permeating the world

On the plane yesterday I read Sylvia Plath for a long time and I loved it. She has the power to express herself beautifully. So now I have to share two terrific paragraphs, one from Jan 1956 and the other from Feb.


it would be easy to say I would fight for you, or steal or lie; I have a great deal of that desire to use myself to the hilt, and where, for men, fighting is a cause, for women, fighting is for men. in a crisis, it is easy to say: I will arise and be with thee. but what I would do too is the hardest thing for me, with my absurd streak of idealism and perfectionism: I do believe I would sit around with you and feed you and wait with you through all the necessary realms of tables and kingdoms of chairs and cabbage for those fantastic few moments when we are angels, and we are growing angels (which the angels in heaven never can be) and when we together make the world love itself and incandesce. I would sit around and read and write and brush my teeth, knowing in you there were the seeds of an angel, my kind of angel, with fire and swords and blazing power. why is it I find out so slowly what women are made for? it comes nudging and urging up in me like tulip bulbs in april.


I long to permeate the matter of this world: to become anchored to life by laundry and lilacs, daily bread and fried eggs, and a man, the dark-eyed stranger, who eats my food and my body and my love and goes around the world all day and comes back to find solace with me at night.

hiding in used book stores

Applying for jobs is bad. I am depressed every time I check the "full-time" box when asked what kind of job I'm looking for. Of course, that's been only once because jobs in northern Colorado publishing houses are harder to get than were previously thought. People think tacking the name "Rocky Mountain Publishing" onto their garage makes them a reputable publishing house, I guess. Although it was funny when the guy came out in red flannel pants to tell me he's not hiring.

So. Now contemplating tutoring alongside a possible part-time job at coffeeshop or used bookstore. Yes? No? Also, being told I should start my own used book store, although I'm not sure I want that kind of commitment. Open to suggestions for anything except what my dad so affectionately calls McDogfood.

Until then, I'm hiding out in used bookstores. Practicing for a future part-time career, right? I had a thrill today spending my clothes money on Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Joseph Conrad, Jack Kerouac, Camus, Woolf, Flannery O'Connor, Steinbeck, George Sand, and Doestoyevsky. Perhaps too much for one day, but I can't ever apologize for buying books. Who needs new summer clothes, anyway?

skittles

A job that includes eating Skittles, playing checkers, and crawling in through the window is a great job. I tutor Alison four days a week, and this is what we do in between quizzing for Latin (tell me the SID SPACE ablatives) and scientific water cycles (constipation! consolation! conversation! condemnation! condensation!). She has trouble with the water cycle. She loves Smoothies Skittles, and we share them while she studies and I sit cross-legged on the big desk and journal. We trade sometimes because she prefers the yellow ones and I prefer the purple ones. And late every afternoon, we watch for the highlighter sky, which is our term for the particularly bright blue moment over the eastern hill just before the sun sets in the west. She tells me that in the morning, the highlighter sky is also yellow and pink and green. Every day we watch until the sky is bright enough to write with, and then we dream of all the things we could color with that much vivid blue.

the first

So.... I finally broke down and got one of these. Here's another attempt at the great phenomenon called Being Connected. I refuse to post tons of pictures or apologize for not posting. That said, here goes nothing....