Archive for the ‘the wide world’ Category

Hey, look at that. You wait long enough, and the seasons will go and change on you. It won’t say a word of apology for how long it took, how delayed it is, how it didn’t call and let you know what was going on, how it showed up smelling like smoke and with lipstick on its collar and looking a little crosseyed, but you don’t care because it’s spring and it’s finally here and you are just glad that it’s safe and not tied up in the brig of a Somalian pirate ship somewhere getting the pollen beat right out of it.

Spring. Hi. I missed you. You’re cute. Let’s not ever fight again, okay? Because I really did miss you. I missed bare legs and pink collarbones and giant blue skies that seem much closer and clouds that are so much cuddlier. I missed the sun creeping closer and closer and getting goldener and goldener.

Happy inauguration day, everyone! This is one of those days that will resonate in my heart forever and ever, watching my historic president stand up and say “Everywhere we look, there is work to be done,” and yet making me feel like that work is going to be done, and well, and that everything will be well and everyone will have unicorns and–and maybe I’m getting caught up, again, in that heady rush of excitement and optimism and hope that Obama–I almost wrote President Elect Obama, but I don’t have to anymore, do I, and that thought made me bounce in my chair and tear up a little bit. I had to blow my nose.

It is exactly that kind of day, today, where, I am a mess, and completely useless, but happy to be so, because it is inauguration day, and I believe in my president for the first time in so very, very long.

Sometimes I am taken up by such a tornado of amazement and wonder that I land three states away, blinking and with two broken legs and only one shoe. Probably because I have a gentle and completely credulous nature which makes me believe you when you say that it was you in the big dance scene in Flashdance (true story, and I don’t want to talk about it). It’s never beautiful, mystical and sensitively spiritual things like dew drops on roses and the small and wondrous pink nose of a kitten that makes me contemplate the nature of a loving Universe and blows my hair back–no, what usually astonishes me and makes me wide-eyed with awe is when I am struck anew by how much in the future we are totally living.

It’s always the little things that get me.

The jeans in my drawers, all three pairs, all come from Old Navy. I have three pairs of jeans that are no longer my size set aside to give away, and they are all Old Navy jeans too. There is nothing wrong with Old Navy jeans, really–they are very inexpensive and come in an exciting variety of washes and shapes and styles and colors enough to turn your pretty head. But besides the fact that they aren’t quite right–for instance, the boot-cut pair are embarrassingly just a smidge too short, and too-short pants on a woman is one of my pet peeves–it somehow feels like Old Navy jeans are not enough.

There is premium denim out there, people. Premium! For a premium, admittedly. But in the world exists brands of luxury denim that are not only luxuriously made of hammered gold and pressed diamonds and sheets of fabric that have been woven by fairies in a land of dreams where wishes always come true and McDonald’s breakfast is served 24 hours a day, but they also have magical properties.

My boyfriend calls me gullible, and he is not wrong. He has me believing things so very, very easily–a list of things that is, in fact, too embarrassing to reveal, because it is true that I am so very gullible. I prefer to think of it as “trusting,” and “filled with the belief that the people around me who love me would not ever lie to me for the sake of comedy because that would just be cold-hearted and cruel,” but he weirdly just will not buy into that world view and I think it’s because of that chip in his head that he told me about.

There are some beliefs I hold that I have never considered myself gullible for believing, though. Stuff like “A poinsettia will kill your cat dead, so do not have one,” and “All the heat goes out the top of your head, so wear a hat!” and “Drinking a lot of water and eating McDonald’s breakfast will fix the night after a whole barrel full of eggnog.” As it turns out, these things are not true, and neither are the truths that so many people had previously held to be so self-evident, that sugar will make you crazy-nutball banging off the walls, and if you eat after, say, 7:00 p.m., you will get very fat and then die, possibly of suicide around the holidays, which is when everyone rushes to knock themselves off, you know.