I'm proud of my mom. She just broke up with her loser boyfriend who, among his many other charming qualities, has no job, sleeps all day, and lays the heaviest sets of judgment on people he doesn't even know. I say good riddance. He can take his inferiority complexes and bad attitude somewhere else. She doesn't deserve them. For a number of equally valid reasons, it seemed like such an achievement for her to dump his freeloading ass. First of all, she's never been the most forthcoming person, or even the type to say "no" to people. She aims to please and is scared of rejection, which leads her down the path of finding the absolute deadest of deadbeats as love interests, or, perhaps more truthfully, someone to sleep next to at night. I think she forgets sometimes that her life is HERS and not someone else's to do with as they please. She forgets that she deserves happiness in its fullest and that it's completely within her power to gain it.
But what she lacks in independence she makes up for in fervor. She's generally happy with her life, always looking for her next adventure, sometimes dreaming too far ahead of herself, and by that I mean that she doesn't always follow through with her intentions. A lover at heart and a worker til she dies, my mother has every right to be proud of herself for taking another step in the right direction, for not letting some idiot unwittingly steer her life.
I speak from experience. The reason I analyze my mom so critically is because I'm just like her. I can observe all my imperfections, stupid habits, and sometimes absurd thought patterns just by observing her. I tell people that if I were a 40-year-old woman, I'd be my mother.
Summertime has been cathartic for me. I like living with my mom because now that whatshisface is out of the picture, it's just me, her, and my kitten Gandhi. The days are languid and sunny. The weeks drag on for eternity, and I kind of like it that way. Having a lot of alone time presents me with the constant dilemma of solitude--I'm forced to either be happy with myself or be lonely, and I've been having surprising luck with keeping a positive, peaceful outlook on my life as of late. My job is monotonous yet fulfilling. Every time I leave I feel refreshed. That's irony for you... Washing dishes for five hours straight seems to keep my busy mind occupied and leaves out any room for pesky thoughts. Even though I'm covered head to toe in sweat and kitchen grime, I always feel at peace when I drive away from the restaurant, long after the sun has gone down over the island and the weekenders are lighting their fireworks and partying on pontoon boats.
Finding simplicity and balance has been easier than getting a tan.
Looking up at the stars on warm summer nights like this makes me feel poetic. Sadly, though, I can't write poetry for the life of me. Instead of being poetic, I'm stealing wifi from a metallurgical laboratory. Sounds intense, but all that really means is I'm sitting on asphalt across the street from our house on my laptop.
Friday, June 18, 2010
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
My Dreams Are Never That Imaginative
"Sometimes rain that's needed falls,
We float like two lovers in a painting by Chagall"
- The Weepies
I'm browsing Google images of Salvador Dalí paintings and entertaining the idea of living in one of them. Sometimes I wonder if artists make meaningless art just for the fun of it. Especially art that's avant-garde or surreal. Can art be meaningless? I half-expect 75% of the song lyrics I listen to to be meaningless, like "I Am The Walrus.". Someone told me those lyrics were just made up to confuse all the people who had been deciphering The Beatles' song lyrics trying to find deeper meaning in them. I guess it's not as critical to understand what the artist is trying to communicate as it is to find meaning in the art for yourself. Half the battle, maybe?
I do pointless things at various times in my life that, in retrospect, are unequivocally devoid of meaning. But I think to myself, Who's to say that art can't be a reflection of that inexplicable lack of meaning that characterizes human behavior from time to time? I could write a book on all the meaningless things I've done. Why, you ask? Who knows. Of that much I'm sure.
My brother and his girlfriend came down for his birthday. I didn't really know what to get him gift-wise, so I went looking at some antique shops outside of a nearby town. After a lonely old couple talked my ear off at the first gift shop, a nautical-themed store where I ended up buying a $4 Indian flute just to appease them, I wandered next door to a more peaceful venue. Shelves upon shelves filled with useless trinkets and knick-knacks made me feel pretty hopeless in finding a gift for my guitar-playing, Scottish beard-sporting older brother. But after looking through all the antique Coke bottles and porcelain chickens my heart could withstand, I finally found a German beer stein for $15. I figured he'd appreciate that, since he makes a hobby of brewing his own beer.
I guess you could say we celebrated by going to the lake the next day and swimming in what looked and smelled like dirty dishwater. But hey, that's Oklahoma for you. I didn't feel the tiniest ounce of guilt for peeing in that nasty lake. My family and I spent five hours in the sun, oiled up and getting drunk. Someone had tied their sail boat to some shrubbery nearby, which proved to be a bad idea, considering the boat ended up coming lose and drifting across the lake after being left unattended. Serves them right.
One of the cons of summer is that when you spend the night with your grandma who refuses to run her air conditioner at night, it makes it difficult to go to sleep. Hence I'm awake and blogging at 2:30 a.m. That's a small and infrequent price to pay, though, when one is at liberty to experience the simple pleasures summer has to offer. I love driving on the curvy serpentine roads of Monkey Island at night with the windows down and smelling the warm, musty summer air. It's almost intoxicating the way the scents morph in and out of one another: thick and woodsy to fragrant and flowery as well as other, more nameless smells that can only be described as Summer.
Life rarely makes sense. For instance, why do actors in movies with exotic or ancient settings always speak with British accents?
We float like two lovers in a painting by Chagall"
- The Weepies
I'm browsing Google images of Salvador Dalí paintings and entertaining the idea of living in one of them. Sometimes I wonder if artists make meaningless art just for the fun of it. Especially art that's avant-garde or surreal. Can art be meaningless? I half-expect 75% of the song lyrics I listen to to be meaningless, like "I Am The Walrus.". Someone told me those lyrics were just made up to confuse all the people who had been deciphering The Beatles' song lyrics trying to find deeper meaning in them. I guess it's not as critical to understand what the artist is trying to communicate as it is to find meaning in the art for yourself. Half the battle, maybe?
I do pointless things at various times in my life that, in retrospect, are unequivocally devoid of meaning. But I think to myself, Who's to say that art can't be a reflection of that inexplicable lack of meaning that characterizes human behavior from time to time? I could write a book on all the meaningless things I've done. Why, you ask? Who knows. Of that much I'm sure.
My brother and his girlfriend came down for his birthday. I didn't really know what to get him gift-wise, so I went looking at some antique shops outside of a nearby town. After a lonely old couple talked my ear off at the first gift shop, a nautical-themed store where I ended up buying a $4 Indian flute just to appease them, I wandered next door to a more peaceful venue. Shelves upon shelves filled with useless trinkets and knick-knacks made me feel pretty hopeless in finding a gift for my guitar-playing, Scottish beard-sporting older brother. But after looking through all the antique Coke bottles and porcelain chickens my heart could withstand, I finally found a German beer stein for $15. I figured he'd appreciate that, since he makes a hobby of brewing his own beer.
I guess you could say we celebrated by going to the lake the next day and swimming in what looked and smelled like dirty dishwater. But hey, that's Oklahoma for you. I didn't feel the tiniest ounce of guilt for peeing in that nasty lake. My family and I spent five hours in the sun, oiled up and getting drunk. Someone had tied their sail boat to some shrubbery nearby, which proved to be a bad idea, considering the boat ended up coming lose and drifting across the lake after being left unattended. Serves them right.
One of the cons of summer is that when you spend the night with your grandma who refuses to run her air conditioner at night, it makes it difficult to go to sleep. Hence I'm awake and blogging at 2:30 a.m. That's a small and infrequent price to pay, though, when one is at liberty to experience the simple pleasures summer has to offer. I love driving on the curvy serpentine roads of Monkey Island at night with the windows down and smelling the warm, musty summer air. It's almost intoxicating the way the scents morph in and out of one another: thick and woodsy to fragrant and flowery as well as other, more nameless smells that can only be described as Summer.
Life rarely makes sense. For instance, why do actors in movies with exotic or ancient settings always speak with British accents?
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