I think you need to look into getting a dishwasher, though.

marta: Thanks for reassuring me. :) I know you’re deep into the maelstrom of NaNoWriMo; that alone, piled atop everything else normally on your plate. [Ed.: "deep into maelstrom"; "piled on your plate" -- mix metaphors much?]

I know some people in their 30s and above who do NOT pine for some physical attribute they had in their 20s. Some, but damn few! In ten years, you may be telling people you wish had feature X which you have right now.

…as long as you don’t completely burn yourself out in the meantime. Ahem.

But I like being a grown up. NEVER want to go back…except for my legs maybe. Wish they looked like they did when I was 20. But…

Must go. Just want to let you know I am here, just tired.

I don’t really pray, so I will say–lots of luck and good wishes (and that’s not too different from praying really).

Wait

Wait, for now.
Distrust everything, if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven’t they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become lovely again.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again,
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. And the desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Wait.
Don’t go too early.
You’re tired. But everyone’s tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a while and listen.
Music of hair,
Music of pain,
music of looms weaving all our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear,
the flute of your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

You might also want to see/hear a video of Kinnell reading this poem, at the WGBH site. According to a note on that page, this is “a poem he wrote for a student who was thinking about suicide after a love affair gone wrong.”

Darc: Things really aren’t so bad as to warrant a prayer for me — especially given all the people truly in distress (and not merely feeling grumpy). OTOH I’d never turn down a freebie. So: thanks! Maybe I can put it in the bank for when I really need it. :)

Moonie: I find myself thinking “being a grown-up sucks” even for things from the good old days of… last year. It’s sort of a constantly expanding block of time, the good old days. I was more footloose yesterday than I am right now; the world didn’t insist quite so much on making us all crazy, even an hour ago.

But for you, I mean… I don’t know how old you are, but my sense is that “going back,” for you, might retrogress you to sometime like, oh, say, February. Heh.

cynth: Well, as I said to Darc, I wasn’t feeling seriously woeful — just put-upon by time (and its absence) and activity. Personally, I tend not to to the agnostic side, exactly, but to something even less definable than an infinitely indefinable Supreme Being. It’s hard to explain. Obviously. :)

And also as I said to Darc, I’m not one to turn down a free prayer on my behalf. Wish I could stockpile them, like a cord of wood.

Jules: How funny is that? I just love a good coincidence.

I read a review of the book when it came out, in the ’70s. Think it might have been in the NYT book review but, wherever it was, it made it sound interesting enough that I sprang for the hardcover. In the vernacular of that time (and the cliché of this one), it blew my mind.

The title is a hoot, although it describes exactly what the book is about. After I read the book, I loaned it to a brother-in-law who occasionally, at family functions, used to go off to a corner to read. Someone took a picture of him once, seated in a folding chair at a picnic table. His head is lolling to one side, resting on the palm of an upraised hand as he naps; open on the table before him, face down, is — yes — THAT BOOK. The convergence of image and words was impossible to regard with a straight face. :)

If I’d been the one you handed that to in the improv class, I think I would have been all, like, Breakdown, is it? And then I would have gone bicameral on your @ss, as Marcellus Wallace in Pulp Fiction might have said.

(recaptcha says: footsore grandchildren. Awwwww…)

See, we were destined to be friends. I’m sorry, but I’ve never heard anyone else speak of it.

“Shinto”=beautiful.

Hope your weekend is relaxing.