Mar 28, 2009

3/28/2009 - To Catch a Beast

This one's for Leah (and a little bit for Scott): Moonboat, revisited.

Alone in my thoughts I imagine all men to be helpless and sweet and serene. By day they cajole and demand and tease; by day I comply and accommodate and defend. Recreationally, I escape. Drifting away from droll conversation I capture them in my mind and contain them in a place where I know them to be tame. I imagine them in bed; not sprawled, naked and lurid, but tucked in, curled under the covers, head lolled to one side. I imagine them in this state and see them at last for what they are. They parade as men, all billow and bluster, but asleep they are boys, adrift on some dream.

My boyfriend (my bedfellow) the cunning debater, plays devils' advocate for sport, entwining me in counter-arguments the way a leashed mutt might bind its owner. Girdled by his tether - his overwhelming reason - I collapse, frustrated and pouting. In argument I find that I am too empathetic, ever-willing to accept the other person's point of view. I am an unworthy opponent, incapable of matching the strikes of my lover/debater. He reigns ever-victorious as I grudgingly wave my white flag.

Early mornings, awake, I search him for signs of piss and vinegar. He's only sleeping, however; sweetly dozing, soft and warm. Long gone to REM, he drawls nonsense songs and mutters cryptic answers to my gently prodding questions. My opponent is lost to this sleeping child and I feel, for the moment, that I have captured something great and tamed it; lured it to the bed where I now lay, lovingly encircled in the arms of my beast. 


Mar 9, 2009

3/9/2009 - Liberals in Paradise

And the prize for most vibrant spring greenery goes to...

These Bushes!



Extreme Close-up!


Oklahoma's really been getting into the spring thing as of late, blissfully ignorant of the oncoming cold snap. Today it's spring, tonight it's tornados and tomorrow its winter. All hail the midwestern weather pattern!

I spent the last springlike weekend house-sitting in my own personal paradise. It is an aspiration of mine to one day live in an old home with modern trimmings; in other words, I want all the old-house trappings (examples: mail slot, tiny grate and door for a front door peep hole, wood floors, vaulted ceilings, etc.) without all the old-house troubles (example: wiring from the 1920's). This place had it all - the original wooden floors, the quirky room layout, the breakfast nook - and was beautifully updated with textured walls, painted ceilings and a fully modern kitchen. The fact that all of the radios in the house were tuned to NPR was just an added bonus.

The house also came equipped with four cats (whose names I forgot immediately upon learning them; the one that was friendly to me I took to calling Mystery Cat, or Mystery for short) and two dogs:

Molly


Interests:
Being sweet, eating dinner, inserting herself under your arm for a rub.

and

Eddie

Interests:

Having a cute face, eating slowly and with great suspicion, chewing on Scott, capturing wild possums and rendering them unconscious in terror-stricken stupor so that the house-sitter thinks she's got a giant dead rodent on her hands and starts making plans to call Animal Control up until the moment that - to her immense relief - she witnesses the creature slowly stand up and walk gingerly away.

So that was my weekend (and how was yours?), possum-playing-possum and all. I've returned home to my cat (interests: chewing on crinkly things, tirelessly pursuing all milk-based eats and most other foodstuffs, running maniacally from room to room on urgent business) and a week that seems ghostly quiet, void of most of my regularly scheduled classes. Though there's not much to do, it at least feels a bit like summer. This brings back good memories, and I don't mind spending my time with those.

Mar 2, 2009

3/2/2009 - Educayshun


This morning I finally captured my cat performing the greatest of all his tricks: mouse fetching. If you look real close you can see in Moxie's mouth the white toy mouse for which his sun rises. He harbors a compassion for this creature which my inferior human mind, I am certain, will never be able to grasp.

I shot this photo early in the morning, which left the rest of my day subject to the drudgery of squeezing in readings of a particularly torturous text book. I would have resented this assignment entirely were it not for the following:

"Researchers [in Mexico] leaned...that men, in order to retain their sense of machismo, refused to use contraception, a behavioral choice that resulted in large families that many of the men were unable to support financially. This revelation provided the input for a public education campaign using a macho cartoon penis character to extol the virtues of contraception."

It's stuff like this that makes me laugh out loud and suddenly not mind so much the endless reading assignments that come free with college tuition. Hyterical mental image of "macho cartoon penis" aside, I actually do consider this a relatively fascinating sociological fact and an excellent tidbit for haughty dinner conversation. I'm beginning to nurture the secret sociologist inside of me, so rest assured that I'll be squirreling this fact away for later discussion.

The rest of my reading was only a frustration, as I am one of those people who believes that if they're going to be reading zillions of droll pages, they might as well be reading zillions of well-edited droll pages; which is why I am irritated (and also secretly, smugly, satisfied) to find typos such as the following:

"Listserv discussions can run for up to a week, giving motivated respondents time to provide thoughtful their answers."

"Straight Edgers themselves typically run independent hard-core music labels; they call these labels DYI, or "do it yourself."

Look. I edit the dickens out of every document I submit to anything and I'm nothing but a sniveling undergrad. Let's show some integrity.

But then, as I should probably be studying this text rather than ragging unnessarily on it, I guess I should shut my trap and go apply myself.
Posted by Picasa