anyone else depressed by my black blog?  

may the richest blessings ever on you fall

Dear Father,

The undramatic life is not worth living.

Go do something you hate. It builds character.

Ketchup me.

Be there in bout an hour.

It's your own dumb fault.

All matters of happiness in life can be solved by a correct balance of the following equation: mexican food and fishing.

Onceuponatimeyoudressedsofinemetabunchof...inyourprimedidn'tyou?

What?

Wish ya happyappyappyappyappyappyappyappyappyappyappyappyappy birthday.

Tight lines,

Catherine

I was hit by a deer!

Okay. It's getting out of hand. The first few were cute, quaint, picturesque, tres nature, etc etc... Now they poop all over the place and act like they own the joint. Every night when I walk up my stairs, I hear rustling in the bushes. My heart races, and then I remember: it's just the deer who have taken over my backyard. They startle when they hear me, as though a human being is the last thing you would expect to see walking up cement steps to her back door!!! This whole incident brings up many questions about deer intelligence. Can they not process their surroundings? Do cars and headlights mean nothing to them? Does a brick house that people--yes, humans!--walk in and out of seem normal in their world?

Back in my childhood years, we would put a salt lick in the backyard to attract these quaint picturesque beasts. That was years ago. Didn't the deer get the memo?

It's that time of year...

January gets the shaft as far as months are concerned. (side note: any guesses on when "shaft" will become mainstream enough to be appropriate in school papers?) No cool holidays-ah! I take it back, one tres cool holiday: NEW YEARS DAY. But mostly new years day is a holiday that lives in the shadow of lofty and repeatedly unfulfilled expectations. It deserves a little slack as holidays go, since it has to follow Christmas, and who can top that anyway?

Funny, I never post because I think I have nothing to say. Hello, do I ever have nothing to say? But the crucial distinction must be made between things to say and interesting things to say. For as my dad once told me, "not everyone finds things as interesting as you do." "Fie on those people", I once told my dad. I'm humbler now, and I recognize that I must coerce and please my blog following with interesting tidbits so they'll (you'll) stick around.

I would post on new years resolutions--but I haven't made any. In such circumstances I side with Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes and his philosophy of always projecting low expectations to ensure that you always over-perform. I'm set to have a great year. I did Pilates today for crying out loud. Though, "my buns, they don't feel nuttin like steel."

So the topic of today that I began with was MI-GRA-TION. That need to fly off for warmer feeding ground, that scientific feat responsible for thousands of birds making lovely patterns across the sky...I love seeing birds in the sky.

I, creature of space, am bound to dismal January. My thoughts are free to wander the world; memories head back to their birthplace for rejuvenation and return to me brighter than ever. Where has my mind been lately?

One last question. Where do the ducks go?

Ah! Christmas

Well, that's my dad, and what a guy! I am sorry for the Christmas season culmination to be so near, because that only means it will soon be a whole year before it comes again. What logic. I do feel like the year cycle is oblong rather than circular, as though our lives orbit around the holidays, speeding up as we get closer, then slowing and practically creeping by until we round the corner and hurtle towards year-end again.

How amazing also that I go through the same experience every year: blissfully anticipating Christmas, regretting the season for not enjoying it more, and mourning Christmas once it is passed. Every year. It simply does not do to reason with myself--it makes no difference that it will come again. It does not soothe that it has come before. Each goodbye is painful and bittersweet. What an interesting system of time we have created, marking our lives into a whole spectrum of measurements. Minutes, months, pay periods... All about how we cannot stop or alter the push of time on our backs--we can only name it. Wouldn't it be fascinating if life could be lived in multiple directions, if we could be queens instead of pawns? But that would teach nothing about loss or letting go or confusion or patience or change. So I accept your conditions, life. Please only play fair.

Does this need explanation? If yes, see me after class...

Well, I've been hit on my car--it could have been my leg. It could have been my head, I might have died!! But in this time of mortal peril any man would expect that his wife would come rushing to his side. (sorry for those of you haven't seen The Happiest Millionaire--the above will make no sense.)

Perspective in this picture, the tire you can see is about at the curb...meaning the tire you can't see is up on the lawn. It's funny because when I first saw my car, I didn't think anything had happened. Business as usual. Then I thought, I don't remember parking it at such a strange angle.

One look at the tire on the other side of the car--or the space where you normally see the tire--and it was clear all was not well in Denmark.
Following are some thoughts I wrote after said incident. (Fun side note: I won the award at camp this summer for best accident--filling a regular old van with diesel fuel. Oops. I indirectly won the award for best incident--cowboy Doug swallowing gas in attempt to siphon it out of the van. He was burping gasoline for a week.)



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Tonight I spent two hours waiting for a tow truck. Waiting for a tow truck in 30 degree weather, in a worthless heatless lifeless car, in the midst of snow storms. Waiting past the point of impatience and still waiting as pointless rage shivered in the seat next to me. I cannot think of a more loaded and irritating word than “waiting.” Waiting is almost an oxymoron of a verb. I don’t care if the thing coming is lovely or romantic or a sunburst of good luck—the point is it isn’t here yet and you can’t get your mind off it so the present is lost to the future. Waiting is needing time to pass but not caring how; it is wanting to skip over a chunk of life to land in some other here and now; it is reaching a greedy hand forward into a moment that doesn’t belong to you yet. (Understand that I am genetically impatient and the term “wait patiently” means nothing to me.)

Even though I just said all those things about waiting—which I still believe—I must clarify that waiting doesn’t mean the time you’re just passing through has to be meaningless. If it was meaningless, what a waste of time! Thus I spent two hours staring at the snow falling in front of distant street lamps, pondering the creepy sinewy web of causality and tracing a newly made web simultaneously. (Understand, if ‘sinewy’ does not work for you as a word choice because it is over-used, that I threw it in as a last resort. Apologies. Bounce it around the inside of your mouth and you will feel better.) How could I not think of causality while staring from a stranger’s car at my own car, perched on the neighbor’s lawn and roughed-up by a coward bully who couldn’t sign his name on his handiwork? If it hadn’t been snowing, if my wussy front-wheel drive hadn’t spun in circles driving home, if I hadn’t have parked my car at the base of a hill, again if it hadn’t been snowing still, if if if if my car hadn’t have been hit—I would be inside my house taking my place in the perfect winter scene complete with hot cocoa and crackling fire.

I love the way snowfall mutes the world. Snow is a rare tyrant in a world resigned to anarchy. I create the crime scene in my mind, without sound in deference to the snow. A car lurches along thirteenth avenue, if a car can lurch at ten miles per hour. The front tires hit a slick spot and the driver, a teenager no doubt with little experience driving in the snow, slams on the brakes. The whole car moves sideways towards the curb, in a motion you never expect to see cars make, driven by such force that there must be magnets lining the doors of each car. Then impact. The driver grazes off my car and continues on his way, dreamlike, the snow promising to cover his tracks. Not a sound but the snow, not a break in the car’s strange dance. Maybe the crunch of the metal was waiting too, for someone to hear it.

My need to analogize everything, to see the whole world as metaphor, exhausts me. Why can’t a car crash be just a car crash, instead of a still life lesson on impact and causality and the illusion of safety—avoiding one danger merely to position perfectly for another?

Dear Friends,

Hello everyone. It's me again, Catherine, your long lost blogger. I haven't posted because I haven't had anything worthwhile to say, and while I still have nothing worthwhile to say you have persuaded me to expose the bare corners of my brain at present. Here is a list of thoughts (mostly in snippets) that have occurred to me today:

Marajute--that awesome bird from The Rescuers Down Under--or is it Marahutay or maybe Merejutay. No clue. But still an awesome bird, and a lovely name too which I like to have rolling around inside my mouth.

Does God have preferences about trivial things; ie pen or pencil, winter or summer, rain or snow?

Do people know they are being silly when they are being silly or are they totally oblivious? And by silly I mean rude and childish and totally without perspective.

My phone is very annoying, and yet I put up with it and will continue to put up with it because I have it and don't care to exchange it and it is PINK after all.

Pizza and soda pop. Practically could be its own emotion, that's how distinct a feeling it gives me.

How long does it take for the smell of rotten banana peel to be cleared out of a car once said peel has finally been thrown away?

Why don't I sit under/next to my Christmas tree more?

I love love love love sugar cookies.

I forgot to do my homework for the second week in a row. I would like to tell my teacher that I AM oblivious when I am being silly and flakey.

Work--no matter how you look at it, love your job or hate it--is very draining and quite the bully of my internal schedule.

There is nothing more frightening than the thought that not only do you have nothing to say, you also have nothing to think.

Cheers to the blank mind.

Eggnog and tinsel,

Catherine