocate nits and eggs. I don't think it is necessary but I am going to have shiny hair anyway. I feel like working out again. I called Radiya at the Lyn's Brick's Gym to try a 14 day free pass. So there it is. Celeste and I took a very long walk a couple of days ago through Hamilton along Harford road. It reminded me of when I was in Alexandria walking in the evening past shops, and past the tire shop on Port Suez St.<br />
Key things I have done lately that feel good<br />
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1) Taking vitamins again. I am so far not feeling down and stressed. Perhaps that was my problem more than the delayed construction zone of a house.<br />
2) Taking in more water in the form of pink lemonade<br />
3) Doing more creative things, painting, sewing, writing this blog again<br />
4) Attempting to find "kids play work" for Celeste along with my grown up work<br />
a) I let her paint two canvases while I repainted a table<br />
b) I let her help me clean the floor. She got the soapy water out of the bucket with one sponge and I focused on getting it back in, and scrubbing. This worked!<br />
5) I found a place Celeste can go to for daycare three times a week that is nice. 7 kids, a nice space, not far, outdoor time, circle time, letters, music, and a nice lady running it. I was hoping to find an outlet like this for both of us<br />
6) Jackson is into gymnastics. I am pleased to see him grow.<br />
7) I am back into learning and healing through relicensing studies for massage. This always helps.<br />
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~ life is good, takes work, so be it, I'm making good on dreams over here~<br />
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To focus on the Gallstone healing process<br />
`Smoothies are better when you need a snack and feel down because they hydrate you and provide fresh vitamins and fiber'<br />
'A problem that stresses you out is better when you are nourished and in motion. Depression and fatigue can often be remedied by first changing something about how you are holding your body'<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1686616309102810626.post-43498875781046560132012-05-14T10:10:00.000-07:002012-05-14T10:10:39.157-07:00Cornucopia, monad, now. All that you are is now returning into the next moment. So much of the struggles I keep dragging into the next moment are sealed in with the ritual foods I express connection with. Coffee seals in a long moment. Food seals in the energy level of the day. Meals with Joe and Celeste seal in our unity. A glass of wine together seals in our hope for the future romance and pleasure together. We have so many seals. Fasting, abstaining, going dry, and cleansing are so powerful that we stay tired and even moody to avoid transformations. The threads are there to shift, you only have but to pull them and the whole clogged mechanism of the soul seems to release toxins, trials, shifts and emotions to transform. Here's to it all....Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1686616309102810626.post-19432714835875374812012-01-02T13:39:00.001-08:002012-01-02T13:57:33.981-08:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Photo: <a href="http://www.mccullagh.org/photo/1ds2-4/olives">Declan McCullagh</a></div>
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Happy New Year from Watching your every food. I ate 5 olives before I went to bed the last night of the year to represent the big stones that nestle in my gallbladder. They don't bother me much, but all the same, I nod to them. </div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1686616309102810626.post-75988928563258563032011-02-15T18:08:00.000-08:002011-02-15T18:08:09.391-08:00My Cleansing and Finances Story<a href="http://watchingyoureveryfood.blogspot.com/2008/07/real-processed-food-is-when-you-think.html">W * A * T* C* H *: The real "processed" food is when you think about what you eat</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1686616309102810626.post-6094716365700174792011-02-15T06:34:00.000-08:002011-02-15T06:58:52.126-08:00The Art of the Cure<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiclJr3hfFHeR9c2DWylS0tb8B8uRpL0F3Aeo0EBPHx6bTvDSh4APSZJ7Se0QBm7pYG9O_YmppBnMY9yPgH6_75A5WW7BWhVegtEnV-dwZLVTA7YDa55vQUEHsB9etAgJBIhPghC85e1Sg/s1600/Photo+on+2011-02-15+at+09.04+%25235.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiclJr3hfFHeR9c2DWylS0tb8B8uRpL0F3Aeo0EBPHx6bTvDSh4APSZJ7Se0QBm7pYG9O_YmppBnMY9yPgH6_75A5WW7BWhVegtEnV-dwZLVTA7YDa55vQUEHsB9etAgJBIhPghC85e1Sg/s320/Photo+on+2011-02-15+at+09.04+%25235.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5573925504504411922" /></a>Good morning healthites:<div><br /></div><div>After coffee and a bite of last night's chocolate espresso cupcakes, I turned to the food of healing. I hollowed out a peeled cucumber and stuffed it with capers and threw in a Spanish olive. I wrapped a lovely purple-veined beet leaf around it and put it onto this art nouveau inspired plate with a couple of lettuce.</div><div><br /></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1686616309102810626.post-63066271310619202842011-02-12T07:48:00.000-08:002011-02-12T07:56:39.662-08:002 waters, 2 coffees, 2 beet leaf caper parsley sprout rollsBreakfast for 1:<div><br /></div><div>Balance and moderation are the key to liver and gallbladder health. I swear by this eternally. Bile was once a sign of anger. There was yellow and black bile. This word brings up the image of Othello seething at the mouth, his fierce moorish lust only toppled by his jealous foolish gut. Bile remains the underlying slow wrenching force of self-drowning eating of the earth all the days of your adamantine life. A dose of sugar and fat for the wish for love's eternity. Say it isn't so!!!! The freshest air could cure the deepest woe. Trouble is we run to oases thinking that they could be a place to bring our pain and so they are. Pain is dragged across the earth for want of an open window. So pray deeply to the god of epiphany for only she knows how to pry open those moments. Some turn to entheogens or drugs, but I turn inward in a different search to find those moments of change.</div><div><br /></div><div>Here is what I had this morning.</div><div>2 waters</div><div>2 coffees</div><div>2 beet leaf wraps with sprouts and capers and a hint of parsley and a diced radish.</div><div><br /></div><div> I feel so good this way. I swear.</div><div><br /></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1686616309102810626.post-49783975493514251902010-10-28T08:29:00.000-07:002011-01-18T18:44:08.184-08:00Almondmilk Fairy blood Bagua of Yeast<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Dear People,</span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Peer into me while having coffee. I am reading Fiskadoro, or wanting to edit it as I read it so that I like it better, and I think, 'sun on the balcony' and then I think 'coffee in small ceramic cups.' Its a food tied directly to an emotion AND a circumstance.</span><div> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> The way she could escape college seminars into long bouts of cigarettes and coffee cups carried over from the pleasure of being jammed into a Denny's booth with a racket of skateboarders from a city nearby. The twins with the Bruce Willis' voice boxes, and Kenny with camera eyes and footage. No one had to know that she was a secret person. It was a blurred all night picture from a dream in which no one turns to you and says, 'How about you...?' Something had kept them all from asking this question, from exposing her before she could flick off the switch, rapel out of the nightmare of being observed too closely. Gratefully anonymous, now she imagined herself, and this quiet self of hers involved in the hand to mouth of smoke and coffee, was as involute, and deadening as sucking a thumb long into prepubescence.<br /></span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Dear People,</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Food cannot change emotions. It changes your body. It zooms in and up to your globed eyes, and your body says, "Oh yes, now I feel even. But insidious as coffee is, it is like guerillla warfare where your eyes have a pelucid infant clarity hidden in the brush tasting the air, wildly alert yet immobile, while your energy is lost in the dark echo of your body being impelled by a heartbeat unnaturally fast for your stillness. So food changes something that lead to emotions but I'd say an emotion is a folk concept, anachronistic, and yet still an effective meaningful compound idea. So food can change the sounds you pay attention to, or the way you walk through woods with filtered light, or bound up the apartment steps, or shlup across the hall, which certainly affects what you feel. . But it is the true 'even' that cools temper. It is the 'even' that remains compelling. I seek the 'even' as its own form of high. The even of mint and almond milk with a hint of pineapple. It is like drinking the blood of a fairy. Emotions can be so potent in their 'even' form. The heightened essence of dread is trumped by the rarified unattached smoothness of presence. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div> </div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">It was the way I felt that morning without a bra on in a white T shirt. I went for Dunkin Donuts drinks, age twenty. I lay my head on his lap, silent tiny fetal cells winnowing. Don't be so clingy he said. On the red sofa made by the scorpio ballet dancer on cocaine, I felt a moment of longing so destructive I must have killed myself in order not to remember its full length and breadth. I wanted to force him to love me, the tips of my nipples turning up in jitterbug love for the hormones of milk. He was folding his origami legs under himself, perhaps, he was only responding to my smell shifting; responding to smelling the future decade of burn scars peeling and searing below a lithe snake-woman stare.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Dear people,</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> Body is mind. All is mind. Eat better psychic food. Has anyone ever seriously claimed that all is body? Its all food. Mind is food. Mattmuirhead relayed the point that 'will' is nothing real. Destruction of anachronistic philosophical constructs is a good idea. They represent clutter in the psyche. Lets not get to burning books or anything. What if I tried to 'be' Zen Essence' in Farenheit 451? If mind is food, then I am not eating well. If mind is matter, why are things still so contrary and obstinant?</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> We are still separate from somethings. Things will make you angry and will make you sad. They differ in mind from your mind's differences. The 'Other' is looking back through the keyhole at you. Here is the true dualism. And so when I say I am trying to purge the unnatural length of emotions, I mean this. However I know that food is both psychic and physical. I think I eat more psychic food and I spend more time with psychic food than physical food. We must purge differences by separating them from ourselves. Or by rising up from them and caring less about them by pretending to care more. Ah, such fundamental irritants! I am allergic to this medicine. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Oh for laconic spirits to leave me to a strict materialism for once!!</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Dear People,</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> I tried to move around the physical things in my space in order to change my life. Can you clean your mind by cleaning your home? </span></div><div> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">I started yeast from flour and water in the corner of the bagua associated with love and relationships. After the little microorganisms flourished, I fed them honey until they died of shock and pissed themselves. I hung up a strand of chili peppers instead and put our sun-fearing plant in the window until you said, honey, the purr plant doesn't like all that sunlight. But the chili peppers were a good idea. I still have tender bruises on my thighs. I moved the plant. I moved everything around ferociously for days. Notebooks and tarot cards and every book on healing, painted purple onto an old painting, and tied a red ribbon around a drain. I'm sort of a neophyte at Earth. I can't quite decorate using space instead of items. Books sing a low hum of soul spinning at 65,000 miles an hour eternally. I can't believe things have less of an effect as the way you think about them. Mind and matter blend and blurr. I am the rug for an hour. I am the computer screen. I am oily onyx stain under my fingernail from making pine poles into window curtain rods. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">After awhile you can move beyond all the things. These physical things you touch which seemed to weigh on you, are now all made of the same thing as you. You have put them in a place, is all.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Dear People,</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> I hope one person gets beyond things until they find this. A sort of deep end sounding for treasures. What if I made psychic smoothies? What sort of curious herbs would I seek? What sort of emotion sifting plants would I grow in the windowsill by the basil for such smooth, 'even' tempers as I pretend to desire? How do you grow a soul?</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">She was tiny, soft blond curls in sweat. COuldn't have been more than a year old or more than six inches from the curb of the thruway. It was a fragile distance and yet as I watched, the child, alone as an adult at a bus-stop, waited and watched the world from her considerate stance. In the late afternoon light, I could almost believe the girl was watching the sun's descending rays gilding an old row-house as she thought of the rushing cars and her own death so close by. Her patience with precariousness slowed the world, spun destinies in the tiny fingers of her small hand. I didn't want to save her. I wanted to watch her choose.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Love,</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Emily</span></div><div><br /></div></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1686616309102810626.post-18709780188072436722010-08-23T09:35:00.000-07:002010-08-23T09:59:41.838-07:00beetstrawberrywine, post-partum, sky cult head-magicAfter birthing Celeste I finally crawl out of my own coma and remember the proper regret-form of tying yourself down. Infancy is consumption and recreation in its most basic form.<div>Today I drank wine at noon. I made a beet strawberry coconut vanilla soy smoothie and ate a flour tortilla with avocado cucumber radishes and a hint of red salsa. The two small crystals of wine fogginess left as the beet did its raw magic. Beetroot is earth's blood. It purifies the sick on contact with the stomach. I swear. If I was too sick to benefit from a beet, I think the earth would have to be telling me that I was dying . </div><div>Celeste slept while I cleaned the closet. I can't yet fit into my sizes of 2-6 pants. This basically means I no longer have clothes that fit. Maternity clothes are in the box and there are a few things that I can wear. My head space is growling with paradoxes of love and sexuality in marriage qua women's new realm of development. I picked up Camile Paglia's Sexual Personae and I am reading this so far Nietzschean inspired aesthetics text that calls women "chthonian" creatures. We are fucked wounds of nature. I say We are Lovecraft's unnamable realm of cold winds that tickle fears of being eternally bound. Men have this reational realm of "head-magic" and they created a sky-cult pantheon to excape the earth-magic of our feminine terra-bound power. It is pretty brilliant and I have gummed it all up I am sure since I am blending it into my beet smoothie. Basically I feel well in a ten steps forward kind of psychological trick. I threw some whole grapes into my smoothie. I have to stay sane. You can't tend an infant when you are depressed. So I must drink water and keep lists and exercise. I feel twisted up in the paradox of post-partum realm. Everything you wanted drives you insane. To not have and to hold is to want to have had and held. To desire life is to desire a bit of death. To desire self is to desire images of self. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000066;">To nourish is still to nourish</span>.<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#660000;">.</span>..this is what I will hold onto. At last!!! A truth!!!!</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1686616309102810626.post-22689610729945905412010-03-08T13:42:00.000-08:002010-03-08T15:09:38.146-08:00IEPs, Iranian Political Prisoners, morning in the treesWe calculated it in the margins of our D&D game; 1 car, thirty minutes to Joe's work. 3 people need time to shower from 5:30 to 6:10, breakfast, coffee, and an hour on the road to Jackson's school. We managed it this morning with these new numbers like mandates. I left Joseph, thermos in hand, outside the institute for emotionally disturbed adolescents. The swipey key wasn't working. He had already drunk one whole 12 ounce of Columbian. Jackson and I had apple banana source of life shakes and oatmeal. He has tests this week so he needed vitamins, sleep, and timeliness.<br /><br />I drilled him on reducing fractions on the drive down, you know, the thing where you take 7/4 and turn it into 1 3/4 , multiplication, and explained that I was not, "wearing his brain out." I took him down to the marina to kill time once we got to Mayo. He said, "Is this poison ivy?" I envisoned him trying to take a math exam, itching like hell. "No." I said, pretty sure ... I lifted his body at a count of three into the tree. We scanned the water for dead fish. I explained how underwater plants can make food if the sunlight can reach them. He energized, smiled, but even at 8, was conscious that a yellow bus in the distance turning into the school lot means,"Is it time? We better go!"<br /><br />On the way to my job back up in Baltimore, I ate an egg roll from last night out of my lunchbox and some Monk's chicken from the Chinese food. After hearing news for the second time that morning, verbatim, explain that a woman named "Hestor" of all things was 'schooling' young women in Baltimore city schools about etiquitte, I turned the dial, so-to- speak.<br />Listening to "Democracy Now".I heard political asylee and Nobel Prize-winner, Sherine Nabadi's Persian translated so carefully. The program diligently played her words in full before they played the English version. I listened for Arabic words, knowing that Persian has some. It was like hearing a person mumbling three out of four words. I thought, even the Nobel prize does not keep the persecution from your door. Apparantly her family has been jailed, her assets have been seized, including prizes, pendants, to include her Nobel prize and her husband's passport. In translation she was thoughtful, wistfully distant from the terrible. She mentioned the sanctions that are being considered against Iran now. She asked that perhaps some products or companies in particular be sanctioned such as the software company, "Simmons" who provided cell phone technology that allowed government wire tapping. She criticized the lack of human rights in Iran and mentioned that there are students who worked on Mousavi's campaign(Ahmadinajad's opponent in the 2009 elections) imprisoned, and scheduled for EXECUTION. I ate the sesame, soy chicken from last night, with my fingers as I drove into the city. I thought of this woman in NYCity, hoped she had support, and wished that we could help these students set for execution.<br /><br />At school where I work, I cut out construction paper trees, clouds, a building with windows of purple city light. I made a sea with a coral reef. I cut out the word Biologia in big 11" letters, adding a blue accent mark over the 'i'. I designed a lesson to teach 7 years olds that 'bio' means 'life' I was proud of the big boy who classified human beings as land creatures, and of a girl who could not decide whether butterflies were land, or air creatures. I supported her decision.<br />I taught "infinitives" to talkative 5th graders. They went to the glossary in the back of their new texts, looking for verbs ending in 'er and 'ir. They yelled sometimes, put their heads down, went to the nurse, asked for translations. They were mostly nice but impatient. I heard the girl with the head scarf say she tasted someone's beer and orange juice. The big girl whose mother I called said she liked a vodka cranberry. I said, "Perhaps that is what I will talk to your mom about when I call her about your behavior today." <strong>I had forgotten the Iranian student waiting to hang...</strong><br /><br />As I ate the rest of my lunch, I perused the Individual Education Plans; the hallmark of the current trend in education. I saw how much analysis is going into setting the scene for a boy who can't pay attention. Accomodations such as "<em>Needs frequent breaks</em>", "<em>Human reader</em>,"<br />"<em>Reduce distractions to student</em>, " let me know that someone is thinking about the kids who I kinda knew were somehow not with me.<br /><br />I want to say there is a theme here, but there is no bow to tie. There is the little boy whose shoe I stooped to tie as he was on his way to get a drink of water. I looked up at his loose teeth, reminded of Jackson's front tooth. I said, "how'd this shoe get so knotty? You're gonna trip." He looked down, pink lips and luminous eyes and said. "My twin did it." I was suprised. I said, "You have a twin? Do they go to this school?<br />His face didn't change. "No, he goes to a different school." In a jolt so common, the boy was gone. He went to get water, perhaps his twin on his mind, perhaps not. I don't know what he was thinking.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1686616309102810626.post-26423858915713820912010-03-03T10:39:00.000-08:002010-03-03T11:16:34.004-08:00Poems to Sleet, Chicken in the oven, OreosI was 'tabbing' which is almost like 'going on a bender' or 'pulling an all-nighter.' The kind of history list that makes you wonder if there isn't everything wrong and right with me all at once. I was interested in theories of depression and self-conception ,albeit only in so far as I was curious about why two children of an eye doctor ended up being eye doctors also, while searching for a place to cash in the insurance for spectacles. I wondered about theories of developmental psychology,and 'ended up', sans google fu, in my own inbox sending a selection of poetry off to an online journal in a flury of leaping over the constant hurdle of such magnetic downward spirals.<br /><br />Here are two of those poems: I ate several oreos and made a source of life smoothie. I'm hungry. I am wondering why I haven't felt little Celeste moving inside me today. What is she doing in there?<br /><br />John L. Peterson<br /><br />The childrens' book author died<br /> his Littles were never for us<br /><br />What words of a blue book<br />my grandfather's old fingers last pointed out<br />were some military shame<br /><br />and his frail figure trying to explain<br /><br />their dinner bell on the telephone table<br /> silently<br />could not suffice to say<br /> why there was no love<br />coming through the line<br /><br /><br /><br />3902 Old York<br /><br />my mother's cylindrical teat nursing a baby<br /> in the ancient red leather rocker<br />the smell of the house that burned in ninety-eighty-five<br />and her heart with it,<br /><br />Lost forever all those chaotic schizoid episodes<br />her saying don't eat daddy's little blue stelazine pills,<br />even at 6 I can remember her saying they'd kill<br /><br />~Love,<br />EmilyUnknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1686616309102810626.post-46535546646530874542010-02-18T10:36:00.000-08:002010-02-18T11:48:16.623-08:00Black tea and grapefruits, teaparties, Law,"...and she feeds me tea and oranges that came all the way from China, and just when you mean to tell her that you have no love to give her, she gets you on her wavelength, and she lets the river answer....that you've always been her lover, and you want to travel with her, and you want to travel blind..."<br />Tod Noletto said we should eat tea and oranges, and I thought back to Judy Collins but you said Leonard Cohen. The thought warmed.<br /><br />I've been eating grapefruit since I found out about the fetal child inside me. I've been stocking up on sunshine despite the greyness and three feet of snow like the july born baby desires it. Joseph buys them for me in twos threes and fours and I cut them into halves and tick myself around their clock always counterclockwise. And when I am done I squeeze and drink the rest.<br />I have been drinking black tea, reconnecting with the hill we used to climb as children to build fires and brew tea and I return periodically to the bittersort of feeling that my parents have never thought to call me since I left home. It was never their practice to muddle about in childrearing. They would be constructed meticulously of wheat germ and brewer's yeast and then they would fall out of her apron, and she never minded setting them loose on the dirty floor.<br />My mother brought Alpaca socks and sweaters and hats and came down with them on her Pro Life March Annual this January. I made Thyme Lamb and Sundried Tomato Soup from scratch and we drank cider with my brothers and sister. The tea has the feeling of comfort beyond insanity. It was one of the only things that I have always counted on.<br />I am feeling a seeping in at the edges of well being. Pregnancy. The flavors of vomit and cookies. Wine and Duck, and the swirl from contented to weary beyond words. New torments come to stretch me in the form of the law and the people who torment me are like hellhounds or time's bitch-angels perhaps, who are clawing a strip of white into my curls. I am bones and flesh and a magnet of electric anxiety and hate. It tore anger into my body in headache and migraine for days until finally the demons manifested in my inbox in the form of a Cause: documents.<br />Documents of intention to take. It was the Law. Outside I was pounced and handed a second summons. I looked inward with strange desperation and humour at the happenings which we cannot always understand. There justice sits looking at me with eyes the color of electronics. I take her gaze in. I take the plaintiff's hatred and folly in. I take the world of unfairness in, and my Ideals are like snow melting outside. The thought that Republicans gathering to ignore the world, or other people plotting to take or steal; the thought that they are somehow truly evil is always a big white circle of hay covered in blue red and yellow and black concentric circles. I can aim my arrow. I can hate. But no, I refuse to believe people are so cruel. Deep in the heart of all trouble are beliefs and opinions and foolish people who cannot differentiate the nightmare from the dream over long swooping epochs. They somehow laughed at Kant's categorical imperative and laughed at the Samaritan, and laughed at pacifists and then at the bottom of some thought, turned to climb the pile of turtles to be a sorry king of their sorry pond. In the interim they are noxious and caustic energies to some, and solace to others. This storm of soul despair rains on the tin drum ceiling of my thoughts. I curl into myself and try not to let it ruin my horn of flame. I am a filter for a tiny spark of wonder. It wavers and rolls in my insides. I cry on the floor and at the table. I light sage and clutch the blue lighter. Your hands are warm on my back.<br />My baby moves inside. I smile. My mother's polish china cup with the re-glued handle sits on a paper towel with raw sugar crystals in the bottom.<br /><br />"And Jesus was a sailor When he walked upon the water And he spent a long time watching From his lonely wooden tower And when he knew for certain Only drowning men could see him He said "All men will be sailors then Until the sea shall free them" But he himself was broken Long before the sky would open Forsaken, almost human He sank beneath your wisdom like a stone ""-Leonard CohenUnknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1686616309102810626.post-53782401623329770062009-12-10T07:07:00.000-08:002011-02-08T08:51:58.162-08:00Capers, Olives, and RadishesThe bitter and the puckery. These little nibblets of sour and bitter and zang are the curious flavors I have worked into the raw and cooked health foods I now devour. Capers look like gallstones. So do green olives.<div><br /></div><div><br /><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-large;"><i>Lithotryptic Salad</i></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-large;"><i><br /></i></span></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">A ring of pineapple for balanced stomach acids</span></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">a handful of Spanish Olives(Green and stuffed with pimiento)</span></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">A handful of green organic mix cleaned and sprinkled on a pretty plate or in a bowl</span></i></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><i>two radishes sliced thinly like cross sections of a gallbladder</i></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><i>A square of cheddar cut into little nibbles</i></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><i>a strand of chicken from the rotisserie </i></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><i>a handful of capers rinsed of their brine</i></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><i><br /></i></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><i><br /></i></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><i><br /></i></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-large;"><i><br /></i></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-large;"><i><br /></i></span></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1686616309102810626.post-90680331212064797502009-09-27T20:55:00.000-07:002009-10-07T06:16:56.607-07:00Rewarding yourself, committing to somewhere, and a cheese ballSunday the 27th=October 7th<br />Even after two cups of wine yesterday night at the windup space, I got up and ran six miles. It didn't even make me unbelievably sore. I had woken up and drank the water and juice at six fifteen. Even...came back to a good cup of coffee but only drank a few gulps of hot black before I headed out to see Carl and Lars(2 of five brothers.) You had working on a flyer. I left you at kinkos and headed over to scoop up Lars and Carl. After a daily grind coffee, we hit the road.<br /> We immediately realized the Saturn was swaying all over the road. It was as though 2 technical minds needed a project and so the universe revealed one in the form of our vehicle.<br />I had to get gas anyway. As I pumped, the distinct pleasure of watching my two brothers kicking and rocking the car tires, a flashlight checking out the bearings, analyzing the cambre and the shocks and what-have-you. After we got the tires filled, we headed over to meet up with my ex and his wife who were having lunch at a random place called Gina's cantina in millersville, an organic-meets-margaritville house shaped picnic table oasis out of the rain. We came in and sat down like old friends, had some food, Jackson a happy little person sitting on the bench comfortable to have me sit with the bench between my legs so I could face him. I described "the-way-things-go" with him like Robert Krulrich and Jad Abumrad on Radiolab, bantering back-and-forth. I ate in the amazement that we were all getting along. Casey asked where my fiance was. I looked at his face and his nose ring and his blue adidas jacket and thought about how familiar he was. Then I looked at his wife as she described her braces in high school. I ate beans and rice and sipped sweet lemonade. <br />Daddy had lost alot of weight. I took my brothers and my son down to St. John's and I was looking forward to seeing my parents and maybe some old friends. I sometimes eat very little at places for no real reason except that to eat alot somewhere is to commit to it somehow.I ate very little at the soiree. A cheese quiche in a tiny greesy shell, a bit of gouda. I met Nelson Lund, a former white house advisor to Carter I think and one of my parents friends from then, and saw Jerry Janizewski who I used to see around the gym. I got eggs from my mother's hens and some vegetables from her garden.<br />This morning was a little sore. I couldn't run. I fried some of the cage-free eggs my mother had brought down from new york. i put in a kind of sort feeling, a kind of attempt to circumvent the stress in breakfast feeling. We had been having a bit of anxiety over meals here together. I made soy sausages for me. I put them on my butterfly plate and came over. I guess we ate sort of peacefully. We were talking but I can't remember about what. <br />Lunch was, we were talking together about something tense. You had been writing, I had been writing, Jackson reading calvin and hobbes as usual. Borne of a simple comment that I snapped at, a discussion ensued that threatened the afternoon. A black and tan. You cracked one and had a sip and pulled one out for me. I wouldn't open it until I had reached the sort of knowledge that was peaceful. You came in the kitchen, put two chairs facing each other and we sat; my beer sweating unopened. I waited until the breakthrough. It came, my hands weaving a delicate believable soul-form, you encouraging me to speak positively, and suddenly borne of two hopes, a peace came with an understanding. I cracked my beer and began to drink it in a mini spiritual celebration of our two hearts. <br />I had toasted jack a bagel during this discussion. Jackson spread the cream cheese listening to us. <br />lunch was two leftover pancakes with molasses cinnomon and honey and the rest of my cold coffee. <br />There was a boh, and some salty chips at the hostel, and a nervous feeling of poems and feelings in my blood. . It was book-festival weekend, still lots of people came out. I ate CheeseyPuffs("Dangerously Cheese" I said thinking of Zenit Chugtai translating "gibna khateera" sitting next to me one day at the Dar. Jackson and I put CheezyPuffs on Scoops and ate them. I ate a CheeseBall talking to a hostel employee named Nick who liked the idea of doing a writing workshop there.<br /><br />Sunday the soccer game was canceled. It rained. I had to work 12 hours Monday. Spanish in the morning to 5th graders, then 1st Graders, then K. Then the train, then teach Business of Massage. I had a really crappy but delicious hot chocolate on the acela train. It cost 36$ for the ticket. I had a table and opened my binder to plan my lesson and it felt very good. I thought about how success brings the possibility of self-importance. I thought about how Joe always says, "what you need to worry about is, preparing yourself for success." It was just a tray table and a faster train. I HAD to take it because I was late. Your kiss was sweet in the morning, and in the evening I walked home sooo tired and you were still gone to ED& Emily's. I ate Shrimp and onions and Snow peas from the SUb SHop near Dunkin DOnuts across Georgia Ave where I work. I left while the students were in the clinic, and felt like I was kind of breaking a law. I was So hungry, Casey had sent me aweful text messages which I had finally had a chance to read..I began to ponder them feeling sort of unappreciated. <br />If I only ate when I felt really really good..How would that look like? Would I feel nourished? Do I feel "good" or just okay? Even as I write this, a week late, I am drinking coffee, the dishes are still dirty from the neat chili I made last night of my mother's baby eggplants and her banana peppers cooked in cumin seed and olive oil with onions and carrots and black eyed peas over brown rice. It feels good to even think of that meal. It was almost hallucinogenic in its goodness. I always think of nourishing skin with onions. The cumin seeds were something intense, some thought I meant to remember; I put them in with the fervence of a witch making a potion. I cut up the eggplants into half moons and thought of my mother's goodness. I was so pleased with seeing all the vegetables cooking and the brown rice bubbling. Food is a commitment to time. I explained principles of transference and countertransference to you, we talked and I watched your heart chakra and mental balance with a strange high bubbling from my forehead like the corpus collusum was separating slightly and putting me into a trance. Among other things, you were talking about Frames of Mind, the primary source of the theory of multiple of intelligences which you are reading. It was a good meal.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1686616309102810626.post-13977355797391861262009-09-25T07:10:00.000-07:002009-09-25T08:27:53.083-07:00All 'Ins' now on alert, the minutes, and morningstarThis is a memory project more and more. To remember my days more clearly is part of my goal. I feel like emotions hijack so much of my experience. SO I start at the nearest food in time and work backwards.<br /><br />Multigrain cereal and soy vanilla. I ate it while watching the beginning of the listening project.<br /><br />Coffee with cream and sugar. I thought of Joe. I thought of Mohammed. I was trying to call Mohammed back. He said, " lIsten Emily I have to tell you something." Of course it would be just like him to have nothing important to say. It might be him trying to tell me that I am wrong in some way. His selfishness made me laugh more than once as I walked away and disappeared into the bright crowded colors of Shari Saed Zaghloul, happy to be an American woman who knows her human rights to exist in the light and the dark of the her fullest range of human expression. I found out I don't have itnl calling so I wonder if he is pissed I didn't call back. I drank the coffee pretty fast wondering if it was a good idea. I thought also of Joe saying, "how are you behind that screen?" Of his intended ambiguity. I was wondering if I seem to be opaque today. How he said he loved me, and through the blurred eyes of my natural sight, I could see him catch my blown kiss and hold it to his heart.<br />Orange Juice-I almost had a cold this morning, my nose had that tingly feeling and stuffiness. I drank the juice and had the coffee and restimulated my wall of walking sickness. I think I did dream some funny things, about a fish and expensive vs. cheap rice, and a classroom and someone leaning over to ask somebody for two cigerettes to which they replied they were their last two<br /><br />~<br />Last night....Kangen water.living water vs dead water..Jenny massaged my feet...Jason Greenberg prattled about prostitute assasins and his Premptive world's greatest grandad shirt. I took in calcium through my feet? Tomato hummos bread and a moment of silence on something Joe said that resonated in both Robin and Matt. I lost it in my tomato chamber of the heart...I just took in the feeling I got. It was a feeling of paranoia. It was a feeling of an energy. I ate it. The taking in feeling I get is sometimes funny. We have the choice to take in energy don't we. We have the choice to say no. We have the choice to understand someone and we have the choice to ignore them. Mind is, capable of comprehension, but it is an altered state to accept someone's thoughts. So we can say no to comprehension. See, I always thought that getting people to resonate their inner worst fears is a way to let them be. But it is like tripping. So when I see someone swallow this innerness I still see the star imploding. <br />So I had mushy grape leaves and spicy babaghanoug and a cuke-umber in a garlicky tahini and a bit of falafel. I thought about my silences, about dealing with multiple energies, about the stresses in my body, about what my erotic world is doing, about what is going on inside of Joe... Psychic space has become the Jungle. There are braided yarn rope swings with hordes of children and supramodern indigo virgins with smoky dundalk eyes and disillusioning adonai and sparkling artsy relationships and accomplishments at the speed danger and excitement of a street race down some corridor of potent visibile emotion whipped me on despite this huge unconscious elephant. Saturn is about taking on or letting go in the right amounts. Be sure. We are beside each other, I saw you putting the lamb onto the bread. There was talk about meat. I felt good from the acupuncture and thoughts on TED and AVAM and EVOLVER and Bonnie Besler, and bacteria floral consciousness and thoughts of hormones. I talked about making art around food for the next EVOLVER at Yabba Pot.<br /><br />So then earlier...I had a flax bar and celery and carroits....and a bit of muffin and coffee with cream(from oN THE Hill) I drove warp speed home from the Hill. I kissed you caffinated. I could not stand the muffin. The muffin was bloated and chewy and sprinkled with the hyperstimulated sugar crystals of a orgasmic heart attack of instinctual anxiety. I could make a better muffin with the taste of grains and berries and mild sweet health. So i will. I will. I will. <br /><br />That day was good though. I took in REIKI in the teacher's lounge with the music teacher talking about his Lesbian convent of witches. He seems so angry and yet at peace. He does look like he is pacing with a club in his hands. A sort of Scottish lout with a evil desire to DO Justice. Haha. And Marion, with cool brown skin and warm clear eyes. I ate fast. I was nervous. I've been nervous for a while now. My body is still adjusting to a new existance. I didn't eat alot yesterday and yet I wasn't hungry.<br />I ate a piece of white pizza the night before from John kellogg. He didn't really look me in the eye. He didn't hug me. He just put a song on twice that said, "But don't play with me, cause you're playing with fire." I felt sort of threatened, but maybe he just likes the song. Before that I had been on the train, and before that I had been just drinking water at school and hadn't really eaten anything since my early Wednesday flax bar and its concomittant run down to the train station. I had eaten some bagel/morningstar burger with ketchup sandwich I made. I ate that really fast, chewing, biting rapidly. I had a feeling of intensity again. I even brought a thermos of coffee with me. Everything so fast. Texted a message of distancing to Daniel. He had called the night before and I felt spun. I felt like it wasn't fair for me to have to deal with his thoughts and feelings again. Some friend he was, Some friend I am, but I drank coffee and mused frantically on the best psychic solution. I'd been trying to make some meals for Joe and I, our days just so busy. Tuesday he washed the dishes after I made the chicken and pasta with mushrooms cooked in olive oil with Gavin's purple cinnomony basil and asparagus for him and salmon for me. It was over angel hair. I left it in the stove while I went to pick him up. Tuesday I'd worked, had no lunch. Went home and felt tired. I had done Yoga in the morning and worked at the school. I felt good but still anxious. The morning I probably didn't eat again. OR did I? I did. I ate some morning star sausage. Monday. So long ago...My emotions have been dealing with fear. Looking at my need for fear. It is so pure. It is also based on thoughts during sex. Food seems clear to me. I maybe need to think about what I take in online and in my mind and experiences. I may just need to focus on the ins that I have on the psychic plane. I may be doing battles with friends and acquaintances on a mental plane. These should all be healthy places. <br />Now about that poetry....Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1686616309102810626.post-60696305793044047262009-09-20T19:58:00.000-07:002009-09-20T21:13:35.106-07:00Etiology and Idiopathy: Where's the meal?I read somewhere that you need to enjoy talking together or eating together since lovemaking isn't always going to sustain a couple. I'm pretty sure we are living on it these days. That and Zeke's coffee. <br />This morning I didn't make the coffee. You did. I prepared it though, cleaning out the little flat ceramic cups from yesterday's coffee. We never did make that evening pot did we? I put raw sugar and a little honey and cream into both cups and you didn't even wait for me to bring it to you. You came over and took it off the counter. Mine was sipped down a little. I can't remember if I was fully dressed. I sometimes just prepare my coffee or do dishes in my underwear. I was thinking of cream of wheat, the cereal, not the kitten, but of how I'd personally not mind eating cream of wheat for breakfast. I'd seen it as I put the honey back on the cabinet shelf. I was thinking how I'd live on little back in my apartment on Bolton st. How I feel like you need meat, and some "meal" and I cater to that. I went over and sat down at the table with you and we talked. You in front of your silver metal Mac. Me looking at 'at the threshold of Alchemy', a book of poems by John Amen, which I had finally brought up from your car last week. You'd explained it was from Jen Michaelski and that you had to write a review for it. It was only yesterday that I finally shook her hand and tried to be a third person in your conversation in the gentlest of manners so she'd stay standing there. The book under that one was Antisocial by David Blaine which Jen had held up saying, "there is a way you can get this book. Come see me to know how." <br />I flipped open the first book and mentioned the review. Maybe I said. 'I'd like to hear your review.' You said you had to send it today(Sunday) You read your notes. I read some words from the book thinking about publishing again. I had just pretty much downed the cup of coffee. I said 'I liked it when you made the coffee' I was feeling curious about how we'd spend our sunday. I think I said we should have a special breakfast and we were going to get some morningstar sausage links for me, but then we started talking about laundry and other things we needed like toothpaste. Breakfast was a second half cup of coffee. YOu came over and poured it into my cup, the hot glass of the pot warming against my hand which was still grasping the cup. I had drunk water first thing in the morning.<br /><br />Still. I have been drinking coffee constantly since returning from Egypt. It is as though I have this umbilicus of dopamine eeking from a roastery on Said Zaghloul st. I keep feeding myself from the bean cord. Trying to keep awake in the existance of a past. The food cycle is broken in my life. I eat strangely and not at all. I finally made us Pbjs at 12:30 while we figured out a formula on your MAC spreadsheet software for our budgets. We had separate tables and we had to merge them( TotalmonthlyincomeJoseph,TotalmonthlyincomeEmily. You wrote'EMma' and then erased it saying, "I'm just going to confuse myself." I came back with the sandwiches. Uncut. You aren't a kid. I've been cutting Pbjs into trianges for years. Even mine. But I put yours whole onto a plate. I put some doritos on mine. Damned doritos. I put them back up in the cabinet at first saying something about, "its the doritoes that got me." Something neurotic and self-derogatory and spacy. I felt talkative for talkative's sake.<br /> I spread the jelly. <br />You figured out something! <br />I came over and put the upside down jelly spoon in my mouth. It was cool and grape. I was done with jelly.<br /> I put it away thinking. With Casey I always bought the red raspberry. <br />I thought. I never liked grape.<br /> I bought it for you. I'd buy. APricot, red raspberry, something different everytime. That would be more like me. I put that thought into the fridge and closed it.<br />When I sat back down you pushed back your chair, waved your hand like 'ya'. Done. I was really into knowing how to do the totals in this software. You were into being done with it. Your satisfaction had turned to irritation. Unexplained. Idiopathic. I felt a static around my chest of tightness. I could either ask or not ask. Talk or not talk. Prod or not prod. I thought about food and emotions. It's kind of reflexive for me now. <br />I joked with you this time instead of applying the claw hammer. <br />Score 1 point in soul experience points. I made fun of myself. I rubbed dorito dust all over my face and made you smile. It couldn't really last for long. Who know why. I jammed the crust into my mouth on a hard thought. I walked away and came back with a long old thought about money. You said something like "what is that fear you are trying to inculcate" I said "Shame on me." and cried truthfully. It was a bit of honest tears. <br />We were ready to go out and buy some things then.<br />We didn't eat again until the veggie burger and pizza at Maria Ds in Glen Burnie. It was a meal. Our second meal of the day. In the middle between Pbjs and Pizza we'd had a beer at Lof/t. My beer was frothy and cold. I felt like a permanent yin chill of drunkenness seeped into my hands as I held it. I put it down and made finger puppets on the back of Robin's chair as she read poems up at the music stand podium. I think I made Rupert Wondolonski(sp) laugh. Maybe he didn't notice. I had fun letting my eyes glaze over while her words sexually charged the air. I heard fist and pornstar, and snake in bamboo at rivers edge and many other words like 'shaved.' I liked the black shadows of my fingers on the red of the chair. My beer was full of my brown dress and my vertigo from too much feeling and too much drinking and talking yet there was still this unknowing around you. I couldn't quite shake it. Even after our afternoon interlude. Mouthsful of each other. More than ever I didn't need to eat and I wasn't eating anyway. Tension in me had begun to rise again. The laughter, and the hugs and the car ride all had my tension and my yesterday, back to my week of teaching. I talked about my blue wolf paper puppet. I talked. I talked. There was a sense in me of too much. I tried to find the etiology of everything. I needed to know everything. I spoke until speaking dried out my throat and my third eye and sat semi-comatose in the seat opening and closing my sleek black intrique phone staring at its silver hinge and watching the light move across the translucent black hard plastic of its wings. Everything was rushing forward. <br />There was no meal today. Outside the game store, we agreed we'd have a slice now and cook later. So at Maria's Italien place where we always go after ice skating, I picked the veggie burger I ate poking it with a toothpick talking to Jackson who was in Martha's Vinyard at a wedding. Jackson had found a caterpiller with black horns. I imaged poky snail horns made of black fleshiness. I didn't look up at you as you ate your hawaiian pizza. I just poked the italian sub bread sandwich repetitively and tried to imagine where he was. I said "what are you doing."Jackson said "its dinnertime. actually its more like brunch." I asked if he was eating. he said. "no. I'm talking to you." I laughed. Later at home I ate the multigrain cheerios and soymilk we'd gotten at Target. You didn't eat anything else. You drank water after I rubbed your shoulders with lavender oil and brought you water. Then you left for Cats Eye and I finished the flax seed bar you asked about...and picked pepperonis off of one of the slices you brought home. I ate it, knowing I wasn't really hungry. You're going to eat the other two when you get home...<br />I feel ambivalent about food. I've had better food days. I've eaten fresher things, drank cleaner liquid, stayed sober, uncaffeinated, taken a bath and felt more even. All my tension could be from this unnourished body...asking for me to rest, to drink water and stretch. I'm so happy you agreed about buying whole oats instead of the boxes of packets....Why didn't I eat? Where's the meal? The meal is last tuesday when I made carrot soup with black beans and salmon with a tomato garlic couli over rice. The tomatoes had been cold and delicious. I cut them thinking of the chambers of the heart because a tomato has four chambers. I ate them off of the cutting board so happy and then sauteed them slowly in garlic and black pepper. I'm almost done with the jar of peppercorns from 2005. That jar is like a spell. Its been causing something tiny and inexplicable to rise and fall in my spirit as grains of causality burble through my inner world. This week I will have to cook something with Gavin's basil.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1686616309102810626.post-63656974894718579922009-08-30T07:04:00.000-07:002009-09-02T07:34:01.805-07:00Emma's new choices,Ouza "White Athenians", & Molletes Sencillos..i.e. nothing EgyptianTahini Tuna<br /><br />I ate a whole tuna steak out of a can like Nour and I would do in the Bait-Al_Talibat(the girl's dorms) I covered it with Virginia Crespo's tomato diced small, green pepper, and Lebanese Tahini. Not one of us in this apartment like the same food. Joe, Jackson, and I eat separately to be most happy with our food choices. I curled into the black beanbag, a gaudy nefertiti gold printed unstuffed-ottoman ontop of it in a a vinyl paradise against my legs. I ate and discussed the implications of becoming a new character. <br />I was making up a new character for D&D in order to psychologically stretch myself beyond old fears of improv acting, and I was attempting to circumvent my fears being translated as indifference for role-playing. "This is really hard for me!" my paralysed inner child screams. Who am I? How can I pretend to be someone else? I decided that role-playing has to be based upon true desires of the soul. But this is harder than it sounds. <br /><br />How easy it is to imagine that what I desire is articulable! Curled in the black bean bag with my metal dish of tuna, watching the boys look at me expectantly, I decided I'd prefer to be the part of me that wants to be agressive, challenging, and chose a Bard who injures with sharp words, who chants poetry about old warriors to make allies feel strong like Pericle's funeral oration, and who uses a technique called "Fast Friends" that gets people to become confused about their alliances. Enemies think they are my friend when they are not and this is to their detriment. Finally manipulative obessesive scorpio-tendencies could come out safely. With the first drink that night I became more capable of imagining how biting she could be.<br /> Any role-playing has got to have some psychic importance to my real self-development. And any self-development was going to come at a price. This new character enjoys being at taverns. This was important. I could see that role-playing a person who is angry and hurt somehow was going to help me 'explore', but needed delicacy. She had suffered from indifference and that was going to arm her with mental lashes for enemies. <br /> Importance is the antithesis of indifference. The enemies of such a cruel bard as I was creating in the imaginary world, would be the goblins of the mythical world. <br /><br />Breakfast<br /><br />The next morning I made "Aunt Sophie's Eggs" which is named after no aunt of mine. The desire just to make them got me out of my cozy bed. I don't usually get excited about frying butter in late summer. I hadn't been able to sleep last night. The revelation that people sometimes don't give a shit about how you feel had me up late last night. Indifference is many-splendored as far as I am concerned. <br /><br />There is the indifference a mother can feel about making breakfast in the morning. This is ordinary. There is the feeling that no matter how hard I try to play D&D well, it will come off as indifference because I have to role-play something I want to be, and that is at least psychologically hard to discover, if not transcendental to become aloud. This is a mis-interpreted indifference. It wishes to evolve like a pokeman( Rilo into Lucario or Catapi into Cascoon and so on.....)I require diligence to evolve.<br /><br />And then there is the indifference of my 'friend' ( I always use real names), whose crystalline will does not apply to Zanex or wandering the streets of Alexandria until sunrise laughing at me because I can peel two vagrant adolescent beachcombers off me with curt gender-specific arabic, or to helping me apply Occams's Razor to the most important questions of life, while watching the sun turn the sea from wine-dark to light jade, but which allows him to disappear to the margins of Facebook in permanent do-not-reply status. How many times has that sea dried up, leaving us Italian salt-rock caves? <br /><br /> It compounded my head last night that I had been drinking, "white Athenians" Ouza aperatif liquor brought back from Emmanual's wedding in Greece mixed with half&half cold coffee and vanilla. I played Youtube videos of music and taught myself the chords of Mazzy Star's Fade into you and refilled my blue tumbler again and again. <br /><br />Indifference was edged out slowly, as the unmoving memories turned sepia-stagnant pink in my depths. At 4:52, the Cream-of-Wheat kitten was still eating my toes and the feeling of being ignored had magnified to a metastrophic horror. What if everything I know is not real? what if I only imagined that we were friends? <br />Earlier that night I had had the distinct sensation that Joe had answered the phone in the middle of my sentence. "So...." he had said, and flipped open the phone. I felt a shock as though this was clearly rude. Of course he had never done anything like that. It felt like indifference when really he had only experienced a pause in my speech as though, an opening for his decision to answer the phone. Indifference was clanging like a ship's bell leaving, like the sound of a train pulling out, like the feeling of a plane pulling up off the run-way. It was taking all my attention left over from peeling the cat off of my face.<br /><br /> The drinks had only made it hard to sleep and left me dehydrated and uncomfortable in our soft bed. I got up and went online. I saw, "the doctor" had accepted my friendship. Matt was another student in Alexandria who I talked to three times. I remembered sitting next to him in the Pearl in Smoohah, a newspaper between us, translating a difficult article about factions in Lebanon, the thread of friendship between us linked incredibly finitely to that moment and hardly consisted in friendship, unlike that between Daniel and I.<br /><br /> That night,Daniel had come in with bean sandwiches for the group a few minutes later and sat across the table with his Al-Kitab opened, smoking, looking at us for a few minutes before he slid behind a pillar and put his ear buds in; Not indiferrence at that point, simply doing his best to study for exams the next day. In memory, the new friend on facebook was only a link to feeling loss. I had to overcome this nicotine-addiction to feeling betrayed by the end of summer school.<br /><br />On facebook that morning, as the other sleepless green dots were rising on the lower left, I saw also that my mother was in town. She hadn't called to say hello, or even to excitedly say anything about my new engagement. I was miffed ontop of injured in my pride. I drank a cup of water, a cup of grape juice, washed my face with Ayurvedic soup, and my nose-ring with saline. I brushed my teeth and lay back down. I cried softly in the way that you can with her chest aching, clenching, and then breathing deeply. It was a true letting-go, of my mother, of my friend and our good times together. It was three or four of these Mohammedean squeezes which rendered truth unto my mind. I am loved by some, and others do not love me as they say. I yawned a deep aching yawn that released me finally. I turned into the warm embrace of my prometido(promised one.) Love is not so indifferent to entreaties. He curled around me lovingly.<br /><br />Molletes Sencillos<br /><br />After I served up the Aunt Sofia's eggs( toast with circles cut out with eggs fried inside the circles),I made myself a version of bread smeared with black bean paste toasted with cheese. Molletes are like french bread pizza in Mexico, and like Egypt, there is no red sauce for pizza. The Mollete is made on a rounded bit of french bread with a layer of bean and a heavy dose of Queso Fresco or Queso Oaxaqueña. I made mine with cheddar and cheap Italian bread. I listened to NPR explaining how 10,000 people dressed up for Michael Jackson's birthday yesterday, and met up in celebration of his birthday wearing fedoras, leather, and bloody dresses doing the moonwalk.<br />My mother called. Joe pointed to the phone emphatically. When she finished explaining how she finally got a hold of me on Joe's phone, she explained who she was going and what she was going to be gifting to them. This was all to say that she did not have anything much for me. I didn't have anything to say except, "that's fine." She asked me if her trip had feasibility. I checked Google maps to see how long it was to her destination in PA and tried to break it down for her so that she could see that it would be possible to see each of her daughters for a few minutes, and my son. <br />"I look to you and I see nothing<br /> I look to you to see the truth.<br />You live your life, you go in shadow<br />you'll come apart, and you'll go black<br />some kind of night inside your darkness<br />colors your eyes with whats not there<br />Fade, Into you<br />I think It's strange you never knew"<br />-Mazzy StarUnknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1686616309102810626.post-71732408841021639092009-06-17T05:56:00.000-07:002009-09-02T07:22:08.855-07:00The useful green things?, Flu precautions in Egyptian girl's dorm, and Eating Pidgeons<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgYvFl45qRVjQK-f3UEyUnfy59Sa-EpXXa_fJPCHHu3SeMA1tXFMprXJ7BmYMmKpYHbm3J7XkTofl4u0ZEcukXyVRIgfCKX1DtUv1SGnFws0s0QpIkD77Tal985sJjQBI2XylN9FDzgXk/s1600-h/DSCN3546.JPG"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgYvFl45qRVjQK-f3UEyUnfy59Sa-EpXXa_fJPCHHu3SeMA1tXFMprXJ7BmYMmKpYHbm3J7XkTofl4u0ZEcukXyVRIgfCKX1DtUv1SGnFws0s0QpIkD77Tal985sJjQBI2XylN9FDzgXk/s320/DSCN3546.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5348280650874421266" /></a><br /><br /><br />Today I begin my research on complementary medicine in Egypt. I did sign a paper saying I would not do any private research while studying under American Councils for International Education's umbrella so I will rephrase and call this exploration a highly contextualized language learning environment. My context is healing arts, and I am collecting vocabulary on this specific topic because international health care is of vital importance.<br /> Now, the above image is of a guy collecting something green out under my window. Yes, this barren concrete mess below that is as strewn with litter as a Baltimore gutter, is what I see when I hang my laundry. See below a picture of my building. This fellow came with a friend and gathered from a vine-like plant for twenty minutes. He was selective and careful as though he was choosing only the best leaves. <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitfJRk-EevaHtFbusHT32jyOhDG9uLK8F7tR8GZymiJiz9J0zX979xoUOvqdrrU3g_Xha07RdtAPA-8NxiMDETm1aaSjpebN2RYRt7z2rex12aWS6Hr6SAjbSi7dwnzrGlji181eDc_js/s1600-h/DSCN3449.JPG"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitfJRk-EevaHtFbusHT32jyOhDG9uLK8F7tR8GZymiJiz9J0zX979xoUOvqdrrU3g_Xha07RdtAPA-8NxiMDETm1aaSjpebN2RYRt7z2rex12aWS6Hr6SAjbSi7dwnzrGlji181eDc_js/s320/DSCN3449.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5348282375947720226" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br />The administrators at the Bait-al-Talibat(بيت الطالبات)or 'girl's dorms' essentially, are on one hand hyper concerned with health and healthy things. The natural use of lines to dry clothing is highly appropriate to the available sunny resources. There are no cloudy days. I was so suprised to see a cloud when zooming in on google earth to an area south of Lake Mareotis, that I thought I was seeing a fire. There is less wasted energy with fewer gas and electric appliances in use although I am pretty sure that is not anything different than the way of life as always in Egypt.<br />Also, the night guards of the dorm I am staying in wake me up at all hours to take my temperature to see if I have H1N1 flu virus. A few people have been diagnosed in the city, who are unrelated to the American group studying at the TAFL center in Alexandria University's College of Literature. Minor stomach irritation has been the only reported illness among us. I heard that they will be ceasing the temperature taking on Thursday.<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEgogpupmZAPtL1BdoCF9dyD6xad3tqFWxmQcbZ3c5Wu0qZ7k0CopI5MArpk5UKQ2uw2bzIORkCjY40XKRn0rsbnEied-typEJqMjO15VijQUvKusO23HVZWxE4NVZPOs60iSioLo2ClE/s1600-h/DSCN3466.JPG"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEgogpupmZAPtL1BdoCF9dyD6xad3tqFWxmQcbZ3c5Wu0qZ7k0CopI5MArpk5UKQ2uw2bzIORkCjY40XKRn0rsbnEied-typEJqMjO15VijQUvKusO23HVZWxE4NVZPOs60iSioLo2ClE/s320/DSCN3466.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5348293423734497218" /></a><br /><br /><br />But the food here blanches nutrients from its landscape like foreigners after the revolution of 1952. The food we are served seems to be based on a pyramid of bread, rice, and pasta with a cream cheese peak. Kosherie, a meal mixing pasta rice, and vermicelli with some onion and oil is a well known Egyptian dish. We joke around about it, but we really are offered bread and jam for two out of every three meals. I have been told that I will be getting some fish twice a week but I will have to see it to believe it. One day we went out to Balba, a pretty high class restaurant and I got to pick out my shrimp. An hour later I got to eat it. It was grilled and seasoned with cumin and very delicious. Valerie Montes ate a cooked pidgeon.<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIgd6bEV7UWsiTR2czYkMproC3RV63nmrFED8s-PozEWgaTOqa4ZYBOJNPFP-s7k79B2XZ_pjZlv0Vl2pG0MyUcibff1We2ue7EDbgmKivXiviraIE2JOtWmNaUyUSuoJJKjCMx9UBhhs/s1600-h/DSCN3408.JPG"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 240px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIgd6bEV7UWsiTR2czYkMproC3RV63nmrFED8s-PozEWgaTOqa4ZYBOJNPFP-s7k79B2XZ_pjZlv0Vl2pG0MyUcibff1We2ue7EDbgmKivXiviraIE2JOtWmNaUyUSuoJJKjCMx9UBhhs/s320/DSCN3408.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5348285092984301554" /></a><br /><br />I am very curious to learn more in depth about the plant down below my window and why it was being harvested into a yellow plastic bag. <br /><br />Though I have only been in country for a little over a week, broad strokes have been made. I have boldly walked through nervous fear into the night to see the sea despite overly cautious warnings. I figured the elements of city include darkness, light, traffic, strangers, exchanges, and my own mind alert. <br />I took myself to see the world just beyond the narrow limits of my mind. The water smells salty and remind me of sitting on the rocks on the Naval Academy grounds where I used to go and sit and look out over Annapolis harbor, and crossing through the tunnel under the highway that girts the edge of Alexandria against the Mediterranean, there is the same green glow of subterranean light that you find in any subway system and the unfortunate someone who tends to be slumped in the corner. Sand crunch under heat stretched leather and people hurry.<br />Should I be afraid of pidgeons, plants that grow from cracks in concrete, prayers that bellow at regular times, or nurses coming to see if I am a host to epidemic disease? Beyond the hissing, The sweet ladies downstairs include Rasha, a woman who studied agricultural engineering, born in the chinese year of the dragon, but who spends her days on the constant beat of feeding students until she gets back into school, how, I don't know. I imagine it is difficult to pick back up that engineering degree. Perhaps I will ask her about the plants behind the building. <br /><br /><em>If you ask the women in Saudia Arabia if the would like to drive,<br />most of them would say I don't want to, why? <br />In Egypt a woman can be a captain on a plane, a doctor, the president of the University, If you(feminine singular) want to do something, do it."<br /></em>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1686616309102810626.post-79737595607273470232009-05-26T11:58:00.000-07:002009-05-26T13:15:11.955-07:00rice, peppercorn,Martian earth, and ladders of realityI confess. One cannot put all the noise on a peppercorn into the written word. Burnt black Indian spice from an old Christmas. I started using it whole instead of crushing it to gray comets with a stone against the wooden cuttingboard. Still in the back of my throat even now, my teeth unleased undeniable hot present tense experience. The taste overshadowed the dirty risotto I had tried to spice well last week. Both had been stuck to the food dinged saffron side of my bowl that had been sitting relatively empty for over an hour and the black circle and white risotto grain had been listing upon their sticky surface miraculously until I reached mindlessly under the fork with my fingers.<br /> In pre-epistolary thought, I ate virgos and being a girlfriend and earth. The black sphere burnt me and I welcomed it. Like Sappho says. Eros Hoptai! Love you burn me! And then I seemed to make that deviled thinking my very matter according to my theory here! So like a recursive formula, I turned upon myself. Yet every one of those spicy heartpearls could be strung, seen and looked at differently, unmagnified or given no dignity. But I dove for the dirt, my fingers pinching for a second black sphere, now excited by the novelty, and yet capable of tasting the moment and the worry like two nipples of equal delight.<br /><br />I reached into myself for the substance of my life since last I wrote,and found the worry pearling in my heart and mind, as though nothing had been removed by cleansing or by writing or by thinking or talking. It sucks, I think, to look back now to March and realize where I left off. Three coins. A prayer burnt on a roof. A glass of water hung in midair between greed and self-sufficiency. Am I undone by all this time away from contemplation of my excesses? Or was I never going to learn anything by my attempted expurgation?<br /><br />The question remains. Since I can change my life and compose my own mind. Why do I choose not to? Controlling intake seems obsessive. Observing every intake had begun to scare me. Big U- turns of thought lead down to quick emptiness. <br /><br /> At the very least I could devise some fucking mental trampolines. Like the no-meat trampoline. I spring up in my spirit to have built in a strong point in my will. What about a sturdy no-worries ladder with rungs made of reality? <br />Here is some reality:<br />Lately I have been eating less and sleeping randomly as though I shut down at a certain point from too much intake from life. I need reflection. I don't want to lose the hard work. I will have to look back and collect the good bits. <br /> My stomach now rumbles each day, familiarly. I wait more and take in smaller bits. Today, I had a cup of coffee, a senior's brownie from Joey's school, low eco-footprint asparagus from jeff's garden. The students. The people we know giving. Could we only eat what others feed us? No. We must take in some and reject others. We are no capable of digesting every single thing. It is too much. <br />I looked at the meat that was on the table yesterday and It didn't look like what I am made of. Red and brown. It had demands all over it. I liked the way the asparagus folded in my mouth and sucked spit out of my glands with its astringent balsamic tartness. I liked the way the potatoes were like grains of warm snow and the way the chives from the garden were oniony.<br /> As I sat at the table, happy to have food and a smiling virgo mind that enjoys life and knowledge and who unfolds maps, and ideas the same way; and I didn't want to say to everything there, why does this hurt? Why does a bridge hurt between people, Is there no permanent solace? No real forgiveness after 35 years? Because there was good and understanding and yet there was this force of dark matter there. <br /> But then later, once we left your parent's house, and worked our way into and out of feelings about just that very thing in our own life. I saw the way stepping out of the car and into my own hands feels. I gave myself a moment to think about the way people hold on to hurt. Hurt, hurt hurt. A pearl, a worrying, and tiny black peppercorn of burnt indian spice lodged inside your arteries keeps crying. Why? What did I do to disappoint you? What did I do to disappoint you? And I say to that... There was a small nodule of something strange where I wasn't felt.Who could say what was?<br />But I didn't think about hurt because you said. Give me something I can work with. I stretched my tight car accident calves and found the answer. Found the hope, Found the future. And the little spicy pearl disapated when you took my hands as if to say. <em>It is that easy.</em> A rung on the ladder between our bodies.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1686616309102810626.post-62251588903082548812009-03-23T06:46:00.000-07:002009-05-26T15:11:49.668-07:00Turningpschosomatic vitriol quota, filled last night in artless measurements<br />the farce, the gestures, the ability to believe deep lostness<br />and settle under a cozy blanket, and rest anyway<br />light dark, light dark, painted, beautiful scarred<br />and the slicing beets bled pink onto the wood<br />the falling beliefs were homed in<br />and the cup of your lovers heart so thixotropicUnknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1686616309102810626.post-36680787135531070732009-01-17T06:50:00.000-08:002009-01-17T08:55:09.749-08:00Notes on fastingI want to quote a website that speaks on <strong>fasting using only water</strong> because it is a really good source but I just want to mention a few things it said. <br /><br /><br /><br />Distilled water is the best for cleansing because of its inherent, magnetic properties and ability to absorb and suspend large quantities of toxins, flushing them from the body. The perceived value of mineral water is misleading because the inorganic minerals are like huge boulders to the cellular membranes, making them impossible to assimilate. <br /><br />I think this is pretty fascinating. The magnetic properties of water without minerals are increased. So I bought two gallons of distilled water.<br /><br />What about herbs? I have been drinking herbal tea. Peach Detox and Easy goes It. I gave up meat three weeks ago but not coffee or alcohol, so I had some sick headaches to deal with yesterday. <br /><br /> <br /><br />"There are no calories or nutritional value in water. On a water fast you have given your body no options but to turn to itself for fuel. This can create a problem when you have spent years depositing counterfeit fuel. Living exclusively on dirty fuel during a fast takes tremendous courage & strength. To ease into water fasting some recommend juice fasting with periods of water fasting. For example 3 days on juice, 2 days on water, 5 days on juice, then 3 days on water. You can juice when you have to work and water fast on the weekend when you can rest. "<br /><br /> <br /><br />This is a pretty good cleanse, and you have plenty of energy and emotional release. I originally intended to break the water fast with juice and the master cleanse.<br />Vamos a ver.<br /><br />Master Cleanse Fast <br />The Master Cleanse or Lemon Cleanse is between a water fast and a juice fast. Basically it consists of drinking a mixture of freshly squeezed lemons, water and maple syrup for a period of 8 to 40 days. It is easier to do than a water fast because you are still getting nutrients and energy from the lemons and the maple syrup. This fast can be done while still maintaining your normal work, yet is less calories than what you would get from a juice fast. It is normal to lose weight on this fast and it is excellent for cleansing the colon. For full details on how to do this fast see the following link: Stanley Boroughs Master Cleanse "<br /><br />Actually I folded over a cup of coffee and a blueberry muffin.<br /><br />So sad, so delicious.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1686616309102810626.post-57770734293059800992009-01-15T09:34:00.000-08:002009-01-15T12:07:47.469-08:00steeling of will and three glasses of waterWe're going to fast. <br />Here are my thoughts. <br /><br />I keep believing that some miraculous occurence will peel this inner layer, <br />lifting Saturn's thumb off of my heart, putting threads of aperture into this com-plication. It is just thoughts like that that seem to pervade. A drum beat through the weeks, Stop! I keep turning, just to catch a mirrored far-far-away mountain flare, but it is only sunset. Our Iphegenia's death only brought inland waves. Serendipity's minor music is that I can read all hopes, and fears off of kinesthesia and no sacrifice of fleshly presence will bring nature round back to correct herself yesterday. So onward Tomorrow! I must learn the elasticity of water, so that its piezoelectric language fluctuating in dear muscles does not frighten me so often.<br /><br /> As I drink poetic water intentionally today I think about water and reach out for words to say what I just drank in. I think about cravings blended with art and how real intelligent women can love much much more by being friends. I asked to be a greater friend to you in the sage of solstice; the fire engulfing and transmuting a paper plea, forcing air, wood, metal, and water to alter forms. Again I swallow too much that none can hold, but me. I gulp beauty of a gift I did not give, the beauty of another woman's love. I excise the whole magic spell of her which I cast, believing that every thought matters. But I cannot undo. Indestructible fabric of even all those morning thoughts, those coffee computer thoughts, those breakfast of mushrooms and toast thoughts, those last night artichoke red pepper thoughts beside you on the futon, thoughts of cocooned light surounded with emotions, and now in that blue glass of water, I can't even recede to watch her watery waterness. I am water drinking. She is prolifically interstitial, she is a woman who loves you, and she is very good at it. She doesn't even have to build walls to create closeness. She is gifts, she is distance. She is very good at it. I finished the water in the glass and set it on the glass table. It clinks. I called you just to hear your thoughts. You didn't have any because you were asleep in your class room. I decided to wait to say what was in my mind until I had thought about it. How long does water take to run through? And where does water stop? And why? A rainy season distorting the potential calligraphy of a patter into a flow. There is a drowned thing waiting to hear sounds on the surface.<br /><br />So there will be a fast<br /><br />Water for three days. LIght juices to follow. Then I will drink the lemonade for seven days. How will that not be "hallucinogenic" to quote the article Pim showed me last night. Apparently I am not the only one who is altered in mind when altering my body. On the third day of the last fast, Nicole, reading from her wheelchair, became a small fairy deity locked inside a casing like a cartoon villain's trap. She spoke words of unlocking the power of children and I saw with wide acid eyes, her beauty.<br /> To prepare, I think, is to ask well ahead of time about the matters. Lemon juice is easy. Stark sunlight approaching mercury eclipsing the sun is a fact. More than easy,physical fact; I want to burn off the husk of this trouble to see it for what it is, and to review again, what I chose to take in, and what I chose to effuse.<br /><br />Three glasses of water <br /><br />Love,<br />EmilyUnknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1686616309102810626.post-63223088458646390282009-01-06T05:36:00.000-08:002009-01-06T05:52:38.787-08:00The art of resolutionsI remember begining to smoke. I always remember because I chose it very consciously and whenever I speak about quitting smoking I explain that my consciousness about the beginning had a lot to do with my ability to call the shots about the ending. I don't smoke now. I choose not to. But I smoked a cigerette Christmas eve after not smoking in a year and it doesn't bother me that in the realm of possibilities I may always choose something other than my true over-arching will . I always left it open to choose otherwise. In this matter I choose free will. In this case it is sucessful. I have not been a smoker in four years and I think very little on the subject. I have recently quit something else: Meat. <br /><br />I quit eating meat this new year, and not for the first time. I quit with the whole rest of my life in mind. I have been a vegetarian before and have no doubt that it is possible and preferrable to me. It is only as a matter of convenience that I have remained a meat eater. Now I slide back into vegetarianism with no trouble but the matter of living with a meat eating person in harmony. Yet this time I decided it was for the rest of my life, and it feels final, but flexible. What that means is that Ihave a statement and a clause attached to it, and both are as real as it gets to me. They compose my resolution.<br /><br /> I hereby relinguish my active consumption of meat of all kinds including the red and white meats and seafood. In the case that I have sucessfully ceased eating meat to the point where it requires no immediately active will-power, then I will allow myself, when the occasion strikes me, to eat a piece of fish. This will secondary clause will not be the mainstay but will be the exception. Resolutions are back and white and flexible in the long run. This is the most natural and the most possible way to choose to change a habit.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com