texas inspired, but home and hearts go hand-in-hand

long winter, and

with someone in mind


(Robert Earl Keen came to Park City last winter--my brother says he comes every year for his birthday in January--and it pricked, stinging of home: memoried flautas and train tracks, margaritas to-go, crowded dive bar music, "safety-clinic" cycling team pub crawls, budlight and pepperjack cheese, language lessons and,


at the concert there were too many men wearing undershirts under t-shirts, and I swear to god, Curve cologne).

nostalgia for England

I'm required to get proof of attendance at Lancs U from 2005-2006 for my background check at my Domestic Violence Shelter job. Initiating email contact with some of the departments has tugged on my heartstrings some, least of which are connected to the Wednesday Market and sitting with a crepe on the Library/Museum steps, Blue-Anchoring myself, pints at lunch, dinner, and before and after damn Syntax lab (never thought I'd need an entire pint to get through a linguistics class, although if I can ever find the limerick that giggled Kara and me near enough to expulsion from the class, I'll post it), taking the free Sainsbury's bus on Wednesdays because we were so poor and cheap, the Sugar House, £1 Yager shots out of a test tube, for whatever reason no one knew, the LUSU shop, charity shops and radiant heat.

The closings of letters and emails are something I miss most from the single year I lived in Lancaster, and unexpectedly so.
A sampling of my favorites:

Kind Regards,
Earnestly,
All the Best,
Best Wishes,
Many Thanks,
xoxox (mostly text messages),
xxxxxxxxxxxx (mostly text messages, and more from Northerners that I remember),
thanksx,
and of course,
Cheers, (that as often was spoken; I would fake a softer "r" when getting on the bus so no one would ask me where I was from. No shame. And anyway, it worked).

I miss the green, and the softest Springtime I'd ever known. I miss the cows on my walk to town. How weird is that?

Lingual Play

Presumably, a [preposition] interlude, gallery

opening: some insuspirations manifest

must have been.

One quick errand for a corkscrew,

your midnight innovations made [present tense]

a champagne hero.

Apparently, you followed [temporal adverbial

clause] somewhere now obscure.

11 PM your words in my ear as I

listed for produce groceries after a 12-hour-work-day,

hearing your traipsing festivities and flirting bar to pub

-lic transport, while I, wanting [infinitive]

fermata-ed that bridge, your attention, laughter across

goddamn satellite static

cellphones and the noise my TV

used to make between channels when

it was "snowing,"

combined with the evensong's slurred

speech disremembering syllables,

made [obsolete ablative]. It didn’t translate.

You’d lost your [singular noun]

so a hard line for incoming calls.

You felt you ought to retell after noon
in stickythroat halting that
frontal lobe and lips involved, damage here
(my “Oh.”)
and by six AM, a sleep-debt [future mixed conditional

of "to be" or a past modal expectation] relieved.

[indirect spacial deixis reference] and

[misspelled possessive apostrophe].

I try to think, “neither [proximity] nor [distance marker],”
(because English already dropped the accusative

case, with no remaining

declensions, save maybe “him”,
that also can class dative, more oblique, but)

anyway, I forwent a season pass this year.

Resort lots full, wintry-slipped roads,

slopes too steep, and too many trips

to physical therapy.

Besides, they, too, have black-out dates,

no access to a lift, reserved for tourists.

chest balm for the heart

After a year in seemingly godforsaken Utah, I've had my heart calmed unexpectedly by my discoveries of a visual version of the eucalyptus, rosemary, ravensara, tea tree, and peppermint chest rubs.

Smith and Moorehouse Reservoir



Mormon Trail at Sunset

This is the intersection of Pinebrook Perimiter trail and MidMountain, I think. It's about five minutes from my house.



Another trail near my house, Troy's, or Spring Trail I think. Maybe Upper Meeks--one of the ones I've been running lately. This one taken in mid-September.

Please excuse the quality of the above pictures, as they were all taken from my cellphone, my own camera battery charger having been left in Mexico. I'll be sure to get some more autumn pictures up too. The orange is in full swing, and the aspens have yet to golden themselves, but I'll try to share some of it soon.

gift horse

You were my mother--the petulant apologies half-growled,

flung like a confident new convert's appeasement:

They chafed

She slapped my mouth (I counted the times) with her floury hands--

you kissed it: buttering my unraveling debt.

some salve.

dreaded question: "What's the points spread on tonight's game?"

"I feel so uneducated," was a lament expressed the other day from one of my friends. What surprised me was this gal is one of the smartest, most well read, and interested people I know. So. This got me thinking.

Her comment was in regards to a conversation about my (yes, my) menstrual cycle. I chart it, observing cervical fluid and my basal body temperature each day, based on the technique elaborated on by Toni Weschler in her informative book, Taking Charge of Your Fertility. I became interested when I tired of hormonal cycle regulation (damn pills stifled my emotions and made me fat) and disposed of all those little white vacuum sealed pills, but found my menstrual cycles to be as irregular as ever. Never knowing when my period would settle into my new panties or my mar forever my white linen pants (I'm one of the few not struck down by debilitating cramps or downswings in my moods with this PMS business. Lucky, except that I was always taken by surprise when with no warning I'd need to rush off to the ladies' room, totally unprepared and without prepackaged wads of cotton to...um...anyway) was incredibly frustrating. Sometimes I'd have a period as soon as 21 days after my last, with sometimes as many as fifty-five days between menses. My boss/co-worker/one of my best friends here in Utah had just finished with this book, and hell, I wanted to take charge of my fertility. Or, at least be aware of when I could expect to get drownded.

(For those of you interested, as this isn't really what my post is about, I highly recommend the book. I remember one week in biolab as a freshman in college coming to the Female Menstrual Cycle lesson and thinking "oh man, I got this down. I mean. I should. I mean, I deal with this every month." And then being totally baffled by the horrifyingly confusing scientific-speak and convoluted presentation about processes that were occurring semi-regularly in my own body. So anyway, this book: very informative, very accessible, funny, engaging, and ultimately, educating, which is more in line with what my post is about).

So I got to thinking: how can she feel uneducated? I mean, the only reason I felt educated about the subject is because I was fed up with something directly relating to my experience and did the research on it. And it clicked. With so much information "out there," how in the world does one choose what to read/watch/listen to? Sure, sure, high school and even college degrees have pretty specific curricula, but after that? Why do I know so much about my period, and my sister knows so much about South Africa, and Katie so much about paper, etc etc etc?

I remember reading an article about the war with Iraq and American ignorance of its culture (yes yes yes, get on with it, you say), and the salient point was: we're not curious. The saturation of the media tells us exactly what we think we want to know and so we don't feel compelled to look further. (Take that how you will, but my point is): what are we curious about? What are our own and individual experiences pushing us toward? My frustration with my body got me asking questions about what I could do about it. I wonder if we're only going to "do the research" on what gets us going, and that's always going to be different. It's not a stock curricula, and it's not about being uneducated or ejuhmuhkated, or whatever, because no one ever will be, or everyone always is, or however one wants to evaluate it.

Anyway, in order not to make this seem like an exercise in futility, (or an overly elaborate and tiring encomium on the wealth of our melting-pot-resources and experiences) I'd leave on a note of this my own desire: to walk through life (well, with me, I might just be wandering around) with enough of an open mind to hear what is unfamiliar to me, and to be curious about it not for education's sake, but for the prospect of being able to connect with a stranger through that lovely medium, conversation.

Which means I might want to learn what a "curve ball" is.

eponymous post

avoirdupois

separate. collection of goods: sorted grained-

freckles, my pied nipples weigh

tea leaves too many, and o(u)nced

sweetened butter creamy between

the legs measure out my pounds. Bleached

or unsifted rye-dark skin—no matter—

milled ever too coarse

or fine.

Legal limit for flight is fifty

pounds (more twelve thousand drams)

for baggage; I always owe

the surfeit fee (stock package) for the “extra-

heavy” orange tag.

skeptic, cynicism, and por quoi?

Wow, talk about tetchy (which happens to be Merriam-Webster's word of the day today). I googled "acupuncture" and the majority of the links on the first page of the search had to do with "does it work?" or "medicine: is acupuncture effective?" and even "although more traditional hospitals are offering both training and treatment in the forms of acupuncture, it remains to be seen whether...".

So: 1) I had no idea it was so controversial because 2) I have always wanted it.

Back pain, anxiety, insomnia, infertility, stress, et cetera. It's a practice of healing, and a practice indeed. Although the training requirements differ since there's not a centralized certification system, healers apprentice and train for anywhere from one to ten years before practicing on their own. From my (very limited) understanding, it's not a panacea; even in university and other hospitals where it's being offered as a "complementary therapy," doctors stress the superseding effectiveness of Western medicine. However, in some places like Santa Fe, most insurance polices offer ten to fifteen acupuncture sessions as standard medical coverage (info courtesy of a friend only, unresearched).

I first saw an acupuncture needle in "real life" a few weeks ago at the Park City Rail Trail mixer in Prospector. It was a promotion for local businesses and a couple Melissa Pepper Krajeski and Wyatt Krajeski (please note these links are not their current business, but are bios/interesting info about them. To contact them at their current practice, please go here) were there giving away free ten-minute chair massages. Ha, well, living for all intents and purposes alone, and where hugs and cuddles are scarce due to my partner's living approximately 1,378 miles away, I'm a sucker for being touched when I don't have to pay for it (e.g. pedicures, massages, facials, etc). Wyatt demonstrated a needle for me, and I was surprised at how flexible and thin acupuncture needles are. And after ten minutes under Melissa's hands at a business-promotion Rail Trail mixer, I was hooked. Or at least eternally longing. Acupuncture is expensive. About as expensive as a standard massage, counseling, or physical therapy session: between $75 and $100 for forty-five minutes or an hour and a half. At least in Park City anyway.

Whatever your bone about it may or may not be, it's appealing to me for it's emphasis on touch, gentleness and holistic healing. Several local practitioners I know integrate acupuncture with massage therapy in their sessions and encourage participation of one's rational, emotional, and spiritual sides in the healing process. Sounds like a quack, for those who would rather pop an aspirin and "get on with life". I wonder two things: how much do we scoff at "untraditional" (at least in our young culture) healing practices and refuse to validate them as "medicine" (relegating them to "therapies" and "treatments") because we are simply afraid of that which is unfamiliar and un-experienced? And what else are we missing out on?

If I ever scrounge around and come up with 7,500 pennies I will post again with the results.
Till then, this just thought-therapy.

confessions

Ok, so I'll admit it. I read my horoscope everyday. Mostly because it's entertaining. Rick Levine, my astrologist is often hit-or-miss, but he's a riot to read and always reminds me to bring the positive into my day each morning. However, this week, he was waayyyyyy off.

This would have been right on target:

Dear Aquarius,
While the [insert the name of some celestial body] vacillates around your sixth house of [something-or-other], you'll notice that certain things align this week while others seem constantly out of whack.

You may find yourself hit in the head by a basketball on your way to work. This orb will knock your glasses onto the ground about twelve feet away from your body, symbolizing [some random made-up symbolization, like "the disconnect between your visions and your actions" blah blah blah].

You'll probably also be ignored by your entire family after leaving several messages for them through various media, including text messages, emails, voicemails, and GoogleChat. However, don't let this get you down; instead, use these incidents that spark feelings of abandonment to [blah blah something about examining your obsessive need for control and nurture to reveal the subtle tensions within yourself blah].

{Horoscopes usually end on a positive note, so mine should have concluded with something like} Remember that it's ok to share your secrets with a safe place, and you're likely to discover more of those this week than you expected. Friends can ease the burdens, so try taking a chance on someone you trust.

Love, The Universe.

However, that is not what my horoscope said. So I didn't see any of it coming. Whoopsies.

This amendment at 10:37 AM Friday, September 19:
Dear Aquarius,
Beware food today, as you will most likely fumble and drop an entire (new) container of cottage cheese on the carpet. If you clean it up and cook up some salmon for a snack instead, you will only slip on the tile floor, falling on your ass, dropping the plate which will inevitably shatter, thereby ruining your salmon on the floor.
Love, The Universe.

But my would-be horror-scope didn't say anything of the sort. So I didn't foresee that either.

in medias res

Most daring: I submitted five poems to a publisher. a couple to share here.

Pain reliever

I say: peppermint oil behind my ears
cool leaf unfolds a remedy for the
unspoken.
ginger root lulling my cramped unease.
Herbal, since new research cautions NSAIDs risk
damage to cardiac tissue,
and I with weak muscle in my chest already.

_____________________________________________

Spring Breaks

Spring (break) meant relief
of you.
You touted around Germany one year,
New York City the next, and I
uninvited.

We brimmed the car with snacks
the April that you sashayed France.
I chose the place (Mexico)
where we haggled for a blanket
that was mine.
I touched wooden carved lions
and tasted horchata
sweet on my tongue in
hot Juarez air.
El Paso too, the way in, out.

You loved Münster, you said.
and slew us with photographs
of cobblestoned markets,
flat in the picture. While

we'd gone to Georgia: I smelled
the air where you'd studied home
economics; an entire degree.
Athens in my lungs was damp
and musty like our basement;
where you both had first met, and kissed,
and the city you left.

Through Marietta, my grandmother's,
a house ringing with quiet, and fat
with butter and fried okra, boiled
peanuts, milk-mashed potatoes,
puremaple syrup, chicken, and pork
that threw me ten pounds off
your diet.
There were murmuring evenings that week:
three generations of Jones. We all looked
alike, and I most like her.
She hated her nose too, as we ours
and her middle name my first.
Stories of bowel movements, and worries
of "nursing homes" that seemed somewhere
for mothers with babies to me.

We swoll the car again, familiar Cheez-Its
and chewing gum. Two days
through the South not yet heat-heavy.
We stopped at a Waffle House once
at a Cracker Barrel, sharing pancakes.

We, always home before you, slept doors
and windows open, still family.