Tuning

No one is going to be quite as excited about this as I am now, but I think I just tuned my own guitar, all alone, here in my drafty little apartment, for the first time. Steve gave me this awesome little Guitar Basics 'zine, no-big-deal enough to get me to actually play with the instrument. This while I have had 4 books from the library on the same subject for the past 2 months that I haven't cracked.

I slept for like a million years last night, finally home again in my own little bed. I like going away. Even more, I like coming home.

I've been thinking a lot about the things I want to get done as the master of my own schedule. Learn to play guitar, for example, bc not enough people know how to do that. This isn't the right season to improve my swimming, altho I did buy a wetsuit the other day. The third goal of my big 3 life goals is a foreign language. I was thinking, as one small step for this mankind, I will try to watch at least half my entertainment in French.

The photo-a-day project continues to be time consuming, but it helps me with another of my daily goals which is to leave the house. Move around. Do something. Today my soymilk turned out to be frozen, and I was craving chocolate; so, I went over to Ritual and got a mocha and a piece of vegan chocolate cake and read the SF Weekly. Then, I walked up to the ATM in the Castro. Life sure is challenging.

One of my favorite paradoxes of modern urban life is that of waiting for the bus. You wait for the bus. I might come in one minute or in one hour. So, you have a choice: do you continue to wait for the bus, or do you begin to walk? If the bus comes, it is faster to ride the bus. If the bus doesn't come for a very long time or at all, it is faster to walk. The longer you wait for the bus without walking, the more committed you are to the bus to make your travel time as short as possible. That is, the more invested you are in the bus coming rather than you using your other transportation option, walking. Many things are like waiting for the bus.

Amazingly, some mathematicians at Harvard finally derived a formula to determine how long you should wait for the bus. They found that you should nearly always continue to wait. Exceptions include when you will have to wait more than an hour (how do you know?) to travel a relatively short distance. If you are going to walk, it is best to make that selection BEFORE you begin to wait for the bus. To me, these findings only deepen the paradox.

At the risk (too late!) of this post having no linearity at all, my mother send me this beautiful poem today: The Lily by Mary Oliver. In it "...the whole earth has turned around/ and the silver moon/ becomes the golden sun –/ as the lily absolutely knew it would", I think my mother is commenting on how I am always telling her (and rightfully) "I told you so."
Yes, I know it's annoying, but she so often forces me to be right in advance.

But more powerful to me is the closing and opening of the Lily, like in the e.e. cummings poem somewhere i have never traveled, we all open and close. We meet and love people who open and close us. It's rare.

Last night, Tyler and I were having one of our marathon phone conversations after he had had a successful date (I am a committee member). I don't know how it came up, but I asked him why he liked one of his other friends so much. I'm not jealous of the other committee members, I just thought it was an interesting thing to pick apart. He explained for a while until it became clear to me that all he was really saying was that he likes him. Or, rather, that he just loves him.

I don't know how these things happen or are found, the connections that open and close us. Tyler is an easy example bc the first thing he asked me was what I would do if I had to travel back in time. My heart raced. (He would worry about sanitation and maybe invent electricity. I would worry about having transferable skills and probably end up a prostitute.) I felt a similar zing the first time I met KT, but I don't remember the words that made that happen. (Of course, I am flattering my known regular readers, but they are also easy and safe examples.)

Back to Mary Oliver and her vegetables and saints, the poem also resonated with me bc of a conversation we had at the gallery meeting last night. Every month, we must answer a question to help "break the ice" with the new people. It's usually "what's your favorite food?" Since February is the erotic show, it was "what's your favorite vegetable for erotic purposes" or something like that. People said zucchinis, oysters, and strawberries. We're artists; we don't like to be restricted by the medium. I said "I like to bite... people... preferably not ones who are vegetables."