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Function: noun
1 : the part of a sword or foil blade that is between the middle and the hilt and that is the strongest part of the blade
2 : one's strong point
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It's Friday evening, July 2nd of the year two thousand and ten. Today was well spent cleaning toilets and changing bed linens, transplanting another set of impatiens. It's first friday in Philadelphia, but to be frank, I'm not too interested. After a good ballet class at Kip's studio, I took to La Colombe and treated myself to a nice crossword. The ponytailed employee has taken to attempting to predict my coffee choice for the day. Today he got the temperature wrong, however, was right in assuming I would stay inside. While waiting, the girl who was working, Angie, I recognized as the girl who was just in ballet class. Confusion.
Does she have a twin?
Do you have a twin? A doppelganger?
I wish.
of course, Sarah then enters, her twin who was in class and I feel better about the world.
Smallness entertains and this city sure is small. There was my teacher, Meredith Rainey on the corner, shouting my name, getting ready for a weekend trip to the Chesapeake with his partner. It's interesting though, so many people take summers and leave. I came home and proceeding to check el facebook, was bombarded by photographs of everyone traveling or spending summers abroad or spending summers in the tundra. I looked around my room in it's brilliant chaos and wondered..."am I doing something wrong?". If I documented my "travels" (also known as my current life...) with a camera and my photographs were summarized in a set of words, it would look like this:
coffee. coffee. work. ballet. farm. work. farm. coffee. ballet. coffee. work. work. work. cigarette. coffee. water. water. water. cigarette. ballet. book. newspaper. book. notebook. coffee. cigarette. work. work. work. farm. letter. farm.
i'm okay with this. but maybe someday, it could look like this:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------> (life.)
and so i don't have facebook then anyways.
it doesn't really matter. it reminds me of a quote my brother once said while we spent the afternoon spitting seeds off a bridge in Harrisburg:::: "a bridge is a poor man's boat" to which I replied "a book is a poor man's plane".
i digress. i admit, i am a bit jealous of people who can leave and escape in travels. i've done it before but promised myself i would stay put for awhile in one place and watch things shift around me. It's a balance I have yet to understand. A part of me wonders why we crave this travel, this escape, this abandonment of our lives, if only to pack a bag and see things more clear in our minimalism. I think you can find it in one place. That you can abandon your own life within your current reality and build off of that. At the same time, what is the effect that an environment has on a person. Is it about rising above your environment (ie current, Philadelphia) and living in accordance with your own values/finding beauty and inspiration in the smallness of a sidewalk stone or glint of light on a building----or can one reach a point where their environment is not conducive to promoting health and livliness? Each person is different and different environments work for different people-- ie, how one's body reacts to certain weather patterns, or the general mentality attached to a social environment. We have to be careful because the mentality of "it's better there", is a grassy patch that may not be greener. (oops, acted on this one plenty of times)
Let's take a look at some literature in regards to this topic:
I'm reading Annie Proulx's "The Shipping News" again. The main character, Quoyle, spends most of his adult life in remedial jobs, staring at newspaper print all day, marrying a woman with a loose you know what. She sells their kids on the black market and runs off with the guy she's seeing behind his back. She dies in a car wreck just two days after Quoyle's parents commit suicide. His life in pieces, his aunt (whom he's never met prior to these events) convinces him to move back to Newfoundland where is ancestors lived. This change in environment awakens in him his natural abilities, brought to the surface by a cold, brutal environment in a place where getting from point A to B can be difficult. An environment that keeps only the most rough and brave of individuals, a place where, by the end of the book, he is surely shining.
At times, walking around Philadelphia, I feel like I am doing myself a disservice by staying. In being attracted to extremes, I am often bored by simple things like how people dress and walk here. I like awakeness, intensity, efficiency, hard work---I idealize that this exists in New York, Paris, London, the kind I can only imagine must exist in extreme environments like the far north.
Well---atleast I can write letters to W in Alaska and D in Brooklyn. Measly ole me, still slumming in the awkward, lazy eyed streets of Philadelphia. Nothing a bright shade of lipstick and brutal pair of heels cannot heal. Or maybe it's time to leave these streets and intentionally place myself in a place I want to be.
BUT WANTING IS SCARY.
it's simply safer to not want and pretend your a buddhist. but good god, without desire and intruige and questions and exploration---we'd still be thinking that the earth was a square. Actually, we'd still be sitting outside the cave scratching our heads with pine needles. I think that sounds nice, actually. However knowing myself, I'd probably be inside etching philosophical physics on the cave walls and daydreaming about mr. caveman with the intelligent spectacles drinking a cup of coffee in the top of the mighty Sequioa.
a toast to crosswords, smelling like a French woman (STEREOTYPE ALERT), and friday nights alone with the plane of a poor man,
caio.
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