Under Construction

"It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases that age and kill us;
it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses."
-Virginia Woolf

It reminds me so much of a conversation that Pat and I had last winter,
about the small things in life, this is so incredibly apt. You aren't
the greatest painting that you ever put to canvas, or your fastest mile,
or year of highest revenue; you're how you squeeze the tube of
toothpaste, whether you leave your street shoes on inside, whether you
greet people with a smile or a firm handshake. You are three hundred
million infintessimal things, choose carefully, choose carefully. I
love the pattern that your brush-stroke makes upon the gessoed fabric,
but your hairs around the drainring and tub base make me gnash my
teeth. We are who we are.

Got the Timbos on the toes this morning, the smell of new leather
reminds me of being a kid, the first day of school. While Anne and Pat
are in Portland this weekend, I need to construct the robot, paint the
downstairs chair rail, mud the kitchen, so much work to be done! The
weekend. Two days of not working. I was thinking yesterday afternoon
that I will never date again, I'll just develop hormone-laden,
impossibly dire crushes on people that I have no intention of getting to
know better, they'll burn at both ends for awhile, and it will be over.
This thought fills me with such a small amount of trepidation that I'll
just ignore it. It's not worth it, getting your heart invested, only to
find out that the other person hates that you squeeze from the middle,
or clip your toenails methodically into the trash can, or crunch the
unpopped popcorn kernels during the quiet parts of movies. I am the
last one [emily] standing.