On Laughing Wild

"And because I do believe in 'intuition'-- which is a nonlinear kind of knowing-- there is a part of me perfectly willing to think there's a whole litany of different kinds of knowledge that humankind could have access to.
So some days I'm a sort of semibeliver.
And then other days, alas, I switch back to finding life an enormous, meaningless effort. And on those days I try not to talk on the telephone, and I sit in a chair and meditate on Peggy Lee singing 'Is This All There Is?' And I wait for feelings of optimism to return.
So let me go sit down and rest for a while. And you can read Laughing Wild, if you like."

Christopher Durang

On Language and Truth

"I don't think language is for asserting established truth. I think people are human when they're working toward a truth they haven't figured out yet."

Craig Wright

On Life and A Single Man

"I like what happens as a result of communication problems because I don't think people communicate truly in any way. Communication is always imperfect. Language is an imperfect instrument--so is sex, so is shouting at each other--and although you get the occasional moments when you feel truly connected, as George says in the film, they're pretty hard to keep hold of."

Colin Firth

Letters from Russia

"I hate but one evil, and if I hate it, it is because I believe that it engenders and includes all the others: this is falsehood. I therefore endeavor to unmask it wherever I meet with it; it is the horror which it inspires me that give me the desire and the courage to write these travels: I undertook them through curiosity, I relate them from a sense of duty. A passion for truth is an inspiration which supplies the place of energy, youth, and enlightened views. [...] A hatred for hypocrisy is the torch which serves to guide me through the labyrinth of the world: those who deceive men, whatever means they may use, seem to me as poisoners; and the more elevated and powerful they are, the more they are culpable."

Astolphe de Custine

Tikopia

"It's hard for anyone who has not actually lived on the island to realize its isolation from the rest of the world. It is so small that one is rarely out of sight or sound of the sea. [The maximum distance from the center of the island to the coast is three-quarters of a mile.] The native concept of space bears a distinct relation to this. They find it almost impossible to conceive of any really large land mass...I was once asked seriously by a group of them, 'Friend, is there any land where the sound of the sea is not heard?' Their confinement has another less obvious result. For all kinds of spatial reference they use the expressions inland and to seawards. Thus an axe lying on the floor of a house is localized in this way, and I have even heard a man direct the attention of another in saying: 'There is a spot of mud on your seaward cheek.' Day by day, month after month, nothing breaks this level line of a clear horizon, and there is no faint haze to tell of the existence of any other land."

Raymond Firth

"The more there is evil in the world, the more we have reason to create beauty. It is doubtless harder, but it is also more necessary."

Sergei Tarkovsky

The Dink, 1933

"I am delighted to live among you young and happy people. If an old student may say a few words to you they would be these: Never regard your study as a duty, but as the enviable opportunity to learn to know the liberating influence of beauty in the realm of the spirit for your own personal joy and to the profit of the community to which your later work belongs."


Albert Einstein

Canada!

Friends in Bellwoods 2

Mamet

"My greatest regret is that I was never a fireman."

David Mamet

MUST WATCH: Children Full of Life

TED: Alain de Botton

Selfless Giving

"When I was young I thought that a quote by Shakespeare from Julius Caesar was something I wanted said about me, but now I know it really applies to John-- "His life was gentle and the elements so mixed in him that nature might stand up and say to all the world, this was a man."

Daddy

TED: Gordon Brown

TED: Barry Schwartz

DWELL: The Bathroom Reinvented

Another Old thought

Existence is like a fine piece of china: all the more beautiful for its delicacy.

Old thought

Our knowledge of the transience of human life can be both liberating and debilitating. While walking through Central Park in November, I marveled at the mall of yellow, orange, and red foliage. Brittle leaves, golden in their old age, dangled from the gray branches that had been their homes for months. I stood on that promenade with the urgent desire to memorize that moment, for with each passing second, another leaf would fall to grace my pathway. For a California girl accustomed to her evergreens, that display of the ephemerality of nature was beautiful in ways I had never experienced. My appreciation for the sight was magnified by my understanding that it all would soon end. I wished to retain this compassion for life, fueled by my knowledge of impermanence, but with my appreciation came fear. I wanted to share the experience with the world, but I knew time would not facilitate my ambition. I longed for eternal autumn.

The Cheese Monkeys

"I decided yes. It was that moment— when the mind, instead of obsessively pacing the prison of its own puzzlement, suddenly, instinctively, deliriously, discovers a way to make wings out of wax and fly the maze."

Chip Kidd

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

"I like the word "gumption" because it's so homely and so forlorn and so out of style it looks as if it needs a friend and isn't likely to reject anyone who comes along. It's an old Scottish word, once used a lot by pioneers, but which, like "kin", seems to have dropped out of use. I like it also because it describes exactly what happens to someone who connects with Quality. He gets filled with gumption.

The Greeks called it enthousiasmos, the root of "enthusiasm," which means literally "filled with theos," or God, or Quality. See how that fits?

A person filled with gumption doesn't sit around dissipating and stewing about things. He's at the front of the train of his own awareness, watching to see what's up the track and meeting it when it comes. That's gumption."


Robert M. Pirsig

"No one ever travels so high as he who knows not where he is going."


Oliver Cromwell

Rahm Emanuel

"The center of the Emanuel universe was the family dinner table, a boisterous place where all the meaningful issues of the day were hotly debated. While Rahm has called the verbal combat that took place there "gladatorial," Zeke described it to me as more of a Talmudic debate-- the Jewish tradition of argument where one's opponent is viewed as an ally in the search for truth. "It's a sign of love to take someone's view seriously," says Zeke, who has fostered at NIH a style modeled directly on the Emanuel dinner table; he calls it "combative collegiality."


John Gartner for Psychology Today

Humboldt's Gift V

"It made me think what a tremendous force the desire to be interesting has in the democratic USA"


Saul Bellow

Humboldt's Gift IV

"...America is a didactic country whose people always offer their personal experience as a helpful lesson to the rest, hoping to hearten them and to do them good-- an intensive sort of personal public-relations project. There are times when I see this as idealism. There are other times when it looks to me like pure delirium. With everyone sold on the good how does all the evil get done?"


Saul Bellow

Joni II

"We are stardust,
Billion year old carbon,
We are golden,
Caught in the Devil's Bargain,
And we've got to get ourselves,
Back to the garden."

Mommy

Humboldt's Gift III

"Perhaps, being lost, one should get loster."


Saul Bellow

Humboldt's Gift II

"I had never heard such things about business, its power to petrify the soul."


Saul Bellow

Humboldt's Gift

"And money wasn't what I had in mind. Oh God, no, what I wanted was to do good. I was dying to do something good. And this feeling for good went back to my early and peculiar sense of existence--sunk in the glassy depths of life and groping, thrillingly and desperately, for sense, a person keenly aware of painted veils, of Maya, of domes of many-colored glass staining the white radiance of eternity, quivering in the intense inane and so on. I was quite a nut about such things."



Saul Bellow

Joni

Laura Nyro

"We could build the dream with love, I know"

Short

It's how good you want to be.

"You must develop a complete disregard for where your abilities end."


Paul Arden

The Hours

"What lives undimmed in Clarissa's mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other."

Michael Cunningham

Sometimes

there's just nothing to say.

The God of War

"I let out a roar that came from so deep a place inside me, it was as though my body were a vast cavern that defied physical reality and that held inside it all the space and energy in the universe."

Marisa Silver

The God of War

"The nighttime quiet dulled the sounds of distant trucks and cars, and the star-pocked sky obliterated the daytime luster of golden arches and other neon enticements. Night restored the desert to its naked majesty. I could hear it laughing at the gas stations and schools, at telephone wires and electricity converters and irrigation canals--at all the human attempts to tame it."

Marisa Silver

Life

People say life is short. And, it is...relative. Relative to the history of the cosmos. But, if you think about all the beauty and pain that can be found in a single moment, a single millisecond. A glance. A touch. A breath. A word swallowed. A chance taken. An accident avoided. And then you multiply that by the number of milliseconds in a lifetime. Yeah. Life is long.

"Damn. I'm beautiful," she said, looking in the mirror.
But, she didn't believe it.
"Yeah. You are," he said.
And, he knew it was true.

"Joyas Voladoras"

Consider the hummingbird for a long moment. A hummingbird's heart beats ten times a second. A hummingbird's heart is the size of a pencil eraser. A hummingbird's heart is a lot of the hummingbird. Joyas voladoras, flying jewels, the first white explorers in the Americas called them, and the white men had never seen such creatures, for hummingbirds came into the world only in the Americas, nowhere else in the universe, more than three hundred species of them whirring and zooming and nectaring in hummer time zones nine times removed from ours, their hearts hammering faster than we could clearly hear if we pressed our elephantine ears to their infinitesimal chests.

Each one visits a thousand flowers a day. They can dive at sixty miles an hour. They can fly backwards. They can fly more than five hundred miles without pausing to rest. But when they rest they come close to death: on frigid nights, or when they are starving, they retreat into torpor, their metabolic rate slowing to a fifteenth of their normal sleep rate, their hearts sludging nearly to a halt, barely beating, and if they are not soon warmed, if they do not soon find that which is sweet, their hearts grow cold, and they cease to be. Consider for a moment those hummingbirds who did not open their eyes again today, this very day, in the Americas: bearded helmetcrests and booted racket-tails, violet-tailed sylphs and violet-capped woodnymphs, crimson topazes and purple-crowned fairies, red-tailed comets and amethyst woodstars, rainbow-bearded thornbills and glittering-bellied emeralds, velvet-purple coronets and golden-bellied star-frontlets, fiery-tailed awlbills and Andean hillstars, spatuletails and pufflegs, each the most amazing thing you have never seen, each thunderous wild heart the size of an infant's fingernail, each mad heart silent, a brilliant music stilled.

Hummingbirds, like all flying birds but more so, have incredible enormous immense ferocious metabolisms. To drive those metabolisms they have race-car hearts that eat oxygen at an eye-popping rate. Their hearts are built of thinner, leaner fibers than ours. Their arteries are stiffer and more taut. They have more mitochondria in their heart muscles -- anything to gulp more oxygen. Their hearts are stripped to the skin for the war against gravity and inertia, the mad search for food, the insane idea of flight. The price of their ambition is a life closer to death; they suffer heart attacks and aneurysms and ruptures more than any other living creature. It's expensive to fly. You burn out. You fry the machine. You melt the engine. Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You can spend them slowly, like a tortoise, and live to be two hundred years old, or you can spend them fast, like a hummingbird, and live to be two years old.

The biggest heart in the world is inside the blue whale. It weighs more than seven tons. It's as big as a room. It is a room, with four chambers. A child could walk around in it, head high, bending only to step through the valves. The valves are as big as the swinging doors in a saloon. This house of a heart drives a creature a hundred feet long. When this creature is born it is twenty feet long and weighs four tons. It is waaaaay bigger than your car. It drinks a hundred gallons of milk from its mama every day and gains two hundred pounds a day and when it is seven or eight years old it endures an unimaginable puberty and then it essentially disappears from human ken, for next to nothing is known of the mating habits, travel patterns, diet, social life, language, social structure, diseases, spirituality, wars, stories, despairs, and arts of the blue whale. There are perhaps ten thousand blue whales in the world, living in every ocean on earth, and of the largest mammal who ever lived we know nearly nothing. But we know this: the animals with the largest hearts in the world generally travel in pairs, and their penetrating moaning cries, their piercing yearning tongue, can be heard underwater for miles and miles.

Mammals and birds have hearts with four chambers. Reptiles and turtles have hearts with three chambers. Fish have hearts with two chambers. Insects and mollusks have hearts with one chamber. Worms have hearts with one chamber, although they may have as many as eleven single-chambered hearts. Unicellular bacteria have no hearts at all; but even they have fluid eternally in motion, washing from one side of the cell to the other, swirling and whirling. No living being is without interior liquid motion. We all churn inside.

So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one, in the end -- not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman's second glance, a child's apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell you, a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother's papery ancient hand in a thicket of your hair, the memory of your father's voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.


Brian Doyle

May you...

May you never stop dreaming, loving, learning,
Never stop lingering in your own thoughts,
Never stop trusting,
Never stop yourself from saying, doing, being what you know is true,
May you never stop listening,
Never stop touching,
Never stop playing,
Never stop forging
Never stop
Never stop
Never stop
And may you never stop thanking, thanking, thanking.
With each breath of life,
Never stop thanking.

Quick thank you...

to my parents.
For giving me the discernment to know when I am being manipulated and the strength of character to walk away.

Quality poetry

Listen to the Mustn'ts, child,

Listen to the Don'ts

Listen to the Shouldn'ts

The Impossibles, the Won'ts

Listen to the Never Haves,

Then listen close to me --

Anything can happen, child,

Anything can be.

Shel Silverstein

I'm going to break the rules

and spend my Tuesday morning at the beach. Memorizing lines. But, still at the beach.
And, I'm going to finally try out M Cafe de Chaya (the one in culver city) because I'm craving some creative macrobiotic (Oh, Souen, how I miss you). Lalalalala. It's fun to be free.

Sentence 2

Show me your darkness, and I'll show you your light.

Perfection

Stewart+Brown

I'm loving all the eco-friendly designers I've been introduced to because of Daily Candy and Earth Day. Here is one LA based designer with whom I am particularly smitten. They have just the right amount of frills and details to keep their clothing chic but still fun. Light and airy. Perfect for Spring.


Plus they make a great simple tee.

And, they have an adorable how-to on wearing their lengthened tees. Click picture above.

Specificity...

gets me every time.

I love being around people who really know how to appreciate the world. The people who find beauty, humor, tragedy in the smallest moments. My grandmother who can watch her cats play together for hours like they are the most practiced of comedians. My mother who always points out the obvious like it is a huge surprise, because to her it is. My father who I catch staring at me and the rest of his children like we are the most magnificent creatures he has ever seen, because to him we are. My old acting teacher Larry who looks at his fingers and palms with the deepest of gratitude and says, "These are my hands," as if he is just discovering it in that moment. Alesha who will shriek with excitement when the average person would just pleasantly smile. Alex who, once hooked by a certain topic, will research it until the sun goes down and up again. My sister who will recall and laugh at strange sounds made or stupid things said years and years ago. And, so many more people. In art, this kind of specificity is crucial. It takes a general feeling or idea, compacts it into a bullet, and directs it straight at your gut. If we do not pay attention to these small moments, our art will never make any sort of impact. We will be left grasping for intangible, muddled ideas, as the truth slips through our fingers.

My New Mantra

Spread peaceful smiles and joy,
Chocolate and Green tea.
Give your heart, your hand,
And free massages.
Camp out. Breathe out.
Sneak out of the house.
Count your blessings,
Your family and friends,
And let them count on you.


credit to photographer

Peace

"A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself."

-Abraham Maslow


I have not, for a long time, been this at peace with my decisions, my direction, my life.

photo: Maile Roseland

sugar Sweet sunshine

Such an inspiring "if they can do it, i can do it...with the right amount of determination, of course" story. Now, all I need is a cool concept, the start-up money, and bit of restaurant experience under my belt.

Missing...

Oh, late night Ukrainian food, how I miss you.
Borscht
Dill infested salad
Stuffed Cabbage
Perfection.

On Commitment

The Three Treasures:

"Hard is it to be born into human life. Now we are living it. Difficult is it to hear the teachings of the blessed on. Now we hear it. If we do not deliver ourselves in the present life, no hope is there that we shall be freed from suffering and sorrow in the ocean of birth and death."


A Starbucks cup that was brought to my attention by a friend:

"The irony of commitment is that it's deeply liberating -- in work, in play, in love. The act frees you from the tyranny of your internal critic, from the fear that likes to dress itself up and parade around like rational hesitation. To commit is to remove your head as the barrier to your life." -Anne Morris




Photo credit to Linnea Lenkus, Vampire Zombie on Deviantart.

In a room filled with coral...

Coral makes me so happy! As a splash of color or a bold statement, it always makes me smile.

JAPAN!

It is well known that I love Japanese people. So, when I stumbled upon Terunobu Fujimori's architecture in Dwell magazine, I had to look up more of his work. His designs captured me without their delicate whimsy. I like that they are playful without being childlike, witty without being ostentatious, capricious without being unfocused. They reminded me of Issey Miyake, who uses draping and pleats to unexpectedly create strong, modern shapes in his clothing. Oh, to live in one of those tree houses!

CLARA, Pt. 5

Clara dies.

...writer's block?

Doubt

When will this doubt seep out of my truths until they are pure? When will I learn to trust? Trust people as I trust this chair to hold me? Has there been so much deceit that it has permanently marred the face of those who are genuine? Or, am I right to suspect fraudulence? It’s really the debate between life as an individual experience or a shared experience. Are we here for a self-preserving or a communal purpose? Is our consciousness solitary or collective?

Crack, Split

"We danced too wild, and we sang too long, and we hugged too hard, and we kissed too sweet, and howled just as loud as we wanted to howl, because by now we were all old enough to know that what looks like crazy on an ordinary day looks a lot like love if you catch it in the moonlight."

Pearl Cleage

Liberation

“It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for something you are not.”

Andrew Gide

Sentence

She found purity in privation and desired to have nothing.

Care, listen, answer

It's all there.

Down These Mean Streets

Brew walked over to Alayce and bent down and picked her up gently. He looked at her face and his hands made her look up at him. They didn't say anything, not a word. Brew put his arms around her. I'd never seen my boy so gentle.

"Alayce, honey," he said, "there ain't nothin' so bad can happen that'll make one ashamed of what they is, if they's proud enough."

Piri Thomas

Earbuds

Earbuds never fit. .

Stories

I wish I had stories.

Spindly legs and elbows sharp,
Strum them raw across the harp.
Silence save an echo faint,
Slowly seeps a coat of paint.

Lithe Spirit

CLARA, Pt. 4

“12 o’clock,” Elliot said, “Taking your lunch?”
Clara walked down the hall toward him. Her desire to stop at his desk struggled against the steady beat of her footsteps. She felt she was following, was controlled by the click, click, click, click. The space between Clara and Elliot closed and opened again. She had passed him.
“Your hands.”
She stopped. “My hands?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry.” She clutched them to her chest.
“No.”
“They must be a sight.”
“Not at all. I was just—“
“I’ll go wash them--
“--just going to ask if you would like to borrow my handkerchief.”
Her shoulders jolted upward and hung, suspended. Clara didn’t turn around. Spoke tentatively.
“I wouldn’t want to soil it. Elliot.”
His name on her lips tipped her tongue in gold.
“It’s really not a problem…Clara.”
“No. Thank you. I’ll just stop by the washroom. Thank you for noticing. For..informing me, of the condition of my hands.”
The first sound of her heel on the tile put that entire encounter in the past. Ten paces away she could finally expel her breath. Elliot’s presence was in that air, she thought. She wished she could hold it in her lungs forever.

Put some static in your stoic

Old and Unfinished

I leave my building with the intention of being free of intention. It is Sunday, the day I walk. There is never a purpose to Sunday walks. There is never a destination or a need for cardiovascular exercise. It is just the day I walk until I stop walking, which always conveniently coincides with the time I arrive back at home. It’s amazing how intelligent the body is once we stop thinking.

Intending to be intention-less, of course, is impossible. Being a goal, it automatically contradicts itself. But it’s un-attainability facilitates success. There is freedom in inevitable failure. So, I set out every Sunday morning to fail, without fail.

This Sunday morning, my failure precedes my walk. I have someplace to visit. There it is: intention. Well, darn, but that’s the thing about these walks. Failure is inconsequential because I have no intention! If I don’t make it there I will have succeeded in being intention-less and failed in arriving at my destination, and if I do make it there I will have succeeded in arriving at my destination and failed in being intention-less. It’s a lose-lose situation. Or, a win-win situation, depending on who you are. But the point is, regardless of where I go, this day will not be wasted because I will have walked. I probably shouldn’t think about this so much. I’ve just written three cyclical paragraphs revolving around nothing. It’s really a simple concept. The city is my Sunday sermon, and Laura Nyro wrote our hymn: “Sidewalk and pigeon, you look like a city, but you feel like religion to me”.

So, I tuck away my intention and let my senses lead me, which proves futile. My destination tints my walk one tiny, imperceptible shade lighter. It illuminates everyone I encounter on my journey, because this will be the day I walked to Shinran Shonin, and these will be the people I passed on the day I walked to Shinran Shonin.

I start off going East on Twelfth Street toward Broadway with a fat, goofy grin on my face. I smile at everyone. I even smile at the construction workers, an invitation for embarrassing whistles I am usually wary of handing out. But today I am feeling generous, and I am, after all, trespassing on their territory. That’s how I feel about all the people I pass, even if they are walking toward me as well. It seems as though this is their habitat. Because, to me, it is. In my memory, the man in the striped red hat and aged leather jacket will forever live in front of the police station. Of all the places along Twelfth Street, I happened to pass him here. It’s like one of those standardized test questions. If I travel east at S miles per hour starting at X:YZ AM, and he leaves his building at A:BC AM traveling west at Q miles per hour, we will meet D miles from my building. There are so many variables. There are no coincidences. This is his habitat. I smile at him, too, and think, “Hello, stranger. Don’t worry, I’ll be out of your hair soon enough. There, there now I’ve passed you. Will you remember my face?”.

From my experience, it seems that the old men are the most likely to smile back. Like this man, walking toward me with his gray hair flattened underneath a black beret. I love these old men. Their smiles hold secrets and gifts. They understand the power of a smile, but not the exceptional power of their unique breed of smile. They smile selflessly, effortlessly, without expectation. And I want to be married to them. I want to be old, with a husband who has grown old with me, who smiles like that. Will I love and appreciate those wrinkles when they reflect the wrinkles on my own face? I wonder, and before the thought is complete, the old man has passed me. Goodbye, old man.

People continue to pass me, and I fight the persistent impulse to change direction and walk with them. I want to know where they’re going. I have an infinite number of questions I would like to ask. It’s disappointing that this isn’t socially acceptable, and even more disappointing that I’m not willing to branch outside of behavior that is deemed “normal”. But there are other things I have free reign to question, to stare at, to touch. I can stroke the rough stone and read the fading graffiti. I can take the cool morning air inside of me and steal its oxygen. I can stand under the skeletal winter trees and scrutinize their layered trunks and branches. Without the perky leaves of spring or the golden leaves of fall, they are seen as ugly, incomplete, bare. Yet every year they decide to shed again, putting function before beauty and discovering the freedom of vulnerability. Their slender silhouettes reach toward the sky in praise or prayer, pleading or rejoicing. I hope they rejoice. I think they do.

Nature flaunts its vulnerability while animals, especially humans, hide it. I guess that’s how we’ve evolved. We are each a threat to the rest of the world. Every one of us has the potential to be permanently destructive. We’ve all experienced the power of words. Our bodies are bombs. There is untapped power in my hands. Power to manipulate, to destroy, to create. I am both intimidating and intimidated. I would never stand naked on the sidewalks of New York as these trees do annually. I am suddenly very aware of my clothes. I can feel where my soft khakis and sweater cling to my body. The wind, strangely warm for a February morning, pushes my pants against my legs, a constant reminder of my separation from the environment. I am the only stranger, I realize. This is tiring.

Late Victorians

"I study my body in the mirror. Physical revelation - nakedness - is no longer possible, cannot be desired, for the body is shrouded in meat and wears itself."

Richard Rodriguez

CLARA, Pt. 3

Work consisted of horizontal and vertical collections of paper. Clara filed. Clara stacked. She stacked files and filed stacks. She reorganized existing stacks and files. Some days she would transcribe documents onto a computer. On those days she lugged a basket of papers up to corporate. Supporting its weight with her left hip, she would carefully press “11” and wait for the elevator to groan shut and creak slowly up the long stretch of twelve floors. Clara kept her right finger hovering over the red “emergency” button, and her knees slightly bent. It was her belief that if the elevator should plummet, her best chance of survival was in countering the fall with a jump.

These mornings were both a welcome relief and a source of discomfort. A young man sat in a cubicle just outside of the elevators. His name was Elliot Fink.
“Good morning, Clara. Big stack today.”
“Hmph,” she would say, and walk toward the back of the office.
“Are you taking your lunch at 12:00 today, Clara?” he would ask, as she walked passed him.
And her shoes would click on the cold tile.
“Because I am. Taking my lunch at 12:00,” he would say.
And her shoes would click on the cold tile.
And his eyes would scan her, linger on her hair, the small of her back, the width of her hips persuading the limp fabric of her skirt to cling and then fall, cling and then fall, until her figure would disappear at a crook in the hall.

Elliot was a morning jogger, a book-a-day reader, a daily shaver, a bike-to-work rider, a fresh=faced, young accountant with an almost unhealthy, thoroughly consuming interest in the girl from the stacks who came up on Fridays. He watched her until she was gone, and then stared at his watch, urging it to turn more quickly. Clara always took her lunch at 12:00.

Around the corner, Clara let the box of papers rest between her hips and the wall, and gave her arms a rest. She clumsily brushed her hair out of her face with her back of her black, print-smudged hands. And, let her head nod into the plaster. “Yes, many papers today. Yes, quite a lot, Mr. Fink. Just look at my hands, sir. Like a coal miner’s, I always think.”

CLARA, Pt. 2

Clara loved failing to anticipate the end of a staircase. She would walk up in the evening with her eyes closed, blocking the urge to count the forty-two steps. If she succeeded in tricking herself, it resulted in an odd sensation of falling. Odd because her standing leg was still firmly planted on the last carpeted stair. The total displacement of her body was zero. But, the feeling of falling had nothing to do with loss of elevation. When she lifted her working leg up to the phantom step, Clara expected the solid wood floor to catch her. But it did not. And, she loved it. And, she appreciated it. The failure of the floor to rise up to greet her leg was a demonstration of everything she believed in. “Hmph,” she would say, confirmed in her notions.

A 5:30 am riser, a morning jogger, a three-whole-meals-a-day-er, a vitamin popper, a calendar user, a newspaper reader-- Clara had stacks of the Los Angeles Times dating back to January 7th, 1978 in her attic, right next to her back up set of encyclopedias and all her retired paper shredders (eleven). She had a hard-copy inventory of every item in her house down to the paperclip, and, for fear of losing a piece, she refused to lend out any of her precious Tupperware collection.

cardamom, coriander, caraway

I love the look of herbs and spices...and words containing "r" that start with "c".