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sublingua | |||||
| The heart with a mind of its own.(Be present.) | The mind with a heart of its own.(It's past.) | The dream that is your waking life.(Go there now.) | |||
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part III: nothing in common with that guy
dearest sophistica, well, your email sent friday didn�t show up until very very late saturday, or very early sunday, depending on how you want to spin it. this may have to do with that �warning� that appears as a personal, direct message from mr. yahoo each time i open my email. apparently, unless i start paying mr. yahoo some sort of exorbitant fee ($9 a year--what does he want, blood?), my email account will be, what? suspended? suspended with extreme prejudice? so there was a making of neo-stephen's mask yesterday, and i'll send a pic or two along shortly (as in, as shortly as i can figure out how to download a picture so that it doesn't eat up every bit of space in your email box, ala mayflower and her goddamn lizard pictures). the event, i have to say, was probably the most nerve wracking of my whole life. why, you ask? why, indeed. i'll tell you, when the unwitting object of one's desires has willingly laid himself out before one on a table to be knowingly slathered with lovely shea body butter, one may wish perhaps for one's assistant to be someone other than one's husband. (and i've started, with the boys, after a comment from one that he was unused to applying any kind of cream or lotion to his face, laying them out and then putting the body butter on them myself). anyway, it didn't seem to be a huge problem, only except for the blushing and slightly trembling hands and the very low-pitched and quiet voice that i suddenly had to adopt to keep myself from becoming quite crazy-sounding and babbly (and which struck people in the studio as being very unusual for me--unusual enough that the woman who worked for many, many years as a nurse on various psych wards came over to find out why it was that sublingua was so quiet and jumpy and which prompted max to ask later, "why did doing that make you so nervous?" and about max: he has this idea, i think, that neo-stephen makes me nervous because i...i don't know how quite to put this. max knows i'm interested in this man, but i think that he thinks that my interest is purely a kind of aggressive curiosity that is prompted by the neo-stephen's ability to indimidate lesser beings at thirty paces. i don't think that--and i admit that this may be a bit of fantastic naivete on my part--max has any idea that i would simply walk away from the life i have with him if neo-stephen expressed the slightest desire for this to occur. so we made a mask of neo-stephen's face, and i made a copy of it for myself--something which i haven't done in a year or more--but which i didn't bring home and put under my pillow, thank you very much. i had that bit of self-control, and that means something, doesn't it? (you don't have to say it. i know.) afterwards, the three of us went to dinner at india palace. the three of us. i swear, i called everyone i know to avoid having this be the case. i called ama and lea and mayflower even. and x, that rat, had a date with "a friend" (read: meg) that he wouldn't break, and i could have forced him to break by telling him that he was going to meet my second husband, only then this information would have been conveyed to max in that x way that he has which is characterized largely by a kind of earnest deviancy ("so, max, is that the neo-stephen sublingua's in love with?" i can hear it coming out of his mouth even now). anyway, i think i did okay. i stuck to asking about everyone's academic interests, and we talked about wittgenstein and derrida and the philosophy and english departments and the cast and crew at sophII's. i didn't ask a single personal question of neo-stephen (which probably struck max as unusual again), and then we all shared a dessert and went our separate ways, max commenting in the car on the way home, "i have nothing in common with that guy." yeah. so to keep this from becoming one long, boring ode to the effects of the neo-stephen on yours truly, let's talk of other things for a moment, shall we? the show things are slowly coming together. i am determined to have every piece i'm taking done by june 9, when summer classes start, and it's been an uphill battle the likes of which plagued sisyphus. first, during finals week, a kiln full of my stuff misfired, never reaching a temperature that vitrified the clay or developed the glazes, so this meddlesome woman at the studio took it upon herself to move my stuff from that kiln to another one. since the contents of the boxes are not attached in any way until the glaze fuses them together in the firing, things were shifted in the moving. it, of course, made not a difference to her that this might occur, but the pieces were then not the assemblages that i had done, but were instead the assemblages that she had done. and some of them were not good. some of them had to be unceremoniously and angrily flung into the dumpster before i could come to her and say diplomatically that i was sure that it was probably nerve-wracking for her to have to move my pieces since they were only loosely laid into the boxes, so that in the future, should a kiln misfire, she should just move everything back to my shelf if she had to move them at all. so that was thing number one. things numbers two and three were clay related. about two days worth of work had to be discarded because the clay bloated and warped in the first, low-temp firing. the next batch of clay turned a very unattractive brown in the high-temp firing, making all the faces look like fresh deposits of dog doo. finally, i have workable clay. and a week before school starts with which to work with it. also, there is the usual amount of self-doubt going on, what with my brain suddenly not wanting to concentrate on making things, but deciding instead to convince itself that, of course, no one is going to be interested in what i make, and it's going to be a huge flop, and there is in my future going to have to be a lot of rationalization time required to offset the failure that is going to characterize my debut at the arts and crafts fair. so, i feel that there hasn't been enough food talk in this email. it may not have held your interest. and, if so, i have to apologize. in the interest of giving you some example of the poorness of my recent diet, i have to tell you that my lunch was a small can of salmon, eaten from the tin with a fork, shared with the only cat who can get away with begging because he is getting too old for me to feel okay about pushing him away. there was the indian food of last night, which i could hardly taste, what with the powerful effects of sharing it with the neo-stephen and the husband. and there was utilitarian thai from the place that just opened up around the corner from our house (which has been no less than four different restaurants in the last eighteen months, so i'm not holding out much hope, though the food was okay and the place had several tables full at saturday lunch, so maybe). other than that, i've been surviving on a costco-sized tub (more wading pool-sized than anything) of extremely garlicky hummus and rice crackers. not the best diet, but after hearing of your continued vending machine nutritional quests, i'm thinking i'm doing okay. is this long enough? and so-- sub.
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