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Winter is for being in warm places with convivial company, snuggling and eating, and for periods of reflective solitude in the outdoors. The cold builds walls around me, indoors or outdoors, and my own self-reflectiveness creates an inward-spiralling gaze that only thaws when the mental separation cold imposes on me is thawed.
Right now I'm in a livingroom full of rowdy video-game players. The room has a fireplace and the smell of bacon. I can't access my schoolwork on the internet right now. I am perfectly content.
I have friends. I have so many friends. I'm finding that as satisfying as having the most flourishing of complicatedly fluid ecosystems in my garden. This is the first weekend I've been in town, not at work or school, for quite some time, and so I have time to enjoy people again. I am enjoying them and then some.
School is exciting too. I had my epic exam on Friday: 8:30 am to 3:30 pm, 3 1/2 hours was spent in the snow with a little bit of sleet and drifting cold mist lining compasses up with distant targets (the dials and my fingers were stiff with cold), reading clinometers that fogged up when I breathed, and doing mathematical calculations (percent slope -> horizontal distance, for instance) to a timer. Many of my classes are drawing to a close, but I don't finish school till the 17th, and there's a lot left to learn.
Work is picking up. It's poinsetta season. Poinsettas are the epitome of the junk-culture consumerism culture we have around christmas: they are poor quality plants, they spend the whole time I'm taking care of them dying, about half of them make it through in presentable condition till they need to be thrown out. It's my job to make it look like they aren't dying, because for us death is unthinkable, even in situations where it's obvious, inevitable, and self-created. So, my job is to remove dead leaves and dead plants so no one thinks about their death.
Also I found this today:
Superbly Situated
you politely ask me not to die and i promise not to
right from the beginning—a relationship based on
good sense and thoughtfulness in little things
i would like to be loved for such simple attainments
as breathing regularly and not falling down too often
or because my eyes are brown or my father left-handed
and to be on the safe side i wouldn’t mind if somehow
i became entangled in your perception of admirable objects
so you might say to yourself: i have recently noticed
how superbly situated the empire state building is
how it looms up suddenly behind cemeteries and rivers
so far away you could touch it—therefore i love you
part of me fears that some moron is already plotting
to tear down the empire state building and replace it
with a block of staten island mother/daughter houses
just as part of me fears that if you love me for my cleanliness
i will grow filthy if you admire my elegant clothes
i’ll start wearing shirts with sailboats on them
but i have decided to become a public beach an opera house
a regularly scheduled flight—something that can’t help being
in the right place at the right time—come take your seat
we’ll raise the curtain fill the house start the engines
fly off into the sunrise, the spire of the empire state
the last sight on the horizon as the earth begins to curve
by Robert Hershon
Oh, and my body is conducting a guerrilla war on me with blood. Slow trickle until the occasional militant overflow when I'm doing something (an exam, for instance) I can't set down for a second and attend to it with. It's getting old.
Right now I'm in a livingroom full of rowdy video-game players. The room has a fireplace and the smell of bacon. I can't access my schoolwork on the internet right now. I am perfectly content.
I have friends. I have so many friends. I'm finding that as satisfying as having the most flourishing of complicatedly fluid ecosystems in my garden. This is the first weekend I've been in town, not at work or school, for quite some time, and so I have time to enjoy people again. I am enjoying them and then some.
School is exciting too. I had my epic exam on Friday: 8:30 am to 3:30 pm, 3 1/2 hours was spent in the snow with a little bit of sleet and drifting cold mist lining compasses up with distant targets (the dials and my fingers were stiff with cold), reading clinometers that fogged up when I breathed, and doing mathematical calculations (percent slope -> horizontal distance, for instance) to a timer. Many of my classes are drawing to a close, but I don't finish school till the 17th, and there's a lot left to learn.
Work is picking up. It's poinsetta season. Poinsettas are the epitome of the junk-culture consumerism culture we have around christmas: they are poor quality plants, they spend the whole time I'm taking care of them dying, about half of them make it through in presentable condition till they need to be thrown out. It's my job to make it look like they aren't dying, because for us death is unthinkable, even in situations where it's obvious, inevitable, and self-created. So, my job is to remove dead leaves and dead plants so no one thinks about their death.
Also I found this today:
Superbly Situated
you politely ask me not to die and i promise not to
right from the beginning—a relationship based on
good sense and thoughtfulness in little things
i would like to be loved for such simple attainments
as breathing regularly and not falling down too often
or because my eyes are brown or my father left-handed
and to be on the safe side i wouldn’t mind if somehow
i became entangled in your perception of admirable objects
so you might say to yourself: i have recently noticed
how superbly situated the empire state building is
how it looms up suddenly behind cemeteries and rivers
so far away you could touch it—therefore i love you
part of me fears that some moron is already plotting
to tear down the empire state building and replace it
with a block of staten island mother/daughter houses
just as part of me fears that if you love me for my cleanliness
i will grow filthy if you admire my elegant clothes
i’ll start wearing shirts with sailboats on them
but i have decided to become a public beach an opera house
a regularly scheduled flight—something that can’t help being
in the right place at the right time—come take your seat
we’ll raise the curtain fill the house start the engines
fly off into the sunrise, the spire of the empire state
the last sight on the horizon as the earth begins to curve
by Robert Hershon
Oh, and my body is conducting a guerrilla war on me with blood. Slow trickle until the occasional militant overflow when I'm doing something (an exam, for instance) I can't set down for a second and attend to it with. It's getting old.
