Patience is an alien quality does not swim in my blood does not pool around me in the mornings I have to coax it breathe on it to keep alive the little bit that I have try it on play dress up practice walking with it so that it looks genuine I want to perfect it I wish I could take a daily dosage a patience vitamin it would get stuck in my throat
Instead of staring at the universe straight on I will squint from now on stand upside down I want to be deliberate when I distort my view of it because I know that by purposefully jumbling what I perceive it will be no less accurate that when I claim to see things clearly
Photo: www.realsimple.com
I’m going gray.
I’m not sure what to do about it.
I never thought these two sentences were worthy of a blog entry but once I started poking around on the subject I realized that To Color Or Not To Color was a big, politically charged issue with far-reaching, philosophical implications.
Consider that the first book that comes up on the subject on Amazon is “Going Gray: What I Learned about Beauty, Sex, Work, Motherhood, Authenticity, and Everything Else That Really Matters”. And that there are a ton of whole blogs – not just entries – dedicated to this. I even found an article in Time Magazine titled “The War Over Going Gray”.
Yikes.
And I thought it was just about hair color.
I have never dyed my hair (except for a single unfortunate highlighting incident in the mid 80’s which did not seem particularly unfortunate at the time.)
While there are exceptions (and it’s quite possible I might be one of them), I think women who go gray look beautiful. My mother-in-law is a shining example – she has never colored her hair and is gorgeous and classy. And, what about Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada?
Besides liking the look, I feel quite reluctant about spending valuable energy on a battle I already know I will lose.
I was fairly certain the matter of my own hair color was up to me, until my usually only moderately pushy hairstylist was so insistent on “doing something about it”, even after I said several times that I wasn’t ready, that I got up and walked out.
Because, come on. Esthetics aside, shouldn’t it come down to a woman’s right to choose?
Photo: The Devil Wears Prada
Go ahead keep a journal write the date neatly on the top left hand side of the page take a thousand photographs and organize them into albums save them in chronological order catch it all with your new video camera despite your desperate efforts to freeze time to hold on to make sure things don't slip by the past is not retrievable
I thought I wanted to be a nomad to fit all my possessions in a backpack a traveler a poem writer speaker of seven languages an existentialist patriotic a wanderer adaptive courageous instead I am a burrower a lover of quiet evenings bonded to my home rooted a wife a daughter an immigrant solid dependable unmusical yet completely in tune
Photo: www.mfischerviolins.com
My brain refers to me in the second person an ever present stream of rebukes like a high strung overachieving hyper conscience you need to be better do more read more try harder despite the fact she never gives it a rest I like the insides of my mind just the way they are persistent noisy and architectural
Photo: http://web.mit.edu/museum/collections/architecture.html
When Luca and I first met and taught each other our respective language, we delighted in words the other used. Italian and Spanish are both beautiful, and have many similarities, despite of which they are a lot more different than people assume.
Our favorite anecdotes are around “false pairs”, where the same word, spelled the same, means very different things in each language. (Try putting a word you know and use into a sentence where it means the opposite and examine your immediate reaction to it. If I told you “get in the car” actually meant “get out of the car” and let a day go by and yelled “get in the car!” what do you think you’d do?)
Learning each other’s language, and the fun inherent to it, continue to entertain us.
We have now been living in the United States for ten years, where we speak English in the office all day. Having three languages in common, we have adopted words from each one and peppered our sentences with a mix that we realize has become incomprehensible to anyone else (and often to each other.)
Most recently, we’ve discovered we are incapable of getting through a whole thought without some kind of abuse to all language. In place of the original creative flourish we displayed, we have reduced ourselves to sounding something like this: “Ah, we need to go to the watchamacalit to get the thingamajig” or “hon, did you, ummm, you know, whatever?”
The most alarming aspect is that about 90% of the time, even when the sentence is devoid of nouns (and sometimes verbs) we know what the other is talking about. The other 10% of the time, one of us stares while the other sits there locked in an internal struggle for recall. Or, we begin to holler, “Come on! Say it! Say it in ANY language!”
I fear we’ll soon be reduced to incoherent blabber.
We’ve hence resolved to lay down the law: a sentence begun in a language must be finished coherently in that language. No inserting words that don’t belong. No making up words (my favorite.) No long pauses where one secretly hopes the other will finish the sentence.
This is going to be…yeah. Phew. You know.
