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the latest
waddle: good morning, wordpress - 10:36 a.m. , 2009-07-03 elaborate murder attempt - 2:56 p.m. , 2009-07-01 building a tractor in the basement - 10:42 a.m. , 2009-06-19 ask no questions tell just a few lies - 3:17 p.m. , 2009-06-09 my long lasting flavor really lasts long - 1:10 p.m. , 2009-06-04
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We don't get Martin Luther King Day off here, so I'm at work. And I flip over the previously mentioned "medieval word a day" calendar, and it informs me that today is also the Feast of St Paul the Hermit. Not that St Paul the Hermit would attend such a feast, being a hermit and all. "Hey Paul, we're having a feast today, if you'd like to come..." "Go away!" Whenever I get...not depressed exactly, but moody and introspective, I have a very particular set of symptoms. The weirdest thing is what happens to my vision. I get fascinated by minute things. The grain patterns in wood. The quality of light as it slides around and drips off all the metal surfaces in the subway car, around sunset. The twisty patterns of black tree branches. Even my own pale, scratched-up hand poking out of my coat sleeve. When I'm happy I attend more to the macro view, on grayer days it's the tiny things that seem incredibly important. Come to think of it, all my favorite toys as a child had the same sort of hypnotic, trance-inducing quality. I used to like to ride my tricycle in a circle, and I was addicted to this wonderful thing called a Lemon Twist. It was a loop of rubber that fit around your ankle, with a short piece of rubber off of that and a plastic lemon (why a lemon?) at the end that had some sort of pebbles or other noisemakers inside. You'd skip over the lemon and get a rhythm going. I could do that for hours. And let's not forget Sit and Spin, Spirograph, the little magnetic wheel on two tracks that went up and down as you squeezed it, and Lite-Brite, which for me was always less about the artistic process than it was about the incredibly satisfying thunk of those pegs as they pushed through the black paper. OK, now I feel the need to spin around in my office chair until that same sort of dizzy transcendence is achieved. ---mimi smartypants back/forward |
