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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 II: the ineptitude of otters
hello, my dear, (i am going to compose this ala sophistica/ee cummings, so hold on to your shift key, okay?) i'm glad you got a long weekend here, as it allowed me to pretend for a bit that you still live across town and we had just been too busy with finals to get together over bad americanos at sophII's. bad americanos. bad americanos. mal americanos. (sorry, i seem to be stuck in some kind of loop here.) however, i do agree that there must be more and better kinds of meals for your next visit, which means, of course, not allowing the boys to have a say in choosing restaurants (especially when said boys are on strict meat and white bread (b) or no meat and no bread (max) or no meat and i'm just glad to get out of the house (x) diets). and about the vietnamese food: i've suddenly become very suspicious of vietnamese food, what with all those oily broths and fish sausages (and if you ask me, that's the one thing that should never have been made into a sausage)--except for spring rolls which i could eat all day every day. (this may or may not constitute needed to know information in your world). in any case, i think the chief lesson restaurant-wise with your last visit lay in x's having to be the one to coordinate (at least one) meal time/place, which is something that exasperated him positively--that is to say that his exasperation, i feel, moved him in a positive direction on the socialization pathway. as a reward for his having done what you or i would normally have done, max and i took him out to an indian dinner, ordered for him (including dessert), and commented not once on his being twenty-five minutes late. (is this making any sense? it feels very nonsensical, but that could just be me. hee.) while i feel it important to get the boys to make arrangements--if only to have the opportunity to laugh outright at the ineptitude of others (almost typed "otters" there)--it is perhaps occasionally more important to have an edible meal or two under one's belt. and speaking of belts: there were drinks the other night sans max and with the stephen who is not stephen, but who is really stephen to the extent that we shall just refer to him as neo-stephen. neo-stephen's (to me) chief weakness finally came to light, and that is that he has a problem letting loose unless he has a few drinks in him. i mean, it's probably par for the course given his extreme philosophical bent, but as i'm grasping at straws here, it'll have to do. it's not that he's an unpleasant fellow when he's drinking--in fact, he is quite charming and outgoing, and sits at one's elbow in an attractive manner and makes lovely jokes and quotes chaucer at length in middle english and all these things make one appreciate him all the more--except for that this is the drinking version of neo-stephen and not the everyday version of neo-stephen, and that alone is worrisome. the everyday version of neo-stephen is very quiet (remember raquel? that quiet), very repressed (a home-grown, even now church-going baptist, for god's sake), spends an immoderate amount of time in his own head (which is difficult to fault him for without a few fingers being pointed in a few different directions, including one or two at yours truly), and can't ever speak about his feelings because it might make him human, or vulnerable, or whatever. there are good things about the everyday neo-stephen, but i can't let myself think about those things, can i? can i, sophistica? dammit. so let's move on. move on, i say.
so i'm in that curious space between semesters when the days stop having any real distinct identities. you know you're there when someone asks what day it is and the best you can come up with is maybe the month, or, if you're lucky that it's either tuesday or wednesday or maybe monday or, in any case, it's early in the week--that you know--and then you have to start asking yourself all these tricky questions to try to figure it out, or you have to start counting backwards from the last day you knew for sure. i'm there. or maybe i'm then. monday was memorial day, and i thought it was the 25th, but no, that was sunday, wasn't it? was it? in any case, i spent all day monday at the studio--most of that time alone, since the studio was closed for memorial day. early in the day, as i was working, listening to june of 44 played very loudly, singing along in that way one does when one knows not one word of the song but wishes to sing nonetheless, the studio director suddenly poked his head around the corner and said, "howdy." and, of course, by the time i was finished getting back into my skin, he was gone, only to be replaced (later) by max and x and a couple of new-found friends, rockabilly mel and her boyfriend x (who met on the internet, which is a terrific story, but for another time, really), all of whom lay down for masks. this is very much the next day: speaking of masks, neo-stephen is coming next monday to make a mask (and to allow me yet another opportunity to make a bloody fool out of myself). i just wanted to put that in there, knowing that i can't talk about this too much, but there will be pictures from it in any case, so you will get to see, perhaps. (edited to add: feel free to berate me at will over this, as a good ass-kicking is in order--or at least is going to assist in knocking me out of the idea that the thoughts in my head are appropriate ones, or something. something.) also, i'm sorry your labwork is all out of whack. shouldn't there be some kind of witch doctor you can call to come in an exorcise your plates? do you think your labmates would find it strange if you brought in ye olde voodoo priestess to sacrifice a chicken over your bench? wouldn't seem to be a problem since sterile technique is more of a curiousity than an actuality in your lab (and i have to tell you, it was nice working in a lab where sterile t. could be sort of a sham process, as everything ended up getting purified in the end anyway). also, i would be happy to go to church and light a candle if it would help. just say the word, and i will brave the scary priest down at our lady of guadalupe. (and what does one brandish at a scary priest, i wonder. i'm guessing a crucifix won't work, and the only alternative that comes to mind is an i.u.d. or some sort of sex toy that looks not so much like a sexual object but more like something one would use to scrub a toilet with and which one would be likely to place in an otherwise sensitive area). and how can one not end on such a note? one cannot, i'm afraid. and so-- sublingua however, as a post-script prompted by the idea of brandishing sex toys at scary priest, have you heard of this movie called "28 days after"--a zombie flick by the guy who did "trainspotting"? we are definitely going to have to try to find it for your next visit--though it'll mean inviting ourselves over to x's house to watch it (on our tv/vcr, of course).
More lies:
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