there’s a piece of Maria in every song that I sing
Thursday 20 December 2001 | I like a cookie
A wicked PMS headache, no doubt exacerbated by eating several pieces of dried fruit all at once (nectarines, plums, pears, dates…et bien sur abricots). Also stomach cramps, see PMS, above. I slept from 1 am until 10:30 and woke to these attendant entertainments—weird hours for me, as it’s been more like 9:30 or 10 pm to 7:30 am. During the late morning, after M. left for work (he went to bed at 1 too, but got up at 6:45—disgustingly virtuous he) I dreamed of assassination—two women were trying to kill me, dangerous and heartless and Bondesque, and I was trying to kill them first, and we were all employing an elaborate variety of murderously erotic methods.
Weirdly enough, though, the dream seemed to have something mysterious and unspoken to do with Megway, but alas I cannot be more precise. Some months ago M. told me about a product which was supposed to be amazing, like, the Internet times ten, but it was called Ginger, and no one knew what it was yet. So now we have this cute little thing which apparently will only be useful in seasonless northern California, if the QuickTime videos are any guide (the people are in shirtsleeves, fashionable helmets (what Mandarin calls helmuts, after Chancellor Kohl), and backgrounds of suburban green swathes of gazon. Nice for them! Here there are weedy brown shocks of plant indifferently spread with snow which shines lavender in the dusk, broken stalks poking through, powder dusting across blacktop in the wind. And you really wouldn’t want to Segway around in it, believe me.
The other thing my brain is babbling to itself about is the fact that we had dinner at another couple’s house last night, and didn’t leave until midnight, which was in itself bizarre and unusual and why we didn’t get to bed till nearly one. M. was quiet as usual, which I was fine with, but then he exploded when we got home into a small but fiery rant about how boring and bourgeois we all were as a group, and how you couldn’t possibly get to know anything truly interesting about anyone except in solitary interactions, one person at a time. I don’t disagree, but…but…but what? “One cannot always go one saying ‘but,’” après Woolf. But I don’t see why an interaction between a group of people, however mediated and inessential and grantedly blurry, is therefore valueless. It’s just different; it serves a different purpose. He wants every conversation and every social interaction to have the intensity of an argument with Edward Said, which seems unreasonable to me.
Then again, maybe I’m so defensive because I’m compensating, and I too am just bored to pieces. The heart of the question is, what are we bored to pieces by?
a) them? which includes every couple we’ve met since roughly 1997? not bloody likely, especially in this case, where the couple is brainy and bookish and well-travelled and have their politics sorted out in the way that people who are well-travelled usually do
b) us? meaning, each other? being married to each other, and being perceived/perceiving ourselves as a unit? or
c) the conventional trappings? the dinner table, candles, Miles Davis and Nina Simone, our Americanness and whiteness (the other three at the table, M. being British Indian), the Asian recipe book food? all the agglomeration of things which combine to make us ineluctably, as the book says, Bobos in Paradise?
This is the nerve of solution, because then we would know which to avoid, which to alter, which to persevere through and transmute.
My head hurts. I’m listening to Radio Free Santa Fe, which is usually where my post titles come from. They play They Might Be Giants and Suzanne Vega and Counting Crows and Fiona Apple and Lucinda Williams. But like every other radio station in the entire world, they do not play Tori Amos. Ever. I have a whole theory about why radio stations hate Tori, but that is an entirely other post. (They’re now playing Tom Petty, which is quaint.)
Also, during our dinner conversation of topping anecdote with anecdote, I tried to explain what blogs are and why they are interesting. I quoted “If a man is tired of life, he starts a blog,” spoke of Evhead and Megnut, but no one got it. They looked at me brightly and emptily, even my own husband, and just wondered what the hell I was on about. I think it’s clear by now that I, ineluctably, am still a geek. It doesn’t matter what my day job is—I started at the age of 9 with that Commodore 64 and Douglas Adams and Gary Larson and more geekly 80s stuff than I care to type in just now, and that’s just what I am.
I am a geek; here me post.
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