i will miss you sweet computer

today is my last monday at my current job. since i am a very sentimental person by nature (on saturday, i looked over at my dear friend in her wedding dress, realized the weight of the moment we were sharing, and had to leave the room, about to burst into tears), i am anticipating being emotional about leaving this job. but i'm not feeling emotional at all! i only feel ... well, nothing, actually. i like this job, i've made lasting friendships here, i have learned a lot and actually grown up a little. when i left my office on the last day of my first real i-have-a-salary-and-health-benefits job at the library, it was pouring rain and tears were streaming down my face as i walked to my car with my huge box of office stuff. the beastie boys "fight for your right to party" was cued to play as i drove away, but i felt too sad to turn it on.

this time it's different. on friday, i will walk to that same car with another big box, but i cannot imagine that i will be crying. (mostly i think i will be concerned that the doorman is going to try and give me an awkward goodbye hug!) but also, i just can't see myself crying.

because i'd never stop. this change is too heavy to process in one car ride home. beginning in three short weeks, i'm not going to live in the same state as my mom for the first time in my life. i'm leaving some of the best friends in the history of the universe. i know that i'm going to explode, emotionally, sometime in the near future. i just need to time it, you know?

hold it,

hold it,

hold it,

ok, go!

if i don't, i'll be crying for the next month straight and will probably have to be committed to a mental hospital. and then everyone will be happy to see me leave, as i will have become an annoying blubbering mess.

i just need to wait until i've driven away for good.

pie

i read this poem this morning and it made me miss my days of pretending to be a literary critic. (i was an english major and so that's how i spent many hours in college- pretending to be a fancy big-words-using literary genius). looking back, maybe i was going through a pretentious period, but it was energizing and made me feel alive. so i am going to quick-write my thoughts on this poem, which i liked immensely when i read it.

Pie
by X.J. Kennedy

Whoever dined in this café before us
Took just a forkful of his cherry pie.
We sit with it between us. Let it lie
Until the overworked waitperson comes
To pick it up and brush away the crumbs.

You look at it. I look at it. I stare
At you. You do not look at me at all.
Somewhere, a crash as unwashed dishes fall.
The clatter of a dropped knife splits the air.
Second-hand smoke infiltrates everywhere.

Your fingers clench the handle of a cup
A stranger drained. I almost catch your eye
For a split second. The abandoned pie
Squats on its plate before us, seeping red
Like a thing not yet altogether dead.

***
my first instinct is to ask- what is the relationship between these two people at the table? and my first-instinct answer is that i think they are lovers who are about to have a break-up conversation. "a thing not yet altogether dead," the pie, is their relationship - the pie is sitting there now, but it's undesireable, and someone's about to take it away and then its not just going to be undesirable, it's going to be dead. just as one of the people at the table is about to say something that kills the relationship. and we are witnessing the moment in time right before its death.

it's a sad poem but it really speaks to me. i love the use of metaphor in things like uneaten, unfresh food. and i love that this is cherry pie- oozing red goo/blood. i make objects metaphorical all the time- like the fact that my scrabble game is missing a blank tile. this means, of course, that my life as a whole is short on blank canvases- i need to work on expanding my options. it's fun and i'm going to try and be more conscious of things sitting in front of me to see if they are saying something!

finally, i think my favorite literary technique used in this poem is kennedy's placement of "A stranger," on a new line. the reader stumbles here and has to read it twice or three times to realize that the stranger that the narrator is speaking of is not the person sitting across from him, but the person who left the cup. the fragmentation of the sentence illurates the fragmentation between the two people and puts the word "stranger" into our heads so that we also ponder whether these two people have become strangers to each other.

inner chill

i experienced an absolute absence of inner (and outer) drama this past weekend and it was glorious. i want to swim in it.

advice

(attempting to write some advice without using a personal pronoun):

when listening to a woman relate the story of how that woman became engaged, try not to judge the story. the woman cannot change the story because the story happened to that woman. the woman must live with that story. so hold the tongue. a unexciting
and silly engagement story (involving, say, a couch and some cheese puffs) could happen to any woman.

(that was harder than one might imagine)

reviving a lost mind

this past weekend, i went (with my mom, stepdad, and younger brother) to tennessee to celebrate my grandma's 81st birthday with her. part of the weekend was spent sitting around her kitchen table discussing new books we've read, or want to read, and making/eating bbq ribs, colorful and amazingly thinly-sliced veggies, and a flourless chocolate (birthday) cake.

grandma's husband died about 18 months ago, and, of late, grandma has seemed worried her large house and its insides, wondering, rightfully so, how she will ever manage to get rid of all her stuff when the inevitable time comes for her to downsize. so we volunteered to take home some things that she didn't need anymore and my brother went up into the attic and retrieved six or seven dusty, heavy boxes- full of family photos, memorabilia, papers, cancelled checks, tax records, etc. most of it had belonged to my great-grandmother, gram, and all of that had remained untouched since her death in january 1989, of alzheimer's disease.

i was profoundly affected by one particular item we found. gram kept meticulous records of her day-to-day affairs, in the form of notations in her desk calendar. we found all of her desk calendars and started pouring over them, checking, for example, how she recorded my birthday (a simple entry, dated November 17, 1977, stating my name, and my weight, height, length, and time of birth), or my brother's birthday (stating his name and "dark hair and happy. aren't we all happy?"). this entry was on October 14, 1987, at a time when alzheimer's already was affecting her mind.

we also discovered the last calendar that gram had used before she died. we held our breaths as we flipped through it. at the top of every page, she had written her full name, address, telephone number, my mother's and grandmother's names, and numbers and a little schedule of her meals (7:30 am, breakfast; 12:00 pm, lunch; 5:30 pm, dinner).

to remember.

some months, she had filled every single square with frenzied notes ("called hairdresser. she said she'd call me"), ("i can't find my eyebrow tweasers") ("borrowed eyebrow tweasers from nellie brown, she lives across the hall from me")- to the point that almost every inch of the page is inked. these pages represent the pains that she took to cling to some semblance of normalcy, even as she was losing her mind. it's both heartbreaking and fascinating.

the most compelling page was the last. it was the month of july 1988, seven months before she died. (the rest of the book is blank). the final entry is july 28, 1988. in that box, she wrote a sentence about how much she loved her late husband, noting also, with amazing accuracy, that he had died ten years ago that day.

i now feel like i have the raw materials from which to craft a book (the book i always said i wanted to write), which will be a story about my great-grandmother. writing this book gives me the chance to do for gram what, despite all her efforts, she couldn't do for herself: revive her lost mind.

30,000 stores!!!!!!!!!!!!

a few weeks ago i read in the paper the following facts:
metro atlanta has over 136 starbucks stores.
starbucks is planning to build 200 more starbucks in atlanta in the next few years.
starbucks also is planning to expand from 10,500 stores worldwide to more than 30,000 stores.

nooooo!!!!!!! all those green and white cups! is it really that yummy? or hard to make your own coffee at home? does everyone need to learn to speak starbuckian? why does tall mean small? where has all of our authenticity, creativity, eccentricity gone? does no one notice we are all becoming the same?

and 30,000 stores!!!!!!!!!! oh no! do we have room for all of them? are we going to have to sacrifice diners and denists' offices so that the starbucks can have the best locations? are they going to put a starbucks in pratt, kansas??????

pratt is an old-time small town in the middle of kansas and where my father grew up. the air is sweet there, you can stand in a wheat field and hear nothing but the wheat, and you can go to one of the two bars in town and run into someone who knows your daddy- it's a good spot. it has a population of approximately 6,570 people.

phew, i just checked www.starbucks.com- there are no starbucks in pratt, kansas! that's the most refreshing thing i've ever heard.

i want to move there.

ok, i feel better.

http://www.prattkan.com/