I love my work lunch time. Today I walked a couple blocks to Coco Cove in the beautiful, hot midday sun, squinting even through my sunglasses, and bought a salad (its a wonder to eat salads again) - my favorite salad lately. You can pick between iceberg, mixed greens, and spinach and then you get to put together a salad by pointing at what you want. The one I love love love is spinach with spiced grilled chicken strips (little ones), mozarella cheese, salted sunflower seeds, fresh blueberries and strawberries, and one spoon of papaya seed dressing. Getting a bite of strawberry in a salad is surprising and makes my whole mouth happy. Mm-ee mm-ee. I take the salad across the street upstairs to the second floor food court where there're lots of empty tables around 1pm. Right up through the center of the boutique mall is this HUGE tree with massive lights hanging from it. It's beautiful and there's always a good breeze. They also have flowers (bougainvilleas) and bushes bordering and overflowing the open spaces between levels (four floors). So I go there to eat almost everyday. And today I started a new book: "The Memory Keeper's Daughter." It was a pretty good first 5 pages. I'm excited to vege this weekend and read somemore. Hurray for the weekend. See you again next week :).

Updates

Some new things and some old ones:

• I'm pregnant - B and I are. Did I mention that? Yep. Into the second trimester already. So far, so good. First trimester was half wrapping my brain around this new thing supposedly growing in my stomach and half lying on my back in bedrest and half hating everything about food - the smell, the look, the taste, the texture, the idea. Finally past all that, relief, but now I can really feel the emotional swings. Out.Of.Control. Gooolllleeee. Whaddayagonna do. But cool stuff is happening too - like the other day I got to work early - the gallery was echoey-empty - and all of a sudden, I realized I wasn't actually alone. It was me and my little guy. Pretty cool experience. One body, two people. Weeeeiiiiirrrrrdah.

• Still working at the same job these days and still loving it just as much as when I first started.

• Still myself, more or less.

I think that's it for now.

READING: "A Tree Grows Over Brooklyn"

OOOOOOoooooooh

lydl lydia.

OOOOOooooooh

lydl lydia

OOOOOoooooooh

lydl lydia

Did you know your name is the easiest in the world to sing?

LYDIALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALAALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALA.


See?

I love you.

I can't just leave it at that - how boring. I'll make a list:

• For about six hours last night, I experienced Vertigo. It seemed familiar, so it must not have been the first time I've felt it, but I can't remember another time. Once, at it's worst, I fell into the wall after getting up fast. It felt silly.
• When I woke up today it was gone.
• I love reading.
• I have to pee but I don't feel like going.
• I'm going to play soccer tomorrow night. I love playing soccer. Last week I had a beautiful, maybe even perfect assist. I patted myself on the back.
• I still like my job.
• I haven't been exercising since early October and I'm lazy to start again but my body feels it. Stagnated. Too much unused energy.
• I bought a pair of jeans for $a-lot-of-fucking-$. They're a little big on me. I don't know if I should keep them. But I don't really have any other good jeans. What to do...what to do...
• They are really long - the jeans - they hit the ground even with 3" heels. This is a pro.
• I have to go back to work. I'll come out with something better next time. it's been months since I've sat still and just observed.

The Road

I just finished reading a book, The Road. It's really good. I almost put it down in the first 20 pages. It took a while to get into, but turned out reallly good. That's all.

Dedicated to Juweleriettalessa

I just finished a book that has exactly 500 pages, which is pretty cool, and after the last period on the last page, the author dated and addressed it, as though the whole book had been a journal entry, which I liked.

It's called The Famished Road by Ben Okri, a Nigerian author.

Right away when I started reading the story, it reminded me of my baby sister, Jweeleurietta, and if any part of it can be true, then she is also an abiku. I'm going to copy an excerpt: Section Two, Book Seven, Chapter eleven: (Julia, I'll bring you the book when I visit soooooon)

The spirit-child is an unwilling adventurer into chaos and sunlight, into the dreams of the living and the dead. Things that are not ready, not willing to be born or to become , things for which adequate perparations have not been made to sustain their momentous births, things that are not resolved, things bound up with failure and with fear of being, they all keep recurring, keep coming back, and in themselves partake of the spirit-child's condition. they keep coming and going till their time is right. History itself fully demonstrates how things of the world partake of the condition of the spirit-child.

There are many who are of this condition and do not know it. There are many nations, civilisations, ideas, half-discoveries, revolutions, loves, art forms, experiments, and historical events that are of this condition and do not know it. There are many people too. They do not all ave the marks of their recurrence. Often they seem normal. Often they are perceived of as new. Often they are serenewith the familiarity of death's embrace. They all carry strange gifts in their souls. They are all part-time dwellers in their own secret moonlight. They all yearn to make of themselves a beautiful sacrifice, within this life, setting the matter ready for their true beginnings to cry into being, scorched by the strange ecstasy of the will ascending to say yes to destiny and illumination.

I was a spirit-child rebelling against the spirits, wanting to live the earth's life and contradictions. Ade wanted to leave, to become a spirit again, free in the captivity of freedom. I wanted the liberty of limitations, to have to find or create new roads fromthis one which is so hungry, this road of our refusal to be. I was not necessarily the stronger one; it may be easier to live with the earth's boundaries than to be free in infinity.

Given the fact of the immortality of spirits, could these be the reason why I wanted to be born - these paradoxes of things, the eternal changes, the riddle of living while one is alive, the mystery of being, of births within births, death within births, birhts within dying, the challenge of giving birth to one's true self, to one's new spirit, till the conditions are right for the new immutable star within one's universe to come into existence; the challenge to grow and learn and love, to master one's self; the possibilities of a new pact with one's spirit; the probability that no injustice lasts for ever, no love ever dies, that no light is ever really extinguished, that no true road is ever complete, that no way is ever definitive, no truth ever final, and that there are never really any beginnings or endings? It may be that, in the land of origins, when many of us were birds, even all these reasons had nothing to do with why I wanted to live.

Anything is possible, one way or another. There are many riddles amongst us that neither the living nor the dead can answer.

Post

Lyds told me she looks forward to reading these so I'm going to keep posting.

I spent Thanksgiving with a random collection of local yocal jugos. We cooked a turkey with two red unpeeled potatoes inside instead of stuffing. We had guacamole and delicious feta cheese instead of cranberry and pie. We were all kind of sick - some flu flew through Oahu's air and snapped pieces of most of us. Some worse than others.

By the way, can you believe it's already December 2008! That's ten and a half years since I graduated high school. Gooolllleeee.

So, we had the huuuge teli on most of the evening, watching this and that. I really wanted to sink deep into the couch and watch holiday movies like Miracle on 34th or White Chritmas or Charlie Brown's Christmas or the Snowman, but other people wanted to watch news and sports. Oh well.

A little later on in the evening, the two elders in our party of ten or so turned on some folk jugo music top volume (I mean, I think the whole 40 floor apt building heard us) and started dancing and singing and shouting and whisltling and yelling. Neither of them even had a touch of alkeehaul on their tongues. They just went at this music with lust and relish and without caring what anyone else thought.

There were five people sitting around the table, before all this, the teli dinning a quite background, when all of a sudden (in a pretty small apt room with hardwood floors and cement walls, mostly empty, vvvurry echo-ey) our white -haired large-breasted tetka turned on her folk music full blast and started jumping around the room old school. I was still sunk in the couch, no longer zoomed on the teli, feeling a little ill. I watched her and it was easy to imagine her 55 years ago in her early 20s, the best dancer at the party, beautiful, fun. I smiled a lot. B and D got up and tried to learn some of her steps.

Anyway....

Back to vrk.