Scoreboard

So this past week my sister and I have been housesitting together for my mom in Farragut. So all week I have been switching from my little abode in Market Square to a perfectly manicured lawn in Farragut. This week has meant going to strength classes with my sister and watching her walk bowlegged for days. We have put cheese wiz on pills and fed them to the dog and nearly killed a tomato plant. Honestly. How do you people keep those things alive? Honestly. So one week and this is the last day. This day, Sunday, a long day's looooooong day and I drove from downtown out west for the 9th time in 5 days for the finale of Abby and Jen's house sitting adventure 2010. I was exhausted, done, over, spent, pooped and because coffee does not equal fewd, I was also so hungry that I seriously considered getting dinner at a gas station. "Dinner". because that, my 3 loyal readers, is what it has come to on days like these. But instead I went home and found Abby there, who had very nearly gone to Menchies to drown her own Sunday sorrows in froyo.Let us be real, who among us has not been there? So without our own respective pathetic dinners of menchies and gas station station delicacies we fended for ourselves: Abby was making a veggie burger and put in a tortilla and said outloud, Hello White Trash. I was out of saltines and was seriously jonesing for my new fav snack, I put oyster crackers and jelly on a spoon and ate them leaning against the counter while Abby read me blogs (by blogs I mean Texts From Last Night, blogs just sounds a little smarter). I made myself some eggs. At 24, making eggs is my newest skill. Abby found this hilarious earlier this week when I called her at work to ask her how to do it. If I ever find myself on internet/personal ad dating, if I ever give up gas station dinners on Sunday and give that a whirl instead, I will now be able to list making eggs as one of my marketable and desireable relationship skills. Single White Female. Can make eggs. I ate these man-magnet eggs at the kitchen table while the dog stared at me with a very concerned look at his face which I can only assume is trying to tell me, "Sour Cream and Onion chips from Pilot would probably have been a better decision." Could not have agreed more, dear doggy. Single White Female. Have chips, will travel. So Abby's Sunday was that kinda DAY too and we sat over the empty plate of eggs and compared our wounds and decided the next natural step to cheer ourselves up would be to go rent movies and buy diet mountian dews and packs of gum. Duh. So we drove to Weigels and listened to a combination of Sting Fields of Gold ( When he says something about the fields of Barley, Abby made some connection to Barleys and out loud wondered if Sting was singing about picking someone up at bar) and then a bad cover of Tupac's Changes, which is so appri-pro right now, as Tupac always is. And I had to smile, hearing Elton John's The Bitch is Back on the radio thanks to the fine folks over at B97.5. We had an unsuccessful attempt at Redbox and instead went home and went home to rewatch a fifties version of Leonardo Decaprio wear a Newsies hat in his reunion with Kate Winslet in Revolutionary Road. This is a good movie for the time period of the fifties and the clothes and places and things, but a terrible movie about relationships. So, naturally this was a perfect movie for the almost-resorted-to-froyo-kind of night. So Abby and I bedded down on the couch with the dog and diet cokes and toasted our lives on this Sunday, the land of singledom, all the problems we don't have. As Abby said, "Here's to not dodging right hooks on the side of route 12." Amen to that.

So sports fans, Here's the scoreboard:

Cheese Wiz 0. Goldberg 1.
Whoever covered Tupac 0. Tupac throwbacks anytime 1.
Sour Cream and Onion Chips 1. My eggs 0.
Abby's White Trash Gyro 1. Menchies 0.
Sweltering East Tennessee Heat 1. Tomato Plant R.I.P.
Toilet Humor and cocktails with my sister 1. Crying into your diet mountain dew alone 0.

This blog has been brought to you by Kate Winslet's costume's designer, Free range eggs, and "that's just the way it is", the air conditioning newly fixed in my car, and new mercies for a better tomorrow morning.

Just standing in my kitchen

So today in lieu of poetry Monday, confession-food-sjp blog.

so one time when i was out of food, I put jelly on some saltines. Either because it was really good or that saltines come in huge packages or because I'm perpetually poor, I do this now all the time. Poorfolk food, brain food, after work food, awesome food, power food. Just standing in my kitchen by myself putting jelly on saltines. Seriously, favorite snack. Mmm boy. And then tonight, low and behold, my sister and her depth and breadth of Sex and the City knowledge said, Oh that's not weird, Carrie Bradshaw does that. In an episode called "Secret Single Behavior" SJP via Carrie B. said this: Carrie Bradshaw stacks saltines -- she puts grape jelly on them. And she eats them, standing up in the kitchen while reading the latest issue of Vogue." So I salute you SJP, all the rest of you with bare cabinets with only crackers and jars of jelly, mixing salty and sweet, and the fine folks who make saltines.

Here, Just listen.

Ever since I could remember, which is basically round the same time I learned to speak or read, I have always been someone who hated to read out loud. Public speaking, public reading ... articulate? I was a reader, still am. Through and through. I remember my junior year in high school my English teacher made us read poems out loud, going around the room. As as much as I hate reading out loud (and boy, did I hate it) that idea stuck with me: That the rhythm of the words and the beat of a poem needs to be heard, not just read. The day I fell in love with Mary Oliver's poetry I was at Remedy and Jackie Newman leaned across the counter and said, let me read it to you. And she leaned over and quietly read aloud from Thirst. If I were sitting beside you right now, I would do the same thing. Even though I have not learned to hate reading out loud any less (man, i still hate it), I would lean over and take the book out of your hand and say, "here, just listen. Just let me read this to you." And then I would quietly read it and you would think it was charming, just like I did when Jackie did it. It's just the speaking and the hearing of the thing; The poem would have voice and the rhythm would have a beat and it would better than just reading it quietly. But because I still hate me having to do the reading, and because I'm not, in fact, with you, and mostly because far better than me reading you anything is the poet reading their own poetry. If you close your eyes, the beat and the rhythm sound almost like live music. Most of these are videos with the audio recording included because that was the easiest way to find the readings. The audio is infinitely more important than the images in the video itself. So really, don't watch, just listen: Langston Hughes, TS Eliot, and Maya Angelou and Jude Simpson. Pretend that you bathed in the Euphrates when the dawns were young; That you were one of the women going to and fro, talking of Michaelangelo. That you hummed like a hive of honey bees and, God, how I loved your hair.
If you only listen to one, let it be Maya Angelou. Sweet voice. great, great poem.

Langston Hughes, Negro Speaks of Rivers

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15722


T.S. Eliot, Love Song of J. Alfred Prufock



Maya Angelou, In and Out of Time


Jude Simpson, Not Cut Out for Religion

Mindfulness

This week at work I overheard a customer telling a story of Joshua Bell, child prodigy turned internationally renown violinist. Bell, winner of the Avery award at 39, sold out Boton's Symphony Hall, where "merely pretty good seats" went for $100. It is estimated that while playing at Symphony or Orchestra shows solo, Bell makes as much as $1,000 a minute. Bell plays a Stradivari violin handcrafted in 1713 by Antonio Stradivari himself. Stolen 2 times from the previous owner, Bell bought it for a cool $3.5 million, which served his career well as, " no violin plays like a Strad from the 1710s." Meanwhile, Gene Weingarten, a writer for the Washington Post was leaving the subway station on morning and passed a raggedy man playing a keyboard who Weingarten said was quite talented, but his music was lost on the masses in the rush of the morning Subway. The reporter walked away and wondered if even YoYo Ma himself standing in this subway could cut through the crowds. Weingarten even he went into his office that day and tried to contact YoYo Ma's agent but nothing came of it. The music critic for the Washington Post later suggested Joshua Bell for the idea who agreed to participate in the experiment. So on a Friday morning in January, Bell, the world class violinist, put on jeans and t-shirt and took his place beside the metro trashcan with his Stradivari and played classically composed pieces to Washington's morning metro station. Weingarten writes that Bell started with Chaconne" from Johann Sebastian Bach's Partita No. 2 in D Minor. "Bell calls it "not just one of the greatest pieces of music ever written, but one of the greatest achievements of any man in history." In the time that Joshua was playing, 7 people stopped, 27 gave money and he made $32. More important than the change people flipped into his open case, was the lack of attention to the music and the amount of people who not only did not part with their pennies, but did not even notice the music. Bell later said, "I'm surprised at the number of people who don't pay attention at all, as if I'm invisible. Because, you know what? I'm makin' a lot of noise!" This is a great experiment and great article written about it; The question that Weingarten's article clearly asks is, are we conditioned to stop and notice something beautiful if we aren't told to be looking for it? This what music, whether in the subway or in the symphony, and poetry and art of all kinds have to offer: Something beautiful, just because it's beautiful. This, in a nutshell, is what I have found to be beautiful in Mary Oliver;s poetry. All of her poems are just little nature journals that records perfectly ordinary old beautiful things on a regular day. She has deep reverence and a real ability to communicate what she finds in nature, which is a great capacity for God.
And also, for the record, a few weeks ago someone said something about this blog that made me feel silly for doing it. I felt like I was very small and this blog was very small and altogether silly. And maybe it is silly and smallish but the thing is, is that this silly small thing has made me read more poetry and I have loved it. Some of Mary Oliver's poems are making more sense to me right now than almost anything else I read or hear or know about; This small little poems have made me stop and want to listen to men busk in Market Square and notice other small, silly things. So whether this is small or silly or not, Jonathan Bell or any other subway musician, three cheers for mindfulness and Mary Oliver and art art art.


Mindful
By Mary Oliver

Every day
I see or hear
something
that more or less
kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle
in the haystack
of light.
It was what I was born for--
to look, to listen,
to lose myself
inside this soft world--
to instruct myself
over and over
in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,
the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant--
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,
the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help
but grow wise
with such teachings
as these--
the untrimmable light
of the world,
the ocean's shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?

from Why I Wake Early

Why I Wake Early by Mary Oliver
Hello, sun in my face.
Hello, you who made the morning
and spread it over the fields
and into the faces of the tulips
and the nodding morning glories,
and into the windows of, even, the
miserable and the crotchety –
best preacher that ever was,
dear star, that just happens
to be where you are in the universe
to keep us from ever-darkness,
to ease us with warm touching,
to hold us in the great hands of light –
good morning, good morning, good morning.
Watch, now, how I start the day
in happiness, in kindness.


All information about Jonathan Bell stuff found at :
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html