Packaging

(Pre-Script: This post should be read as the song, "Good Intentions," #22 on the playlist, plays in the background. Go down to the playlist, click on that song, then come back and resume reading. I'll wait...)(...still waiting...)

The other day, I bought the wrong sardines.

"But Michelle, how did you know you had bought the wrong sardines?"

Gentle reader, if I am saying I bought the wrong sardines, safely assume it means that it doesn't take a B.S. in Molecular Biology to figure out that you have bought the wrong sardines.

Ahem.

It happened because I was in Lucky's, not Trader Joe's, where I usually buy them. But although the package said "Sardines in olive oil," just like the kind I usually buy, I should have been concerned when I didn't see the word "skinless" on the wrapper. Instead, I figured that since with the skin on, the sardines would look like puke in a can, that no one would have the lack of sense to try to sell them to live humans that way. How often will I have to pay for my assumptions that humanity will, in the end, do the right thing? Or at least, do the very thing that I would do? I don't know, but suddenly, it was that afternoon, and I was finally taking my lunch break at work. I took my break late, so by the time I sat down to eat, I was hungry enough to devour, in more of a lion like than lady like manner, both of the cans of sardines I had had the foresight to keep in my purse.

But then I opened the first can. And what I saw when I opened that can looked like something Jesus and his disciples had just flung out of the Sea of Galilee onto the shore with their heavy overburdened net, then sat by the fire whistling and counting as they threw sardines any old which way. From the look of it, not much else was done to the massacred fish by way of cleaning and care. I didn't even open the second can or blink when I threw it away with the first.
Always read labels and between the lines.

But if certain key lines aren't there to be read between...be afraid.

Be very afraid.

-XOXO,

crumbling

(Pre-Script: This post best read as the song, "Everybody's Changing," #12 on the playlist, plays in the background. Go down to the playlist, click on that song, then come back and resume reading. I'll wait...)(...still waiting...)

Today is Jeremy's 10th birthday. Blink, and your baby is in the double digits, even though you have photographic evidence that he was just born yesterday...too bad the photos are all in your mind, and technology has not advanced so far as to develop that kind of pictures. I think they haven't yet found the right paper.
It's been hot lately. It's been uncomfortable, sometimes. Jeremy's cake, though baked with pure love and good intentions, crumbled into a whole lot of crumbly bits. You want to throw your hands in the air and say, "I'm sorry, Kid, we tried. In the end, I cannot control the weather or how a thing reacts to it; in the end, I may have left out a pinch of this, a touch of that; in the end, it may have been in the oven too long or too short by a millisecond." Instead, I covered the cake up with extra frosting, taking special care with the shattered parts. Frosting covers a multitude of sins; I have found this to be true over the course of my lifetime. It doesn't take away the lumpy spots, and you can tell that there is foundational damage at the base of the cake but with the frosting, it is now a thing once again glued together, once again a thing to be candle lit, sung and celebrated over, cut into and please,-everyone-have-a-piece-'d over. Because Jeremy turned 10, whether he was born yesterday or 10 years ago today. Whether or not the weather and the baking conditions coincided peacefully; he is 10, and next year he will be 11, and we will do this again, and who knows what that cake will look like or who will be around the table but
we will do this again and again because it is life, and we celebrate life, we cherish it no matter what it looks like, we savor and enjoy, and lick the last crumb and morsel of the frosting from the plate until the plate is clean.
(Happy Birthday, baby, you are still and no longer a baby, look, I have the pictures right here...)
-XOXO,

inside

(Pre-Script: This post should be read as the song, "Keep Breathing," #16 on the playlist, plays in the background. Go down to the playlist, click on that song, then come back and resume reading. I'll wait...)(...still waiting...)

I'm waiting in the same place I always wait: inside.
outside is clean, calm, contained, outside, I am in
one piece and smiling in case anyone is recording this
or even noticing whether I was smiling or not right now.
inside,
a storm
and it's me,
i am the storm
and i grow bigger as I swirl around and around
within myself, picking up small things in my
centrifugal momentum, things i had forgotten,
things I thought I no longer cared about,
things I thought had already died of neglect,
but look here, see they were quietly waiting to
be storm tossed up into the atmosphere,
where I choke on them, I choke them
back down my throat
until the swirling recedes
in the place i always wait,
inside.

-XOXO,

From my pet rock

(Pre-Script: This post should be read as the song, "Between the Lines," #24 on the playlist, plays in the background. Go down to the playlist, click on that song, then come back and resume reading. I'll wait...)(...still waiting...)

You know the type-the people who write their family Christmas letter from the perspective of the lowest denominator in their family; typically the family dog or the new baby: "What a year it's been! First, I was born, and Mom says she's so glad THAT's over, but I have no idea what she means; I mostly just cried and slept through it, and then they were all saying that I was the cutest baby that they had ever seen, and what a miracle I am, and everyone makes googly faces at me."
Blink

Blink
It's August, so of course I have been thinking about the Holidays, and Christmas in particular. I have been wondering about the annual Christmas letters. Not that I ever write them myself. But I wonder about the people who do write them, if this is how early they get started writing, and I wonder how long it takes to erase anything negative or less than perfect about their livelihoods and children, to plan out what they are going to say. How wonderful Timmy is, how involved and excellent he is in everything he does, so golden is his touch. I don't ever write those letters; I just can't think of a whole page worth of stuff to say about how perfect we all are.

This year, I think I'll send a Christmas letter, and it will be from my pet rock.

It will be a very short letter.
-XOXO,

Short Poem

I'm too tired to care

about the light bulb I keep

forgetting to replace. The world

is dark naturally, especially at night.

I dream in color anyway.

-XOXO,

Some Of Us

(Pre-Script: This poem should be read as the song, "Gravity," #28 on the playlist, plays in the background. Go down to the playlist, click on that song, then come back and resume reading. I'll wait...)(...still waiting...)

Some of us can't relax
unless we have a bottle in one hand
a bottle in the other-
what is in the bottle doesn't matter
different things for different ones of us
at different times and I
am all of those "ones of us"
at some time or other.
the way I do is
I will drain this bottle down then
refill it with all of the tears it was blocking,
then I can finally release my fierce grip on it's
neck, so
I let go wildly, reckless in the letting go like
whoosh and like who cares-
then comes the impact
as crash and glass shattering
cuts my toes and makes me bleed
at least a little.
The rest of the shards get washed out to sea
with the force of the tears they contained-
to be tossed to be tossed to be tossed, jostled
by all the salt of every ocean and once smooth,
deposited on some shore
upon which I have yet to awaken.

-XOXO,

Nesting

(Pre-Script: This post is at it's best when read as the song, "Blackbird,"#30 on the playlist, plays in the background. Go down to the playlist, click on that song, then come back and resume reading. I'll wait...)(...still waiting...)

Outside my window is an Italian Cypress tree; when I say "outside," I mean that the tree is not two feet away from the window. For some reason, this year, the mother bird decided to build her nest neatly inside the tree at a level where if you stand on a chair, you can look straight into the nest and watch her baby birds for her. There is window glass separating you, but as I said before, you are not even two feet from them. That is close enough to see the distinction between their tiny baby bird eyeballs and the brown outlining them. If you realize how tiny that is, you have a sense of just how close you are to these baby birds, and how often are you ever that close to baby birds in the nest, to watching life science happen right in front of you, and not on a screen? Except that the window separating you is like a TV screen, if you want to think of it that way.
The first thing I did this morning was check on the progress of that fluff mass; that's what they look like when they are all asleep and huddled together. Even so close, you wouldn't think it was anything but left over dirty cotton balls that somehow landed in the tree, except for the collective sighs of rhythmic breathing that moves the mass up and down. But then, keep watching and a beak pops out, and then the magic of four separate beaks and four separate bird bodies silently individual but all calling out. When nothing happens, they fall right back into one sleeping indistinguishable mass. Where is their mother, and why does she leave them there for long stretches of time, alone? I know that babies need to sleep sleep sleep, but I also know that sleep is often a sign of depression, and if your mother were gone most of the day, and you were just a baby not old enough to make anything of yourself in this world, not even old enough to leave the proverbial or actual nest, don't you think you might be a little bit depressed? Think about it.

I see the mother about once a day. She feeds them, and then she flies away again. When they open their tiny bird beaks and raise their tiny bird heads to be fed, they look like that whack-a-do arcade game where you are supposed to whack the thing with a mallet when it pops up. I've always been sort of good at that game. It's the kind I play over and over so that I can get a gillion tickets with which to claim some prize I don't care about, which will likely break the moment I open it's wrapper. It's more about earning the thing than the thing itself.

Once mother bird is out of food for the babies, (or maybe when she is just fed up, she has had enough, somewhere among all of the childrearing and housekeeping she has lost her identity and needs to go and find herself in a wilderness or game of tennis or badmitton or backgammon) she flies away, the so-tiny-as-to-almost-be-imaginary bird beaks settle themselves into their sleeping dirty cotton ball mass again and resume their sleep. I see her point. Why stick around when her babies are so boring so often. I think she was deliberate in placing her nest where it would face the window just so, knowing that while she worked, the human kind would watch her babies for her. It's so hard to find good help these days, but I got my official babysitting certification badge at the age of 14. Someday, when their fluff becomes winglike and they insist on flying off to live their own lives, she will look back and regret every moment she is not here for them now. I'm just saying. Until then, I'm a sucker for this sort of thing, fascinated by every day miracles hidden in plain sight.

-XOXO,