Sciencin' Around

Looking for a way to spend a rainy afternoon, I stumbled upon Carl Sagan's Cosmos in all it's season one splendid entirety on hulu. Even though the show was made in 1979 and first aired in 1980, the science behind it is sound, the visuals are stunning, the soundtrack is epic, and the entire package is delivered in the soothing, dulcet tones and sweeping gestures of a dashing, young, mop-topped Carl Sagan.

He approaches the macro and micro of the cosmos with a delightful sense of awe-filled optimism that is entirely refreshing the the current, cynical, panic-stricken climate of Science for Profit and Evangelical Atheism. It's science without an agenda, other than to explore and better understand our world. 

When I was a kid, I loved science, in large part because of this show. I'm sure I watched it with my dad, along with Nova and National Geographic Presents. I remember the long reclusive hours I spent as a kid making observations and conducting experiments.

Somewhere along the line, my attention turned significantly to language arts. The joys of science became bogged down in the horrors of math, while language led down a slouchy, jazzy path of literature, music, and visual art where it seemed anybody with an idea, even a stupid one, and an elegant or gimicky way to express it, could explode into a happenin' scene of epic proportions. 

Lately tho, I feel kinda done with happenin' scenes of any proportions. At the same time, my fine young nephew has brought the dazzling world of Science back into my center of focus. Ever since our trip to the Franklin Institute, I've been remembering those days of early childhood, and just the shear wonder of everything.

All areas of science have made leaps and bounds in the 20 some years I wasn't really paying attention. Now, hanging out with Matthew, I get to catch up to all the stuff I missed out on AND stay on the cutting edge (Matthew's totally cutting edge. This kid is a natural born quantum physicist. Talk to him about Time Travel. Seriously.)

So now I'm filling in my gaps, devoting my rainy days to Carl Sagan, Kenneth W. Ford, and the Reluctant Mr. Darwin instead of my usual gin and ink and A Perfect Circle records. 

And, in the immortal words of Bill Nye, "Science Rules!"

I Love...

Waking up alone, at dawn in a strange apartment. Watching the light move. The smell of green tea and sandalwood. 

There is no where I have to be, nothing I need to do for hours. It is early April morning, but the city hums with summer: air conditioning and sprinklers. 

I stretch and turn over onto my stomach. I bury my face in the scent of someone else's sheets. I hear kids at a distance. The aching part of the year when it feels like summer but still, there is school. I remember. The countdown days. I am outside of all that now. 

Stretch again and flip again. Reach down and pull on my jeans. I have the intention of going out, for coffee, for juice, for sunshine, but the light moves so softly on the other side of these blinds, illuminates the room inch by soft pink inch, so I lie back down, pull my headphones on, press play, fill my head with sounds.

The Roots and other summer music. K-OS, bouncy hip-hop that makes you think of stacked girls in tank-tops. City walking rhythms. The light reaches me. 

One more stretch and I'm on my feet, wash my face with headphones still on, wash some dishes, make some coffee. Take two shots of last nights rum and I'm open like a morning glory.

Today could turn into anything at all.

Missing the Sun

Each day, the light lasts a little longer. 

The ground has thawed and is trying to dry. Midgy has her tulips and her daffodils in an impatient line, waiting for the weather to be right so she can get them in the ground.

We want things to grow. We want colors again, and sunshine pouring in. We want to open the windows. 

I'm watching out for Robins. I've heard rumors of them, but I haven't seen anything grace our backyard yet, besides the occasional cagey squirrel. I'm waiting for the embers of their red breasts in the grass, bringing bits of the sun down to warm things up and chase away the winter.

When they come back, I will ask them for a bit of sun-fire. I will take it to his house, and plant it with some orange and red tulips in his front yard.  Maybe the sun will help his heart thaw. 

maybe then we can grow.

Don't You Take That Train to Negative Town!

For a while, there was sweetness. He's always thinking about me. 

Sex in the morning, Valentine's candy. 

Red roses blooming in the Bluecoat bottle. 

Could I be one of these people? 

Grow into love like a crocus through the snow.

For a moment, I think it. 

But oh! 

All the girls, their long legs in stockings, 

high-heeled shoes, lingerie shopping, 

long dark curls across white hotel pillows. 

Men with worn hands 

and wide, boyish smiles, 

door holding at grocery stores 

long looks across Christmas lit parties. 

Musicians I'm always crushing on, 

the one it's not impossible 

will one day kiss me under fireworks. 

long fingers tracing my iliac crests.

Twenty-two year-olds with close-shaved heads 

The faces they make to look sexy in pictures. 

Boys and the smoke, the bars and the drugs, 

Trains, and crashing in anyone's bed, 

kissing a stranger for the poetry of it, 

going to sleep alone, and happy.

All this beauty and potential 

build a river between us

I cannot bridge,

he will not swim across.

The Great Dumpling Disgruntlement of March, 2009

"Oooohh, I have dumplings!"

"Uh, you have A dumpling. One."

"Oh. But, but I want two!"

"I know. But it was all I could do to only eat one."

"Dangit."

Winter Marches Mercilessly On

Snow is inconvenient. Cold without snow is stupid. I miss California.

Piled under blankets, wrapped around a mug of tea, watching the pearly grey light strain against my kitchen windows. Watching the plants in the kitchen strain starving towards the light. 

If I close my eyes, I can see Cali, the impossibly tall Palms arched across the radiant sky. A softer winter sky, without the scrubbing summer dust. The magenta bougainvillea leaves trailing in the pool, lazy lounging hearts. Thick date clusters hanging over the garden wall and the oleander in the corners, around the rocks where the lizards sun themselves. I can see Cali, but I can't smell it. This house just smells cold, plaster and snow, and the cigarette smoke in my hair from the night before. 

Bears would take one breath and know it was still time to sleep, curled up under piles of leaves and layers of fat and fur. Bears would wait for spring to wake them. Why are humans so intent on staying the same all year round? If I could sleep with the season, I'd be far less grumpy. I would dream of Cali and Mexico, and the hot basking sun of Rome. I would taste the desert sun in my sleep and wake up hungry for summer. 

I wonder what bears dream? Probably honey. 

I would dream of honey too. Sweet sticky ribbons of sunlight, and the summer hum of a billion bees. 

Bees also sleep in the cold. They also know. And who can even guess what bees dream? Bougainvillea and Star Jasmine and Purple Clover and bears.

And I dream of bears and bees chasing me. Laughing. 

I Miss You Most Mornings

I take my coffee and cigarette alone, watching the snow, breathing the cold. It's beautiful and still and white, and it is early and I have lots of time.

These are the things I wanted to tell you.

The smell of roasting pumpkin seeds

Girls in bright dresses, splashing in puddles

A room where you can make a huge mess

Jackets with red lining

A host of sparrows taking flight

birds against a winter sky

white sugar on a wet strawberry

maps

the hollow between shoulder blades

January morning light caught on the curve of a white porclein teacup

rings turned inward on wrinkled fingers

Little kids in grown-up shoes

Remembering why you fell in love

Men in white dress shirts with freshly starched collars

Minty fresh smiles

Cuddling a puppy under a fuzzy electric blanket when the wind is vicious outside and the cold seems to come from everywhere

Dressing for a first date

Lemongrass soup

Boys with frowny smiles who mutter under their breath that they miss you

The women in church with fabulous hats

Red curry in a yellow dish

Knowing that January is finally over.

Carbuncle

...is a really fun word for a really gross nasty thing.

You should probably prepare yourself, because I'm about to tell you the grossest story I ever told. Its chock full of pain, embarrassment, blood, pus, and well, it's damn funny.

Shortly after Christmas, I noticed a curious pain in my tailbone. Like a deep sort of achy pain, like when you fall on the ice, or if someone wacks you in the ass with a cast iron pan and misses the fleshy bit. But I didn't have a bruise, so I shrugged it off.

Then a couple a days after that, the pain was getting worse and worse, and I discovered a little tiny pimple-like lump, right at the tipity top of my ass crack. Which is a most inconvenient place for a pimple to be, but I think we've all been there. Shrug and apricot scrub and sit more carefully. No big deal.

Except it was about to become a big deal. Like, a Great Masher Marble sized big deal. 

And I thought what any interesting person would think, "OMG I am sprouting a tail!"

Suddenly, weird body quirks and years of odd medical ailments all made sense! My hyper-developed sense of smell, the chronic insomnia, my allergy to silver, my outrageous arm-hair, the lump in my ass-crack! Nothing was wrong with me at all! It was just really really slow-onset lycanthropy! 

I was about to become a werewolf! With all the crazy demonic superpowers that that entailed! (Oh yeah, that pun was totally on purpose!) At least my dreams of super-villainy were about to be realized.

But then the lump was the size of a golf ball, and sitting was excruciating, and still no tail or fangs or anything! And then I had to do the worst thing that anybody ever had to do. I had to ask my mother (who is a nurse) for and Ass Inspection.

Oh, it was humiliating. And the one painful lump was becoming SEVERAL painful lumps, and who ever heard of a werewolf with like, 4 tails? That is completely unnecessary. 

Well by new years eve, I couldn't sit at all without my legs tucked all up under me (it was a good thing we saw the Tale of Despereaux. Could you imagine me trying to get through Benjamin Button?) And so my mom took a look and she got all very serious and she said, "You need to see a doctor." And she told me some scary stuff about infections and traveling to the spine and yeah. 

But I don't have health care and I'm kinda low on cash, so first we looked it up in a book and that's where we came up with the handy and catchy word "Carbuncle." 

A Carbuncle is a painful circumscribed inflammation of the subcutaneous tissue, resulting in suppuration and sloughing, and having a tendency to spread somewhat like a boil, but more serious in its effects.

Which is a snooty way of saying an infection in my ass crack that would swell to the size of my fist, keep me couch-ridden on my stomach for the better part of a week, until finally it swelled so much, the skin split, upon which would follow days upon painful days of oozing bloody puss from the unmentionables, accompanied by high fever, body aches and general degradation and humiliation.

Which is exactly what happened. I DID wind up going to the doctor, after the first ones split and the new ones started sprouting and the prospect of another week in agony was too much to face. They put me on the wickedest and also expensivest antibiotics imaginable, and various friends doled out the percocets and hydrocodones for the pain. (Thanks ladies!)

Fortunately, I am finally on the mend. Yesterday, my fever broke, and I could finally sit on my own butt again! And as of this morning all oozing seems to have mercifully ceased.

And the next time I feel like I am at the height of degradation and misery, I will think of my mother, driving me to the doctor, saying, "I just, I just don't know how you got this. You weren't- were you... fooling around with somebody... back there?"

And I will laugh and laugh.

I'm still kinda bummed tho. About the tail.    

Love is Like a Bottle of Gin

I have a bottle of Bluecoat this morning to pull against the cold. Drunk when my roommates can still taste the toothpaste. Don't you love this time of year? Clouds pile high in the sapphire sky, remnants of gold still gilding the woods, the wind finding every crack in the house to pull you from your bed, to follow the sound, to stop up the holes and the noise and go back to sleep, to try and drown your memories. Boys keep me awake. Bees sing me to sleep. Drunken backwards days of waiting, for work, for winter, for something to break. 

I am wary. Treachery waits for me in the cracks and corners of my house, in the bottoms of all my bottles. It whips in the wind, slamming doors, whispering rumors to sad susceptible friends. Gin is not the only poison I am swimming in. Smoke can't rise in it. It just clouds my judgement. I need to stay sharp, needles and pins. I need to cut through this as quick as I can. So much of getting through is holding my breath and waiting, letting go and sinking, hoping sometime soon, my feet will touch the bottom. 

This bottle is bluer than the November sky. And just as cold. The liquid inside is just as bitter. Memories, sky blue and gin soaked, cling to all my fingers just like the smell of juniper. Sharp, sticky, still green smelling after so much time. It smelled like juniper the day he died. It grew outside the school. I smelled it as I was walking in, when they made the announcement over the PA. I was late, and the sky was this blue, brilliant and shot through with late autumn light, early morning light, that day I was late for school. In my midnight blue dress, and my best smile on, taking a moment to straighten the hem, looking up into the high-piled clouds with the light sifting down across the juniper bushes, warming them up, releasing that scent over the duller, dustier scent of the dew evaporating off the concrete. Thinking, "I look pretty," and not really listening to the morning announcements, not really caring that I was late except to hope some boy would notice my legs in the short blue dress I never wore and the tall black boots. A bit of mint still on my teeth pleasantly, the same rich sunshine in my sister's hair as she turned around ahead of me, her face wet and strangely crumbly. Her voice thick and pinched and wet we she said that he was dead.  The juniper and the blue and the bend of light and the bend of knees turning to liquid and suddenly standing on the dewy concrete drowning. Drinking in the mornings, drowning. "Love is like a bottle of gin, but a bottle of gin is not like love." 

Sounds Abound!

There is this spot at work, outside an open doorway where they keep fax and copy machines, and there is an electronic singing sound that comes out of there that makes me see rainbows. I walk out of my way every time I leave my desk just to walk through this shimmer of sound. (If you want to hear something very like it, listen to the static in the first 30 seconds of (This Is) The Dream of Evan and Chan, by DNTEL.)

There is also a glorious noise at 30th Street Station in Philadelphia, when the table that tells you what track the trains are on changes. It is an older table, and instead of being digital, it is a bunch of little character cards that flip. When it changes, they all start to flip real fast then slow down until there is only one left. People who think rainsticks are cool would really enjoy that noise. It is one of my own personal favorites.

And since it is winter time, if you happen to be over Robbie and Stephen J.'s house, they have a kerosene heater that, when you turn it on, makes this amazing bendy metaly whale sound. Oh man! It is all curved and echoing, like listening inside a shell. But it only does it for less than a minute, so you have to be there at the right time. I think it is one of the most beautiful sounds in pretty much the entire world.