Decisions

Wore really long pants with flat shoes and it's very wet outside today. Other than that, I'm feelin pretty fine.

*

Talking about re/reading over at Big Other. Chime in.

*

The grading maelstrom is almost over. Can't wait to make some Christmas sweets.

Chewing on eyeballs

I've been thinking about tactility, about synesthesia, about pica. Sort of all in the same mouthful.

(1)
I can still conjure the smell and taste of a particular lipstick that I had when I was a kid. I'm pretty sure it was "Tinkerbell" brand, or if not, it had a Tinkerbell-type avatar painted on the plastic case. I cannot tell you the excitement that lipstick spawned in me when I was young. (Lipstick still makes my pulse race a little.) I loved the shape of it, the texture, the color. When I opened the cap and twisted it from the bottom, and it would rise up, unmarred, unused--it was thrilling. I would do this many times before I ever put it to my lips. And I always stifled this urge to bite the thing, not because I wanted to eat it, but because I wanted the toothfeel of all that color, all that waxiness. There was no food, really, that resembled it. And it went so near the mouth, without going inside it. And I wanted to see what a bite mark would look like at the top, replacing the angled edges--perfect. Perfect enough, almost, to warrant ruining the thing. Because the urge was partly that, too--the desire to ruin the smooth and perfect thing, to trample fresh snow, to smear the birthday cake, etc. When the Tinkerbell lipstick was on my lips--in my room, in front of my mirror, a very private time, with the color looking horrible on me; dark, heavily-eyebrowed kids do not look good in princess-pink--and I'd lick them, it'd taste like something so specific that now, so many years later, I can recall it precisely with all of my senses, without having any idea how to describe it. A perfectly visceral experience, that lipstick. Recently I was somewhere and smelled something that smelled the way it tasted, and I felt frustratingly close to being able to pin it down, but wasn't able to. Beyond, you know, "Tinkerbell-tasting."

(2)
In some book I read and re-read as a kid, some rite or initiation involved eating a bunch of mystery things. Blindfolded, one kid would have to eat whatever (food object, but still) another kid dropped in her hands. Fucking terrifying. Did anyone read this? It's probably in a lot of YA-type books. Judy Blume, maybe? I can't remember. One of the items was grapes. Which were described as eyeballs. I think they'd have to be peeled in order for this to work. But I've always imagined eyeballs as being chewier than grapes. I got contact lenses quite young, and although I didn't wear them on the regular until a few years later, I was pretty fascinated by them. Again, I stifled the urge to put them in between my teeth and then sort of grit my teeth together. I thought they'd have good give while still being firm, nice elasticity. Like an eyeball. Not that I wanted to eat eyeballs, per se. But just to connect to some outlying bodily curiosity. Much of my kin are doctors, maybe that has something to do with it. It was never so much the function/physiology of the body that interested me in science class--and I did enjoy science class, a lot--but rather the feeling and feelingness of the body.

(3)
I'm writing something with a character ("writing down" a character, as the inimitable Mark Leidner might say) who eats things that aren't food, but I don't want her pica to play a central role. It's just a small detail, like instead of eating an apple on the way to the post office, she eats a little Scotch tape. Once I saw an SVU episode that revolved around a character (victim or murderer, can't remember which, just the way Dick Wolf likes it) who had pica. Which means that it's strange, but mainstream-strange, probably. I mean, I've surely read things that featured characters who ate non-food items. But probably someone who has pica could write a Memoir of Pica and sell like a million copies, because it just seems to have that talk-show appeal. I should write a Memoir of Pica. I wonder if I'd have to go on Tyra Banks and eat paint chips for a horrifiedmiring audience.

Apparently, pica comes from the Latin word for "magpie." Fascinating!

(4)
And then there's Salad Fingers.

Poshlust & Thinglust

The humanoid and I have been home all day together, her with a nose full of snot and me with various rags and tissues and saline spray and the nasal blaster thing. Nobody tells you how sad and severe-seeming simple congestion can be in a baby. She wants to eat and drink but derives no pleasure from it, no relief. Her frustration would be comical if she didn't feel so lousy, I think, and I feel her frustration and her lousiness and it makes me irrationally mad at the small nasal passages she seems to have inherited from her father (anyone who has ever seen my nose knows I can't be blamed here), and sorry that I can't blow her nose* or ingest things for her.

We spent a lovely half-hour on the bed, though. Our headboard is wide at the top, and since there's not room on my side for a bedside table, I keep books up there--a couple that I'm reading currently and a few others that I just like having close by. One of Beatrice's favorite pastimes, easy, is toppling them from on high onto the bedspread, and then leafing through each one. She was alternating between Peter Rabbit and The Body in Pain and I was thumbing through my much-worn copy of Gogol's Collected Tales. I came across "The Overcoat," which I hadn't read in forever, and I started reading aloud from it, more for my own pleasure than for Beatrice's--she didn't seem to care one way or another--and I was sort of delighted by it as though I had never read it before. I skipped around, reading passages I'd underlined years ago, and I felt so keenly that Russian magic that is like three parts sardonicism and two parts existentialism and a half-part almost embarrassing sincerity, and then that hard-to-define-but-unmistakable poshlost.

I'm thinking that this may need to be a Russian Winter, a good, cold**, dark time to revisit Gogol, and Nabokov, and Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy.

And lately I am consumed by thinglust, an insatiable drive for certain objects, and a belief that these things will make me happy, even as I know that they are only "falsely important," as VN might say, and therefore poshlusty in their own way.

* The nasal blaster thing, or aspirator, is supposed to provide the same kind of temporary relief that a nose-blow would, but this relief is usually overshadowed by the trauma (mine & hers) of ramming it up a tiny, inflamed nose.
** Wish it got colder and wintrier in Georgia.

Fifty-Two Stories

Meet me there. Thank you, Cal Morgan, for being a most excellent & generous reader.

The moon was like one of those gummy orange slice candies.

We were driving to Birmingham at night and listening to Belle & Sebastian (Beatrice loves it; she's much more emo than Elmo, haha, and with a frequently furrowed brow, and I see this and realize "she is being herself," "she is becoming herself," a process about which I can do precious little, a staggering thing, really, to see a small person becoming a person, with or without you, largely without you, I suspect, the first stirrings of all the letting go yet to come) and I was thinking about how very much I love being in the car, in the passenger seat, particularly at night. The horizon disappears so that it feels like we are driving straight into the night, that we are actually creating the road as we drive. I have this same thrill when I read something good, that I am creating the story as I read, that in my hands the book is becoming exactly what it was meant to become.

Beatrice, the road, the book; Beatrice, the road, the book. All three things becoming.

My brain is developing a mind of its own.

I don't know, lately it seems to *know* things that it doesn't actually know. Like I will get a lot of answers right while watching Jeopardy, even though the category is one that I recognize only hazily. Or I'll have an idea about someone or something that turns out to be spot on. I can't think of specific examples without making it sound as though what I'm explaining is some kind of sixth sense or a keen discernment faculty or whatever, and maybe that is what I'm talking about, but in its moment it feels more like I learned something while I was sleeping, and upon waking, the essence or aura (or is it the trace? I'll always love you Walter Benjamin) of the thing, the residue of the sleep-lesson, collects within me at a certain precise moment, which is maybe the same thing as recalling a kind of dream, but a very lucid one that can be applied to actual events like Jeopardy and the plots of movies and details about characters in books.

Meanwhile, I feel bored by almost everything that purports to be interesting or innovative (shut up everybody, just please shut up), and vastly entertained by exceedingly banal forms of leisure--television (not the "thinker" shows, either), food blogs (this one is smarter and more compelling than most lit-blogs that I habitually stumble around; it's cooking *and* theory; this post is maybe my favorite so far; Rachael Kendrick, let's mingle), Facebook. So while it seems like one lobe of my brain is getting sharper, completely of its own accord, the other lobe, the one that I'm supposedly more in control of, and probably supposed to be feeding nutritious bits of literature and culture, feels like it's on standby. (I know I'm not using "lobe" in an anatomically correct way here, but it still feels right.)

My diagnosis of this current condition is that it's probably the exactly-right climate in which to start writing something new...my front-most mind is pleasantly dulled, but its hindquarters are snapping and popping and noticing a lot. It's hard to leave The School but I feel like I must commit to trying.

Tags

In general I'm into the whole tagless t-shirt movement. It makes a shitload of sense: why attach an additional piece of fabric or paper to a shirt, when you can just stamp the inside-back with the necessary info.

But when I'm trying to get dressed in the dark--that is the exception.