Little boy, about 3 or 4 years old, sitting with his dad, continuously asking about his “coffee” — when can I get my coffee, how big will my coffee be, are you getting coffee too, Daddy, etc. Finally, he gets his “coffee,” and calms down enough to announce, “You don’t talk to strangers, Daddy.”
Dad agrees. “That’s right.”
“And you don’t talk to ladies, either.”
Dad sips his coffee in silence.
If your conversation with me is regularly peppered with these — and used without irony, without tongue in cheek — we basically won’t be friends.
Occasional uses, however, will be forgiven. Context is key.
~ harmony
~ balance
~ empowerment
~ powerful
~ dynamic
~ “my truth”
~ “gifted” as in “My friend gifted me this lovely handmade sweater.” You mean she gave you a lovely handmade sweater? Shut up.
~ “blissed out” — blissed out people need to stay THE HELL away from me.
~ “healing”
~ goddess
~ diva
~ “own” as in “You need to own your full potential.” No, I prefer to rent mine, thank you.
~ destiny
~ “a-ha moment”
~ sisterhood
~ “it’s all good” — no, it’s not. I repeat: Shut up.
~ birth/-ed/-ing — as in “What do you want to birth in your life?”
~ “inner voice”
Stay tuned for future volumes of “A List of Words and Phrases That Make My Eyes Glaze Over.”
A snippet — without editorial comment, although it’s tempting.
A bride-to-be with her groom-to-be meeting with a florist a few tables away. The bride wears giant hoop earrings — Tyra Banks would tell her she “needs to lose those.” The groom ogles me and basically every woman that walks past him.
FLORIST: Give me three words to describe your wedding.
(silence)
GROOM: Well, fun …. and ….. well …
(longer silence)
FLORIST: Okay. That’s good. What’s the size of the bridal party?
BRIDE: Twelve.
FLORIST: Okay.
GROOM: Seven guys and five girls.
FLORIST: Do you have a theme?
BRIDE: (sadly) No.
FLORIST: Oh. Hm. Okay.
BRIDE: But the girls are in red so they should have white flowers and I’m in white so I should have red flowers.
FLORIST: Okay. Any flowers you particularly like?
BRIDE: Noo … I dunno ….. I’m open …
FLORIST: Okay. Why don’t you look through this book of samples then?
(they do so — several moments pass)
BRIDE: Do lilies come in any other color besides white?
FLORIST: (eyes wide) Uh, yes.
(another long pause of perusal)
GROOM: The guys are all wearing red vests.
FLORIST: Oh. Okay.
About 20 minutes later, the couple walk to their car, far apart, not holding hands, not touching.
Our new condo, a rental now, requires certain mental adjustments that I am so far not making. There are just things I’m struggling to get used to — like the following, for starters:
1) The way the toilets flush as if they’re going to overflow but then miraculously manage to choke it down at the last second. Doesn’t seem to matter what “it” is. I now have generalized anxiety about toilet flushing. The toilets are not willingly doing their job, like little kids forced to eat lima beans. So then I feel bad for the toilet. I feel bad for a toilet, pippa.
2) The kitchen. I don’t like our kitchen. Move on.
3) The light that shines in our bedroom from the porch lights of the building next door. I like a very dark room for sleeping.
4) The need for a sleep mask.
5) The way said sleep mask never stays on my head. It ends up atop my head, on the pillow, on the floor. Again, like the toilets, another disappointing slacker.
6) The way a tighter sleep mask cut off my facial circulation leaving my next-morning face with grooves and slashes and bizarre puffiness. I gasped when I saw my face in the mirror. I AM NOT AN ANIMAL!
7) The sound of the little girl who plays in the yard next door and screams a high unhuman scream every afternoon at 5:23.
8) The one portion of wall in our living room that seems to be very thin, as if the builders forgot a layer.
9) Because of that, the sound of the single 30-something dude and his little turtle dove having gasping thumping sex in his living room.
10) Please have sex somewhere ELSE, dude. I’m uncomfortable knowing precisely how long you last. Also, I know the layout of your unit — we looked at that unit — and you have a back bedroom that doesn’t share a wall with anyone. Hello, gasping thumping love lair.
I’m stunned. Stunned. Natasha Richardson, Tony Award winning actress, daughter of Vanessa Redgrave, and wife of Liam Neeson, has died from a freak fall on a beginner’s ski slope in Quebec, Canada. I don’t even know what to say; it just seems so implausible. How could this happen?? It’s so terribly sad.
My condolences to Liam Neeson and the entire family.
Perhaps better known and appreciated for her theatrical work, still, she was a luminous actress. I will miss her.
…. there’s not much hope for you, peaches.
I love this song by gospel sister-duo Mary, Mary. A real pick-me-up. (Not crazy at all about the video — there’s some surprisingly bad dancing — but close your eyes, listen to the song, and move your feet for da Lord, pippa. C’mon.)
Makes me wanna find a church full of worshippin’ black people right now!
I found In the Frame, Helen Mirren’s autobiography, at the bookstore recently and fell in love with it. It’s really more of a scrapbook of her life, great photos, juicy anecdotes, little scribblings alongside the old photos, all giving the sense that you’re just sitting with Dame Helen on her cozy couch as she turns the pages and walks you through her singular life. It’s lovely, so personal and inviting. In all honesty, I read the book in one sitting at the bookstore — for shame! — and wrote the following anecdote down on a scrap piece of paper.
(BUT! I always buy a least a coffee at the bookstore and I always clean up after myself and I’m writing all this so Kate P doesn’t get mad at me because, basically, I need constant approval. At every turn. All the time. Ad nauseum. To infinity and beyond.)
Proceeding apace.
This short excerpt is actually a little piece written by Mirren’s father, Basil Mirren, about his cat. (Speaking of anthropomorphizing.) Note the detail here — how much he reads into his pet’s personality — as anyone with a pet always does. It’s just human nature to do that. But this is charming to me. He seems to just revel in the separateness and the otherness of his beloved cat. I’ve read this several times and never find it anything less than delightful. I love the unselfconscious, almost childlike, insights.
My cat’s name is Flossie. I call her all sorts of other things at times, but Flossie suits her soft fluffiness. You couldn’t draw her with clear lines, her outline is too hazy, like a leafy tree, but she is full of strong flowing shapes from her pink ears to her ankle-length Victorian drawers. She is a golden-eyed long-haired white Persian Queen.
Flossie is an out-of-work or, rather, a retired actress who last appeared on TV with Sir Laurence Olivier in a new Pinter play. She worked well, but modestly, and didn’t upstage Larry. The play was a success and got an EMI award. But the lights, noise, bustle, and general backstage confusion put a severe strain on her sense and sensibility. Sanctuary in suburbia seem better for her than occasional caresses by the famous and she was fostered by us.
Away from the stage she still has a whiff of theatre about her. She understands ordinary Green Room talk like “There’s my darling pearly whirly girlie” or “Piss off” and responds correctly, her timing always absolutely right. She can show her feelings in every movement from her head to her drawers. But always a Lady — dignified, controlled, and fussy.
Our communication is mostly telepathic. I can recognize a range of body signals that give a lot of information. She can, for example, say, “Thank you for my dinner” by rubbing her head against my arm as I put the plate down or “I don’t like your cooking” by shaking her hind leg at it. But beyond that sort of thing, something in me can sometimes be in tune with something in her, the same strings vibrate, and there is an exchange of sympathy rather than information.
She has a lovely character, gentle but brave, loving but independent; since her operation no longer tortured by the lunacies of sex.
Flossie is also lazy, has fleas, and catches pigeons. But that is how she was made. She’s unpolluted by knowledge, thank God.
(I previously posted this on Friday, reworked it, lost half of it, got distracted, and now here it is again.)
First, pippa, The Sudden Yurt Commune is now its own category. Mainly, because these days, I take the whole fantasy, the whole imagining of our little world very seriously. And also because I expect to be adding to it, creating it more fully as time goes along because I think it’s fun. No. More than that. It gives me joy and I think the whole notion actually de-stresses me these days.
So. On to my question for today.
Imagine that we’ve arrived at our sudden yurt commune. It’s evening. We’ve gathered ’round the fire, gorged on S’mores, sung some campfire songs, become delirious in a Rocky-Mountain-High kind of way from said campfire songs, but we must try to regain ourselves because now — it is time for the Sudden Yurt Commune Book Swap!
You each have brought three special books, with covers you’ve wrapped in plain brown paper to conceal the titles, and placed them on the patchwork quilt in the middle of our circle of happiness and songs and S’mores. On the inside cover of each book, you have written a message to any potential reader, extolling the virtues of the book, sharing what it meant to you, etc. Your goal is to be brief but enthusiastic; you want the reader to be excited to read this book you love. Without giving away the title. You can drop hints, clues, throw in a giveaway word if you like, but don’t name the whole title!
For instance, if I’m Sheila, maybe I write in one of my books (forgive me, Sheila):
“This book may seem like a monster, but no book has ever expressed my own worldview, my own beliefs, so perfectly. It’s a deep and challenging book about …. everything.”
And maybe the book is Hopeful Monsters.
(See the awesome little clue Sheila gave? Good job, Sheila. Except, well, can I be honest? I don’t really feel all that excited about reading the book. Hm. Downer, Sheila. Okay. How’s this: “This book may seem like a monster, but on random pages, I’ve penciled in clues to a buried treasure of GOLD.” Okay, Sheila!! I am now totally excited to read Hopeful Monsters!! Uhm, yesss, so hopefully you all get the idea here and will write much better messages than my faux-Sheilas. And feel free to promise whatever golden treasures you wish.)
Back to our campfire …..
We pass around, oh, an antique humidor that contains numbered strips of paper. When your turn comes, you close your eyes and select three strips from the box. For a brief moment, perhaps, you breathe in the old sweet smell of pipe tobacco wafting from your strips of paper and, overcome with joy, whisper a spontaneous “kum by yah, Lord.” Such is the serenity of The Sudden Yurt Commune.
The swap then begins according to number. When your numbers come up, you pick a book from the pile. You don’t know what book it is. You cannot see the title; it’s covered. Once the rotation is over and everyone has three books, the books are opened to the inside cover only. Do not venture any further into your books! Everyone eagerly reads the messages and tries to guess — based on their memory of what will be revealed in this comment thread — who wrote the messages and, therefore, what books are now in their hot little hands. Each correct guess allows you to unwrap the cover of your book for everyone to bear witness to your rightness — ta daa!
With that as your set-up:
Which three books would you bring to the SYC Book Swap and what would be the message you write on the inside cover of each of your books?
This scenario involves some time-traveling in your head to an imaginary future. You ARE revealing your books and messages now, yes, because some day in our imaginary future, ’round the campfire, people will pick your books and have to remember the identifiers left here, in the comments of this post.
Hope it makes more sense this time.
Really, mystery and mental time-traveling aside, it’s just this: What 3 books would you bring to the SYC Book Swap and what messages would you write in them for any potential reader?
(Although, I like the mystery, but maybe it complicates things for some.)
Ready?
Go.
(Oh, and blog or no blog, long-time reader or short-time reader, anyone can answer this question. The Sudden Yurt Commune welcomes all. You know, until it doesn’t.)
She has created little masterpieces in honor of The Sudden Yurt Commune.
You have GOT to see these. Basically, these would be The Official Cookies of The Sudden Yurt Commune.
I am blown away. They are gorgeous and hilarious both. I can’t stop smiling over these, over the sheer whimsy of Jayne’s heart.
Thank you again, Jayne! I never knew virtual cookies could make me SO happy. Weeeeee!
LOCAL TV ANCHORMAN: Experts are trying to decide what to do about the gray whale that is currently lost and swimming around in San Diego Bay.
MB: Kill it.
(He’s a hard-hearted felon. What can I say?)
