2.15.2006
Last weekend, Mat and I got away to Tiburon. Tiburon is a very short drive from here, and I rode in the back of the truck, lying down on my thermarest with my leg wedge (a ramp-like pillow that takes all the pressure off of your lower back). Not exactly the most glamorous way to pull up at a nice swank hotel. Not very lady like at'all. But that's the way I roll, yall.
We left. We crossed the bridge. We had a change of scenery. Mat didn't have to cook and clean (although once I caught him making the bed out of habit). We ate in a restaurant (at the bar so that I could stand up) for the first time in 8 months. I sat down in a chair for 10 minutes one day. That's huge. We strolled around. I rested a lot.
There were times when I did not think I would get here. And here is definitely still pretty terrible compared to normal people. I still get frustrated with the pace of recovery and not being able to do what I want to do. I really want to hike. I want to be out in the middle of nowhere, having gotten there on my own two feet, and sit down in silence under a tree looking out across a sweeping vista. It is my carrot, suspended in front of me towards which i strive.
But Tiburon tasted delicious. A first taste of freedom in the form of a sparkling bay with sea lions barking and cormorants floating. Night time walks under the full moon, looking back over at our adorable, twinkling city. Watching the sun rise with only the gulls as company. And falling asleep under a different roof with a log ablaze in our fireplace.
2.07.2006
I love this Four Things thing. I keep changing some of my things, and I have finally completed it by coming up with four people to tag. That was the hardest part!
I am glad to be posting again, glad to be slowly getting my life back again. I can be up and around now for about 2 to 3 hours at a time before I have to lie down and rest. I can walk 15 blocks at a time now! So I can walk to the panhandle now. It has given me a whole new world to explore as I walk through the noble trees, tall and full of songbirds, and I just stop and stare around me, seeing it all for the first time again. I can't stop walking up to the trees and touching them, leaning against them, feeling their old stable energy. I think about the tree tatooed on my back.
The tree of life. I am calling on it now to strengthen my back like the trunk of the trees in the park. They withstand so much. Wind, fog, age. I imagine the trees in the park inspiring my spine, exchanging information with the tree on my skin.
The tree of life is about eternity, life, power, and I visualize the mark in ink on my back, seeping through my skin, winding its way in and out of the crunchy, knotted places in my back, retraining my spine to take back its stance of power and strength.
2.01.2006
Four Things
My friend Andre "tagged"me. I am not 100% sure of exactly how this works, but here goes. I will get started on it.
Four Jobs I've Had (not in any particular order) - updated
1. Aid at an inpatient drug and alcohol rehab : I would give the patients their medicines and take their vital signs and talk to them and report to the next shift on how everyone was doing. My favorite part of the job was loading everyone up in this big white van and driving them to Narcotics Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous classes. I got to hold hands with everyone and stand in circles and smoke a lot of menthol cigarettes out on the front porch. A recovering heroine addict once told me that his favorite way to write a poem was to spin around in circles for a long time and then sit down and write down the first things that came to mind. Those are the kinds of things we liked to do.
2. Nursing Assistant : Maybe the darkest days of my life. I would come home and cry. I had to give adults baths and change their diapers, and I vowed to take care of myself so that I would never end up like that.
3. Cook at a summer camp: I went to this summer adventure camp up in Northern California for two weeks as a camper, and when it was time for me to leave, I had so fallen in love with the smell of Northern California that I couldn't leave. It just smells amazing way up there in the far north in the mountains, and the sky is big, and the stars are better than movies at night, and swimming in the lake when you're not supposed to is just so fantastically naughty underneath all those stars. I just could not leave. My mom and dad sent out a few more changes of clothes, I borrowed some from some of my fellow cooks, and I got up before dawn every morning to run and watch the sunrise with deer and their babies. I made a cauldron of oatmeal every morning and then assembled lunch and then I was free for the rest of the day to rock climb and hike and just sit and breathe and look at the huge animals (all the animals are bigger, the squirrels are as big as dogs, the jack rabbits as big as a deer, the deer the size of a moose. In the evening, we would move these giant irrigation pipes around in the fields as the sun went down, and then at night we would count the shooting stars and one night we went swimming in the lake and got caught and so we had to literally create a flag football field, cutting grass and raking and leveling a field, as our punishment. It was when I got my first taste of Northern California mountains, and they will never ever leave my blood.
4. Registered Nurse in a Pediatric Intensive Care Unit : This is my current job. I love it. It is high stress, but very exciting and stimulating and a day is never the same as the last one. I work with people who dance for the kids and sing to them and we are like a family.
Four Movies I can watch Over and Over
1. The Royal Tenenbaums - over and over and over and over and over.
2. The original Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (with Gene
Wilder) - in fact I love it so much that I have not been able to see the new version, even if it does have Johnny Depp in it.
3. Mommie Dearest - I love how crazy Faye Dunaway looks when she has on her mud mask, when she cuts Christina's hair off, the way she buckles Christopher into his bed with some little harness, the night that she chops all of her roses down hysterically screaming, "Box office poison!" And when she finds some of Christina's clothes hanging on wire hangers, "No more wire hangers. Ever!"
4. Top Hat and any other Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie - I love these movies and how they all used to hang out in their black tie formal clothes every night and I love how much booze they all drink. All day. Someone will come in from being out somewhere, and someone else will always pour them a drink from their big crystal decanter of booze. And everyone smoked.
Four Places I've Lived
1. Bowling Green, Kentucky - born and raised, beautiful town, ideal childhood setting, friendly community, and we used to never lock our doors
2. Tuscaloosa, Alabama - drunk for five years, wild college
3. Etna, California - mountain idyll ranch where I smelled like tanning skin and warming pine bark (see #3 in jobs)
4. San Francisco - the city made for me
Four TV Shows I Love
1. Desperate Housewives - I love the clothes, the make-up, the hair, the wisteria of the lane. I love everything about this show. I love Bree, I love Gabrielle. I do not like any of the kids, but who can stand child actors. I love the story line, and I get excited on Sunday afternoon because I can't wait to watch it. It is Melrose and 90210 for 30 year olds.
2. Survivor - I WILL be on this show. Oh yes. I will. And I will win, too. Because I can be a competitor. And I will not feel one bit badly about playing the mind game.
3. The Amazing Race - Mat and I were almost on this. We were interviewed for it here in San Francisco after we made our video and sent it in, and they asked us a lot of questions like "What was your last fight about?" I think I heard a big scratch of a pen as they crossed us off the list when we couldn't remember when our last fight even was. Again, we WILL be on it. And we will win. We have studied it, along with Survivor. The $1 million award is, as Mat put it, "our retirement plan."
4. The Daily Show & The Corbert Report - we watch these every night, literally. When John Stewart is on vacation I am sad. He is the only way I can tolerate the news of the day. He makes it all OK.
Four Places I've Vacationed
1. 6 months in Southeast Asia with just our what we could carry on our backs. I opened my soul, found myself, and caught Dengue Fever. It is where I have felt the most like myself, the most me.
2. Ireland - I backpacked across the Dingle peninsula, eating berries along the way. It was breathtaking and comforting down to the bones.
3. French Polynesia - It was my honeymoon, and we spent half of it on a tiny island called Vahine. There were only 9 cabins on it. It melted my muscles, and I oozed around in the sun and flowery coconut tropics.
4. The Big Island, Hawaii - I went with my parents and so got to stay in a super posh resort, and we trespassed on some land (by rec. of the bartender) and found a huge waterfall in the middle of nowhere. I saw a giant beautiful ray swimming in the ocean at night.
Four of My Favorite Dishes:
1. Thai curries - any color, but especially green, red, or Panang
2. greens - winter greens like collards and kale, the way that Mat makes them and sushi rice
3. Mat's breakfast - homemade hashbrowns, soy sausage, two eggs fried yolks runny, toast OR my mom's soft boiled eggs and toast
4. a pad thai that costs 5 baht on the streets of Bangkok (never had another one like it) with a lot of prikh nam plah on it (that's fish sauce with chopped up raw Thai peppers) with a Chang Beer (it has formaldehyde in it, yes!)
Four Sites I Visit Daily :
There are no such sites because I am not on my computer very much, and definitely not daily. BUT some of my favorite sites are
1. Emptyage
2. Beakdip
3. Cute Overload !!!!!
4. Gaggaccticca County
Four Places I would rather be right now:
1. On my grandmother's farm, called Edgewater Farm because it's on a river in Kentucky. It is completely quiet, and you can go there and sit and not hear anything at all except for birds and if you stay long enough you will see lots of deer and wild turkeys.
2. Yosemite, in the backcountry, in the intense high elevation sun and cobalt sky with insane rock features that look like holograms, and the air hums with energy.
3. On a high peak lookout somewhere with my brother, eating cans of tuna, listening to Jerry on our I-pod with the little portable speakers, looking out across a valley and doing yoga poses, feeling the thrum and the sun, and hearing the wind spirits whip through the trees.
4. Muang Ngoi, Laos (sorry Mat, I know you put that, too, but it is the most absolutely perfect place we have ever ever been)
Four People I am Tagging
1. Jeff
2. Matthew
3. Aimee
4. Katherine -- come on, dig out that old blog that you used to have, bunny rabbit. I tag you. You're it. I can't remember the address, so I can't link to it. Leave the address in a comment, will ya?
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