i've got a crush on this movie

image via zoee.tumblr

“What came first: the music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?” - Rob Gordon, High Fidelity

things you desperately always wanted to know without realizing it

1 At dinner tonight, Lola and Dakota were picking on each other. Dakota made a haha on Lola, and Lola paused. Mr. Curry and I looked up from our plates. Lola opened her mouth and said ' Dakota, I hope you get cervical cancer in your brain. ' ..... hm. Uh. Yes. Well. All I can say is that the government is possibly a little overenthusiastic in informing the populous about cervical cancer, without informing said populous about what a cervix is. Exactly.

2 When you pour bleach onto copious amounts of dog urine, the urine fizzes. And pops.

3 One of the secrets to happiness is champagne.

4 Onsies for Babies That I Have Created In My Mind:
Emotional Terrorist
Life's Been Good To Me So Far
My Mother Has Fantastic Breasts
My Daddy's Sperm Beat Your Daddy's Sperm
Someone Cut My Umbilical Cord And I Haven't Been Happy Since
De Je Vu: Old Soul's Club

5 Another secret to happiness: erotic French movies. Hm. The French seem to have a lot to do with happiness. While America is swinging more on the wildly ' nihilistic and empty ' side, as Joan Didion said. Speaking of Joan Didion, if you haven't read The Year of Magical Thinking, and you are a person who is alive and might someday die or know someone who dies, you want to read this book.

6 Christmas is about a Savior being born. I am not religious but I believe in living a purposeful life. I believe the deepest meaning we can extract from life comes from what we nourish and love, and how much we do so. I am thinking as hard as my little beady mind can about what things to do this December to give to the world around me. We bought coffee for the immigrants in front of Starbucks and I plan on doing so for the rest of the month. I even risked humiliation by using my subpar Spanish to ask ' Quieras cafe con leche? ' I started a fundraiser for a Visa Gift Card for a young married mother of two young children who is going to die of breast cancer, and we will be giving her the card soon. My kids are donating toys to Goodwill and will be each picking an act of kindness to perform. I have not kicked my dogs today, even though Wolfgang snuck on the coffee table while Mr. Curry was in the bathroom and grabbed the entire butter jar with his white Wolfie teeth and yes, you know, it's true- he ate the entire carton of butter. Mr. Curry came out of the bathroom to find Wolfgang looking slightly ill and also sporting a large white pat of butter directly between his eyes.

7 This.

your name in lights

buttercrust, bread plates red and white-

the snow. no snow. rain, rain, rain, all

night. clear drops and mud. the grass

stains her Winter tights. she is a long

stalk grown in natural light. the music

rings merrily through car and home

and mall. i am counting heads and making

plans and as mother i am daily bread.

he and i argue over timing, payment

rent and budgets, numbers in smudge

marks on our fingers. we drink despite

roiling stomach, make love underneath

the evergreens. one night the Christmas

tree is left on lot and we go home dark and mean.

music rings merrily through car and home

and mall. i choke on mincemeat pie

answering the call. hello? Christmas lights

swing bold and bright over our front door. cats

are tangled in their green lines. that voice

a badly taped recording- hello? i hear the thick

heavy breath. you can only say pervert

Around Christmastime if it refers to some-

thing funny. that is the rule. thems the breaks.

what breaks against light. lights shine

in the dark living room Christmas music

plays merrily through car and home and mall.

hello? i pull plugs and sit in the dark.

Christmas music finds its way to me

through car and home and mall. hark i listen to it

distantly, if at all- my ears tuned toward

the past. the ringing of a phone that will not

ring. the computer shut down like a face.

in 1994 i was born again. a few years later

you took last place. i never want to see

you again. i know you read this page and look

for your name. find your resemblance

in red lights, grief that does not mend.

you find yourself haunted- always looking backward.

Christmas music finds it's way through

car. through home. through mall.

these are your instructions: the rest of December

is mine. do not call this home again.

maggie may ethridge

Evergreen

It is pouring rain. I have a stomach virus from four babies at my preschool that shot diarrhea out of their extremely small bottoms like miniature canons all day Friday, one by one they went home, bellyaching and cleaned head to toe each time the diaper didn't work for a living. Friday night we used a gift card and went to dinner at California Pizza Kitchen and picked our Christmas tree. It was my favorite kind of night to pick a tree, slight rain and cold but not windy. We stood in the rain for an hour picking the tree and then waiting for the thick stump to be sawed and the tree to netted. Mr. Curry pulled the entire tree manfully over his shoulders and carried it to the car. The boys tied up Lola with tree floss.

Lola gathered a small tree branch end and named it Ever, which happens to be ( so far ) at the top of the list for Girl names if Mr. Curry and I are so lucky to have another baby. Ever Elizabeth, the Elizabeth being after my Grandma Elizabeth who passed away a few years back. It is essential for me to hear and feel rain. When I was a child if I was afraid, I would sneak out my window and hide underneath the big bushes and trees in our yard. I did this when it was raining. The kind of fear that darkness, rain and trees bring a child is a pure fear. It is not the same as fearing your father. I stayed in the rain and inside the leaves and I felt embraced by the world and it's cycles and fears and beauties, and that feeling took root in me and has remained a crucial part of myself ever since.

When it rains I take the family on a rain-hike at least once. We go into the canyons that Mr. Curry and I played in as children and hike in the pouring rain, mud, tree, dunk our soaked feet in the swollen river and fall and slip on the banks. It is a cleansing ritual and something to remind us we are alive. And we are together.

In Other News, Nie has a series of articles about the plane crash and all that follows which I highly recommend reading here. I am sure ( although it has not been said ) that the young reporter who has done all this research and personally followed Nie through her trials is planning on writing a book, and I will be first in line to read it.

Comptine d'un autre été: l'après midi

dakota wolf, i love you

Children require guidance and sympathy far more than instruction - Anne Sullivan

Babies, The Movie

loosen my heart, until it becomes a wing

transcendence, today!

Today I was in my car driving and the sunlight came through the window in a thousand scattered flowers but still I was the blossom and unfolded and my freckles darkened and my blue eyes were bluet and I was at risk of crashing my car. Crashing always a risk in ecstasy. The sky was in my favorite form, violent, full fathom five, deep and morose grey blue. Some old song came through the radio ' I'm burnin, I'm burnin for you.... burn out the day, burn out the night...' and there were tossed on the wet face of concrete and pavement, thousands and thousands of dying leaves, just pulled and snapped from the branches of the only home they had ever known, into the fluttering open bodies of thousands of other leaves, to have their orange and red and yellow paints pounded into dirt, street, underneath the tires of my car, tearing down the road with the window rolled down, so that the rain came smacking and leaping and hitting on the right side of my body and face, so that I could remember that I am alive, I am alive. I felt my heart take a deep breath and turn it's tired self over, to face the exhausted and scared side toward dark, and rest, and the blood mouth filled red blossom toward sunlight, toward my eyes, which themselves turned toward the dim light in the sky, hardly to be seen past the rain. The wind was so cold. My skin and my arms and my breath leapt and I was aware that December had come with this great grand storm of pounding rain, rain, rain and wind and cold and leaves and offered me a redemption, and where I had seen only the dark and rolling tires, I could open my arms and eyes and roll clean out to the ends of my stem and see that I had again, just begun. Every time this happens and I realize this is possible, still possible, I have a deeper and more profound gratitude that I still, in the moment, live a life where I am capable of this. I do not take this new breath of life for granted nor do I expect that it will continue to fold and unfold this way, as it has for the length of my life so far. Yet I hope fervently that it does. If there comes a day when my mind , spirit or body is

' so beaten and so battered... ' not capable of responding to the world around me this way, I will be either a new person I am not capable of seeing or understanding now, or I will be gone.

Isn't it the strangest thought of all, to imagine tires rolling down a wet road, leaves sticking to the black rubber, making that delicious scrunch-crunch noise on the tar...without your life on this planet to see them feel them or hear them again? They are there. You are not. Beyond my understanding. It leaves the echo of that noise in my head, as if death, instead of being a great void, is a great void between. Not nothingness, but the sound and crunch and move of those tires down the road, far away, where you can hear them and remember them, but never find them again. You either stay looking forever for those wet December roads, or you move forward to something completely new. I admit, I think I would stay a long time- I love moving cars on rain soaked, tree lined streets.

'

image, nikki jane