squish

squish
it's a nearly perfect word
onomotopoeic
able to be drawn out to match any circumstance:
squish
squeeeeesh
skaweesh
squishsquish

it looks odd if you analyze it

it is nearly impossible to misinterpret the meaning

it conjures up clear images when you say it

and applies to physical and emotional situations: squish a bug, feeling squished in your feelings

can be injected with horror, vehemence, playfulness


and also, many things that have been squished taste better as a result.

so it's not like it's all bad, this squishy business.

Mondegreen in Ceylon; Picture

A few things:

1. Playing with colors on your face (also known as "makeup") can be fun.

2. My hair is really long.

3. This song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fncjgN88xUE

4. In conjunction with this song, every person deserves to feel like "warm night air" in each of their relationships. There is nothing like that time when the sun goes down and the yellow-orange-green-fade-to-blue is streaking across the sky.

5. Watching this happen with someone you care about is the keenest of pleasures.

6. When the warm air surrounds you without being too hot or too humid--it's comforting, familiar, and you just relax, that's when you know it. 

7. The people from Erasure knew what they were talking about when they wrote the lyrics, but I actually have been focusing on the happy part of the lyrics, and didn't even hear the sad part, really, until I went to look for the lyrics just now.

8.  From the window in the kitchen/To the fireside by the chair/Sat in familiar surroundings, warm night air...
All the feelings I remember, I cannot hide/Not for want of trying

9.  I have recently discovered that mostly, I don't want to hide my feelings. I want to feel them. 

10. Now comes the funny part...I thought this song had lines saying "On, into Ceylon."

I was pretty impressed with the band's geography and history awareness. Little did I know it was just another mondegreen. The lyrics really say: Longing to sail on/Through the night to the stars/On until sunrise.

Oops. I still just love the overall feeling of this song.

11. The bottom picture reminds me of my niece. She sometimes stands the same way. I didn't realize we had a similarity like that. It makes me happy that we do.

12. My socks not being the same height makes me smile.

beyond a solecism: made to look

Recently, I did something I'm ashamed of. I took a picture of someone who didn't know I was taking his picture. He was sleeping, though, and I didn't have the heart to wake him up to ask him.

I don't think I have seen someone who so obviously was so particular about how he looked in a long time. I mean, I know people who care about their dress and appearance...but this fellow was so meticulous, so exacting in his standards. I wondered if he was extremely insecure or just very confident. Probably a mixture of both, like most of the rest of us.

My eyes probably widened when I saw him. I had just sat down on the bus.

I noticed his hat first. It was the little feather, sticking jauntily just so, that grabbed my attention. Then I looked at the rest of his hat. It was perfectly clean -- no little bits of anything stuck to it. (With hats like that, it's hard to do. Trust me, I know.)

Then I looked at his face. (I had just seen pictures of the Facial Hair competition [I did not know there was such a thing] --  some of these are pretty outrageous.)

This picture doesn't do it justice...I was very impressed by his facial grooming. His beard was perfectly pointy. Perfectly. Perfectly enough that I imagined the chin it was hiding was classic storybook villain pointy, as well. His moustache blended in so well it was scary.

His nearly full length wool pea coat fit him as if it were made for him. He had a leather briefcase (black) that was on his lap, and a large umbrella with a wood handle (it was a knob, not a cane-head shape) was between his knees. His entire person was so very well put together, I wondered how long it had taken him to get out the door that morning...if he did it every day, or if this was the Wednesday Special.

We got off at the same stop. I walked behind him. He had on black leather half boots with silver zippers with pointy toes that clicked when he walked. As I walked behind him, I imagined that the silver was a sticking point with him, but that he had been looking for the perfect boots so long he decided he would accept this quibble and just move on. His step was measured. He walked resolutely, but carefully, as if he were wanting to get to the his destination, but wanted to not disrupt anything about his appearance or seemed rushed.

His hair, which was almost to the bottom of his shoulder blades, was trimmed neatly. The only thing that anybody could argue threw off his look at all was that his hair was not perfectly straight in the back -- it looked like it had some wave, but only in the last four inches or so. It was like he had partially braided it the day before and then didn't realize there were still braid marks in it today. (Not that I've ever had this phenomenon happen to me...)


 

A Pressing Matter

Facts about pressing cider:


* It is always more fun to press cider with other people than with yourself. Kind of like a barn raising, quilting bee, corn husking, or any other sort of work "party."

*  20 lbs of apples = 1 gallon of cider. No wonder it tastes so good -- all that fructose, condensed!

 *  Pressing cider is the most fun when you do it in a fun, beautiful location. (See picture <--. You'll get what I mean.)

*  When you freeze apples before you press them, your cider turns out a lot differently -- more like applesauce than apple cider. It's not a bad thing -- just leads to extra thick, almost syrupy goodness. W says it's because the freezing action helps break down the cell walls.

*  Pressing is a multi-step operation.

1. Buy apples

2. Wash apples

3. Cut apples into halves

4. Put the straining sack in the barrel.

5. Put the barrel under the press.

6. Use the press, hand cranking, to chop the apples into tiny bits that go into the bag.

7. When the bag is full, close it up, ties inside, and put the lid on the barrel.

8. Screw the lid of the barrel down tightly. Leverage (see yellow rod) helps. Don't get dizzy!

9. Enjoy the hissing and popping of the fruit and watch as the juice oozes slowly out of the cracks in the barrel.

10.  When you can't press any more juice out, let it sit under pressure

11. Unscrew the lid. This is actually harder than it looks because your hands will probably be cold and it is hard to unscrew something smoothly.

12. When you've unscrewed it enough to clear the barrel top, remove the barrel and the bag for cleaning.

13.  Tilt the table to make the juice run into the container under the spout.

14. Funnel the juice into your final carrier.

15. Enjoy!!!! 

*  And then you enjoy dinner, ever so tastily. And enjoy the view, too. This picture of one of my favorite people basically sums up how I felt about Pressing Day.

the power of numbers

Tonight I hung out with four guys and played video games. I haven't hung out with that many guys, with me the lone lady, in a very, very long time. I also wasn't very good at the video games, but it's okay, they beat up on me mercilessly anyway.

We were sitting around eating tortellini and dark chocolate chip peppermint cookies (rather, they were eating) and something that a friend of mine I had in middle school used to say popped into my mind: "You know when the odds are good, the goods are odd." (Meaning, if you're vastly outnumbered by the opposite sex, they are all likely bound to be weirdos, too nerdy for words, painfully awkward, unattractive, or some combination of all the above.)

I don't agree with her assessment, but it has made me smile a time or two when it came to my mind. The thing is, odd doesn't mean bad. It doesn't mean below-average looks or intelligence. It can even just mean "not even." (Not in the Valley Girl sense, either.) It's not negative -- it just...is.

But there's something about the numbers being very uneven that does change behavior--I'm not a psychologist, or a sociologist, so I can't tell you why. And I really don't care, to be honest...because  tonight, I was happy to just be "one of the guys."

Eagles vs Shakespeare

Another song plug for you:

I don't really like the Eagles. At all. I have never liked them. I was really upset when they were voted the band of the 20th century over the Beatles. At the time, Hotel California was the only Eagles song I could name, whereas I know almost all the Beatles songs by heart. The Eagles didn't have fans tht were so loud they couldn't hear themselves play. The Eagles don't have more than one "sound." The Eagles got back together after claiming they never would. The Eagles just...well...when your claim to fame is Hotel California, what else can I say?!? Hotel California seems to last an eternity for me and I really think it should be banned from all karaoke bars, as a matter of course, along with Piano Man. But that is neither here nor there in context of what I would really like to talk about, so I will move along.

There is one song that I heard earlier in the summer on my Tom Petty Pandora station that I considered for awhile. It had lyrics that, in part, went like this: [I was infuriated that the station ran amok -- I think the same day I heard it for the first time, I also heard a U2 song, which you can best believe earned a prompt thumbs down, and, thank goodness, I have not heard one since.]

I've got a peaceful, easy feeling/
I know you won't let me down/
cause I'm already standing on the ground

If that's all you hear, you might think: wow, that's a really awesome perspective to have. To be peaceful, secure, and comfortable in a relationship! That's amazing. How logical -- he's recognizing that although he isn't feeling the butterflies anymore, the peace and calm he's feeling, knowing he's not in the clouds, hoping for someone to return love, but that the person is already returning the love and it's a firm reality, a grounding, rooted relationship--solid and secure.

But if you bothered to listen to the song in its entirety, you would probably hear something else: the exact opposite of what I just described, which irritates me. He already knows the end is coming, he's seeing the fruitless inevitability of the ending of the relationship. He's already over it -- there's nothing she can do to hurt him any more, and he has his eyes wide open. He's either already hurt so much, he is either numb or already has worked through it so the fact that he is standing on the ground with zero expectations and singing this laid-back country song is just a testament to how those darn women always do you wrong and why should you expect anything else?

Or perhaps there's another meaning that I just didn't hear. I did, after all, practically fail the poetry interpretation portion of my English Lit class. That is putting Don Henley on par with Shakespeare, which I am really not comfortable with, though.

Either way, I'm probably protesting too much, methinks, about the merits (or lack thereof) of an Eagles song. So I'll leave it after this--except to say that I hope every person I know gets a chance to experience the first interpretation at least one time in their life.

Hold On, Let Go

Seems like most of my blog posts are related to a song of some sort. Sometimes there are songs that just resonate, echo, explode, calm, fill the empty place, or make the jumbled thoughts in your mind clear.

I wish I could make songs like that. Perhaps I could, if I could really let myself go and focus on it. I've never...really let myself though.

[Sidetrack:  If there were a Music and Lyrics of my life, I would definitely be the Lyrics part of the duet. I'd rather have someone besides Hugh Grant as my Music though...just saying. And I'm nothing like Drew Barrymore, I'm quite sure. (We both are female and live in America and speak English, but the similarities pretty much end there.)]

My parents recently came to visit. My mom told me that she sometimes thought that of all her children, I am the most expressive. I think I kind of laughed at the time...but since, I have felt that the need to express yourself, and to try so hard to do it perfectly, and then to fail but keep trying, is actually really difficult, hard, and not very much fun, to boot. As I have been thinking about expressing myself, and the emotions in my life I am trying to sort through, as usual, things came to me in my head in a song.

This song came to me from a familiar source; however, the source told me to focus on the lyrics, which almost never happens. (It is not a completely clean song, lyrics-wise, which also surprised me, considering the source -- but by no means is it anywhere close to explicit. In fact, they play much more offensive things on the radio every day.)

It reminds me of a story -- one I read in Book Club this summer, about Corrie Ten Boom. She watched the love of her life marry for money. For her, there would never be another, and she, in tears, wondered aloud how she could possibly kill love, love that was strong, love that she had nurtured. Her father told her that the better thing to do would be to give her romantic love for this person to God, and pray that she could love the love of her life as God did.

When I read it, I cried. I thought she was brave, and bold, and how horribly, horribly sad it was that she would never experience the kind of love she had dreamed of as a little girl ever again. She, being the strong, amazing person that she was, truly followed her plan. Not only did she do that with the love of her life, but I truly believe she tried to see every person who came into her path as God saw them.

Part of being able to do as Corrie did is what is mentioned in this song: "At least I hold on when I get love, and I let go when I give it." She held on to the love she had for her mother, father, sister, refugees, the Bible, God, colors, and, eventually, even was thankful for fleas! She held on tight to the memory of the love even when she was in a concentration camp, not knowing if she would survive. And she let go of love, too. She let go of her resentment toward the fleas, for the horrid conditions, for the mistreatment of the guards...of everything. And you can bet she loved those little fleas that were so pesky, because of the freedom the fleas afforded her and her fellow roommates. She cast her love net wide and did not bother to pull it back, but just kept sending out tendrils of love.

The other part that resonates is the part about taking the weakest thing in you and beating everyone else with it. Sometimes I think my weak things can't beat anything but myself--and myself, they can beat very effectively, as they know the most tender places with the freshest wounds. But weak things can become strong, and there is nothing, nothing in this world or the next as powerful as true love.

That's all you can do--be grateful for the love that you have. And when you give it, you don't know how the people you give it to will use it- if they'll return it, perhaps with interest, or if they'll hightail it out of sight and never come back. So, even though it is impossible to do this, it seems the song would advise you to have no expectations that anyone or anything will love you back. It is certainly an interesting idea to think about. In the meantime, I am going to give freely, with the best of myself-- as I wrote almost four years ago in this post. I'm going to hold on to the love that I get, tight tight tight, and when I give love, I will send it toward the other person with everything I've got, letting go completely. Only when you open yourself are you completely free.

just a girl

The particular girl I'm thinking of is wandering about in the slush, both her own emotional, and nature's physical, in front of a tiny store. She has on a bedraggled hat, a nondescript coat, and low suede boots, which are completely inadequate: her socks, when she takes them off tonight, will have permanent black marks on them, as the quality of the suede is very poor indeed. As she meanders, pretending to be nonchalant, she is also desperately trying to ignore the fact that her left boot has a hole the size of a dime in the sole and cold water is seeping through at an alarming rate. If she bothered to drag her mind away from her runaway emotions, it would be obvious to her, as it is to all passers-by, that her efforts are wasted, as her entire gait has been altered awkwardly to allow her foot the least amount of contact with the pavement.

Every so often she stops, seeks the advice of a device telling time. She's impatient with herself for being impatient. To distract herself, she tentatively taps at a pile of slush with the tip of her boot. Then, as if her tap has contaminated the pile, she balances on one leg, swings the other to the side, and, using her leg as a shovel, she creates a new pile and begins to shape it with her boot, tamping it down from an irregular mountain range to a perfect mesa, sometimes even rubbing the toe in clockwise circles--just so--to even the surface. It’s as if she’s forgotten the discomfort of her wet foot, her bedraggled self – she’s pouring all her self-consciousness into the busy, busy work of smoothing the slush. Smooth! Smooth!

The taps of her boot toe and the swipes of her leg get more aggressive, until her agitated state can no longer be masked by the menial task she has assigned herself. She sullenly kicks the slightly imperfect Mesa Slushie she spent the last ninety seconds constructing and lets out a long sigh before resuming her sentry-like tread in front of the shopfront, warily watching the windows for any activity, then pausing and pretending to act as if she is waiting for something or someone whom she has high hopes of actually showing up.

But to be honest, it’s a pretty thin veneer, and even she knows it. To distract herself from the fact that she is alone, and the someone (thing) she wants to arrive is not, in fact, going to come, she begins another Mesa Slushie right next to the one she demolished just a minute ago. Tap, tap, circle, slow circle, tap goes the boot tip. She rests too much of her weight on the tapping leg and gets off-balance and slips on the slush, nearly falling. Flushed and embarrassed, she determinedly ignores the scene of the near mishap-- she doesn’t even bother to demolish her second “creation”--and rocks forward and backward in place, pointedly staring into the distance and amusing herself by pretending to be a dragon and blowing her breath toward the streetlamp. But she is foiled even in this, as it is not quite cold enough for a reliable puff, and the distraction loses its appeal, as it is no longer a distraction. Quite soon, she no longer is content with sentry duty, and after one considering look at her timepiece, and a too-long stare down the road in either direction, she heaves a sad sigh both long and eloquent and disappears.

phases

I am in a phase of life where it seems like everything I listen to, absorb, watch, or process, I am relating to my life--even if to an outside observer the situation seems out of context. I don't know if I'm thinking too hard about myself or whether I am just stressed out to the point where I think everything's about me, or if I'm bored so I think about what I /should/ know best (myself--but these days it feels like I don't know myself at all).

Knowing what you want and where you want to go is a powerful asset.

Some days I feel like I don't know one single thing and I'm relying on the things I read to teach me about myself.

Perhaps, as one of my favorite books says, "it's just a phase."

Maybe that means that I've been a caterpillar my whole life and am preparing to become a wet-winged butterfly. I'm hoping that there's a wind that is good, but not too stiff to help me get my wings to harden so I can tackle the next "phase."

four five seven five

all little moments
coalesce into a life:
habits, character

climate, not weather
is determined by small choice
steady rotations

inexorably
seasons change, but in rhythm
a cadence steady

same things over and over
small tweaks of navigation
hope is powerful

impossibilities

Thoughts swirl in every possible prepositional position through the grey matter between my ears. Always.
If they were electrical impulses, they would light up the grey 'sky' like lightning streaks
on a recorded loop whose rhythm is just slightly off, but never turning off.
Not even while I sleep.

The emotions I feel are spurs of energy that carry their charge
and jolt through my body -- usually straight through my heart.
There is no predictability to the tide, to the ebb and flow.
Even neap tides are large, and largest when my body's energy is drained.

It never ceases to amaze me how tiredness
seeps
leaches
melts
whispers insidiously
sidles up and overwhelms even the firmest of resolves; makes all situations seem worse.
Fatigue opens the door to emotional entropy; sweet slumber does not always close it. 

At times when the tide is out, when the sandbags under the eyes are stacked down to the bottoms of the molars, and some of the sandbags have burst and gotten in the eyes and the grain is just too much to bear, it seems impossible to stop the emotions from overwhelming. The sadness is sadder, stronger...it's like the swamp of sadness from Neverending Story is real, living inside me. Hounds of sadness bay, the echoes growing nearer. Sometimes it feels like I can hear their snarling and they're nipping at my heels.

But sometimes the relief of going to bed before you're too exhausted to sleep, just because you can, is enough to make the hounds quiet, the swamp evaporate just a little, and the sandbags a little less full, and life turns around a few degrees -- enough so you can see all the good things in life a little more clearly through the tired fog, and that sometimes relaxing isn't as impossible as it seems.

Escorts

I love my nephews. I adore my nieces, too, but there is a special spot in me for my nephews. Today I held one for almost an hour while he banged his fist on the table (he was so very obliging, and did not bang in my food or spit up all over me, though he is a "drool-bot" and could win a contest with one gland tied, probably. (This is a joke.) He is almost three months old and is in a very smiley stage of life. He is so cute! His li'l eyebrows are so expressive, his eyes so blue, his eyelashes so long, his need to suck on things so great...he is a gift. Every new thing he does astonishes; he smells so sweet and his skin just shines with light. It made me think that even if I didn't believe in heaven, that I might believe that's where he came from anyway, because of how his whole being shines.

My other nephew is empathetic. He knows what I need and just how to touch my heart and make it tender again. Today, he told me that he hoped that I would be able to enjoy every day at work, that I could relax, that my friends would be nice to me, and that he wished I would call him on Friday afternoon so we could be in better contact. He gave me so many hugs and kisses today, freely, without prompting. He held my hand and squeezed it sweetly. He told me he loved me, and walked me to my car to say goodbye, before opening the door for me, and then, upon being told that I needed the drivers seat door open, promptly walked around the car and did it again, perfectly intent on helping me. I wanted to cry. It was so genuine, so caring, so unselfconcious, so freely given. And the tenderness with which he and my niece each kissed my cheek and hugged me, and the determination with which he ran after me yelling, "Goodbye! I love you! Goodbye!" until he couldn't see me anymore nearly broke my heart. I teared up and could barely drive away.

I feel so grateful for the love of these boys and their families. Being told repeatedly that I am "Best Auntie Ever" (a title for which there are unending "ties" in terms of number of places) makes me feel so popular, so wanted, so cared for. If, indeed, I am tied for "Best Ever," it's because I have the best nieces and nephews ever -- so easy to love, and some of that stems from the love my siblings have for me.

Thank you, siblings. Thank you, nieces and nephews. Thank you, everybody who loves me and makes me feel special, even on days when I'm just sure that all the special beans for the day got sown in someone else's field (forgive the reference, but I played Bohnanza today) and mine is all hopelessly dried up and there is no special crop to harvest.

Sky and Pumpkin

1. I found an artist the other day I really like. I happened to hear him first when at a restaurant. It had Latin American food. The people I was with both spoke Spanish, but one mostly Dominican and the other Chilean. They compared food and platano dishes while I ate my ropa vieja and was grateful I didn't embarrass myself with the pronunciation of it when I ordered.
   
   If you can get past the first 30 seconds, you will like this a lot. This is an alternate link in case it doesn't work if you're not a Spotifier.
   
   Also, this needs no 30 second buffer. It's Ron Murray's version of While My Guitar Gently Weeps.
    
2. Today, the sky as I came home from working at the coffee shop was perfect.  This is a couple hours later, and is not so perfect. It was the most lovely grey -- grey in the way that only Pacific Northwest skies are.
   
   here is something:
   
   The clouds are perfect in their coverage.
   Not one inch of sky is blue; neither can the label "grey" be uniformally applied.
   They maintain a dimensional appearance. And although they end up resembling
   polyester quilt batting that has been washed with denim jeans on accident,
   and has subsequently been played with by the family cat, they are not unfriendly.
   No soft mists of rain are currently being bestowed; the marks on the pavement
   tell me they finished giving out such generosity about twenty-five minutes ago.
   The soft sworls and swirls of grey aren't really "marble," though I do not have a better descriptor. Although the thickness appears to vary, the light ends up falling uniformly anyway, and only those who look up would notice the shades of the shade.
   This sky is not a simple canopy, but ever-changing, and would defy even Monet an accurate portrayal.
   
   
   
   The sky fit my mood perfectly. It isn't a dull grey, but a grey that's ever changing. Darkness ebbs and flows, but the overall effect is slightly melancholy and calming, simultaneously.
3. I had fried rice with bacon in it that was then baked in a whole "pumpkin" for dinner last night, along with yakiniku. It was definitely An Experience. My dinner companion and I ate the whole thing. We also hate Washugyu beef and outside skirt. I wonder if inside or outside skirt tastes better. Either way, it's probably delicious.