January 2010
12 posts
Best foot forward! Hello, 2010
December 2009
12 posts
I love animals. I’ve always known this about myself but I tend to forget, only to be reminded in cruel moments like in traffic on the 405 or watching a sad show about environmental devastation. Why do I worry about loneliness when there are animals?
G O N E F I S H I N G
What does it mean to be a woman?
This is a question that I find increasingly asked of me in books (new ones and old), conversation, media, and “life experience.” It’s not something I gave much thought to before this passing year. I’ve thought a lot about what it means to be me, Yvonne, and what it means to be a person in the world; the gender distinction hasn’t...
I’d like to learn how to distinguish a Chopin waltz played by Rubenstein, for example, from the same waltz played by Horowitz. I can hear the differences, but I don’t know how to explain them except in abstract, almost silly terms which I associate with descriptions of wine. Is there a nomenclature for musical interpretation?
It’s so cold in my apartment the end of my nose feels like refrigerated putty. When I lived in Colorado I looked forward to the coziness of my apartment, but in LA, we generally don’t have central heating, so when it’s cold it’s cold all the time. To warm my nose I’ve been covering it with my scarf and breathing into the fabric. People think that I think they smell.
People who still listen to jam bands in earnest fall, for me, under the same category as people who enjoyed high school.
Yesterday on the radio I heard a girl singing a song about how she “wasn’t that kinda girl.” But judging by her voice and the song’s frame of reference, I’d probably assume that she was that kind of girl. I could be wrong, but whether someone is that kind of girl can usually be intuited by things like shrillness of voice, or, for example, the degree to which a girl...
The result of all these confessions was very strange: for me, you are no longer simply a woman I desire, but one I love for her sincerity, her passion, her freshness, her youth, and her folly. I have lost much over these explanations.
- Baudelaire (via Alex)
I have a reoccurring dream that one of my paternal grandparents, who both died on the same day in 1999, did not actually die, and has been alive this entire time. Last night it was Poppa. He had been living in Galveston in a beach house outfitted like a cruise ship. There was a brass staircase and an absurdly high ceiling in the living room, but also familiar things from their real beach house:...
