Category: Domestic Life

for a callback

for the onset of a period of adjustment – I’ve finally bought my machine.

for inspiration about esthetics for sunday

for inspiration to make my comments on the minister’s Rite of Ordination

but despite the waiting there has been movement; I made supper for breakfast this morning; chops and fresh green beans and fresh brussels sprouts, quartered lengthwise, both steamed together, and quartered purple spuds done up in rosemary and garlic and salt like last time since they were a spectacular hit if the comments were any indication.  That you get to watch them disappear and get thanked for them… that’s rooted in the place happiness comes from.

and I have my machine.  It smells plasticky, but that is really hard to avoid.  There are a number of lovely features, preheated moistened air, a quiet period so you can sleep before it fires up and then just sleep through that part, really quiet fans, a really nice LONG and robust power cable for those times when you really have to string it aways across a floor and he gave me a good long walk through the features.  The mask I’m already used to; it is apparently a medium and covers both nose and mouth.  It’s of a milky silicone hue, and sensorily I must report with all gravity that it feels like somebody’s upended a little hovercraft over my face. Before I figured out how to seat it properly, there’d be blasts of icy cold air going across my eyebrows, evenly on both sides, until I (once again I am not exaggerating) thought my eyebrows were going to freeze in the act of fleeing as far up my forehead as they could fling themselves.

In other acts of random candor, I must report now in a spirit of feminist self criticism.

I recently started plucking my eyebrows so that about half their normal mass is now yielding before the first pair of tweezers I ever owned that was worth a docken.

I am pleased with the results and believe it makes me look, along with new stylish glasses, and a short neutral haircut, and me resting in the ammoniacal arms of Garnier number 60, reasonably well-kempt in a low key way.  I no longer care to wear contacts even though I own a relatively recent prescription pair; the capacity to wear makeup except in the context of a miracle play or other public event, or possibly dressing up for an awards show I got invited to by accident… I wouldn’t even wear makeup to my own wedding, were my life to break out in bizarreries of that nature; no creature who loved me would countenance it, let alone ask for it.

But I must now say that every ravaged follicle under both eyebrows rose up and said in one voice, as the arctic blast from my cpap mask chased my denuded brows into the heather, “Bet you wish you hadn’t plucked us now, you sellout!” I can’t say how much warmer I would have felt, but their ghostly cries interrupted my five minutes of thinking of this and that before I fall into my nightly ‘sleep’.

I’m amazed I remember that; my sleep is like a special case of amnesia, where all my bad memories go down dark hallways and get conveniently throttled, while all the sunshine and fireworks and gleaming new bicycles and a pair of pantyhose that lasted ten years lived.

My Mac died, and I’m sad.  I have another machine, so I’m happy.

There is a balance in everything. Sometimes you’re at the pivot point, and sometimes you’re hanging on for dear life off the end. Sometimes the only thing you care about, as you fly through the air frightened and alive and hyperaware, is that the right kind of music is playing.  That is the rather neurasthenic and precious point I find myself at, and I’ve tied myself into this wildly swinging rope in the hope that inertia reasserts itself and the rope quits moving soon. I have a sack of popcorn, a tarot deck and a small stringed instrument.