shouldn't have drunk all that cough syrup
Monday, Aug. 26, 2002 @ 10:48 a.m.
From the Cincinnati Enquirer:An enormous beehive lying 5 feet from a jogging trail in Fort Thomas was painstakingly relocated Wednesday by an expert who could hardly believe his eyes. “It's amazing these bees had been there so long. It appeared they wanted to get along with people,” said Granville Griffith, a beekeeper from Southgate. About 40,000 bees were living in the hive, which spilled from a catalpa tree within Tower Park along South Fort Thomas Avenue. Their honeycomb — drenched in honey and covered with bees — looked like fungus growing on the tree, said Fort Thomas Parks and Recreation Director Don Brindle.
*runs off screaming into the night*
I spent all weekend determinedly resting and doing as little as possible. I’m still a bit stuffy in the sinus regions, but compared to last week I feel like a million frickin’ bucks. I read a lot of Nathaniel’s Nutmeg and spent almost all of Sunday reading The Tale of Murasaki. I don’t know why, I just really wanted to read it again. Lately I always want to be reading something “Japanese”.
When I came home on Friday there was a box on the porch. It was my incense! I take a childish glee in packages. Even this one, which I had ordered and paid for myself, made me excited. I burnt a lot of incense over the weekend, trying all the different smells. The white plum is sweet and delicious, but I think my favorite is the chrysanthemum (which happens to be my birth flower). It’s a floral, but not overly sweet, and it has a slightly bitter dustiness to it. It’s so complex. In Heian Japan, women would cover chrysanthemums with cloth, then rub the dew that collected over their faces. Dew from those flowers was thought to slow aging and wrinkles. I think maybe it’s because when all the other flowers have died in late autumn, the chrysanthemums are still in bloom.
One of the main reasons I am glad to be over this sinus infection is that I can start wearing lipstick again. Shallow, I know; but it is so vexing to spend several minutes applying it only to have it smear the first time I have to blow my nose. And there’s no point in re-applying it when I’m just going to have to blow my nose 10 minutes later. And L'Oreal "Endless" is supposed to be “semi-permanent”. Bah. I have been doing this complicated lipstick application that I saw in Kevyn Aucoin’s Making Faces. It’s called “3-dimensional lips”, and it takes a while to apply. First I use a dark brown lip liner, then I fill in with a medium grayish-brownish neutral, then I blot the very inside center of my lower lip with a pale beige gloss. It really makes my lips stand out, but because the colors are so neutral it’s not like having neon lips. Gawd, I love make-up. I’m so happy I was born a girl.
Last week I got really annoyed at L. She said she liked my shoes and asked where I got them, and when I told her “Payless” she actually flinched and said not to worry, I wouldn’t see her with the same pair. I merely said I wouldn’t care if she had the same pair of shoes as me and left it at that. But the fact that she liked my shoes until she found out they were cheap really irked me. Are they not the same pair of shoes no matter what they cost? That way of thinking is so reprehensible to me, and I would never have thought L. was so shallow. Too, she’s old enough to realize that some people have bills and responsibilities; we can’t all go into the city and drop a bundle on mommy’s card at Nordstrom’s and go out for sour apple martinis at Elephant Bar with the girls afterwards! I know that L. and her mom sometimes struggled with money when she was a kid, so I can understand her enjoying the finer things in life, but it also means she should have an understanding of what it’s like to be on the other side. Besides, it’s not that I couldn’t afford more expensive shoes; I happen to like shoes I can toss after a season when I get tired of them. I am getting too defensive here, but it really irritated me. I should have just let her know what I thought of her behavior, but I was still feeling pretty sick and couldn’t think of how to articulate what was so exasperating about her comment. When I miss an opportunity to get in someone’s face I always stew about it for a while. I’ll get over it.
I had a dream the other day that I went to Mission Lakes thinking my parents still lived there, and where the creek had been there was a lake, with oil wells along the shore. The road that led into the development had been reduced to a dirt path with more oil wells along the side. The inside looked pretty much the same except that the trees had grown very tall. I was running to our old street when I remembered they didn’t live there anymore, and I felt like an idiot.
Read this poem in Emily Dickinson over the weekend:
One need not be a Chamber-to be Haunted-
One need not be a House-
The Brain has Corridors-surpassing
Material Place-
Far safer, of a Midnight Meeting
External Ghost
Than it’s interior Confronting
That Cooler Host.
Far safer, through an Abbey gallop,
The Stones a’chase-
Than Unarmed, one’s a’self encounter-
In Lonesome Place-
Our self behind our self, concealed-
Should startle most-
Assassin hid in our Apartment
Be Horror’s least.
The Body-borrows a Revolver-
He bolts the Door-
O’erlooking a superior Spectre-
Or More-
For some reason I never thought of putting my answers to the Friday Five in my journal, until I saw it in Gwenllian’s. So I hope it’s okay with her if I pinch her idea!
1. What is your current occupation? Is this what you chose to be doing at this point in your life? Why or why not?
I work in the registrar’s office of a private, for-profit IT college. I took this job as a temporary measure when I was laid off from my last job (when the economy tanked) and since I liked the job (and the feeling was mutual) I have just stayed on. So I guess you could say I didn’t choose this career but I chose to stay in it.
2. If time/talent/money were no object, what would your dream occupation be?
Beachcomber. Seriously? I think I would make a good book editor or movie critic. I don’t possess the talents to create those things myself, but I have a good eye for what makes them good or bad and the intelligence to be able to write about them.
3. What did/do your parents do for a living? Has this had any influence on your career choices?
My step-father is a doctor and my mother has done various jobs in the health-care industry, such as placing nurses at hospitals, and doing the insurance billing when my step-father had his own practice. I think I might have had some romantic notion of being a doctor when I was really young, but was cured of that when I realized it involved cutting people open and digging around in their guts.
4. Have you ever had to choose between having a career and having a family?
I’ve never wanted children, so no.
5. In your opinion, what is the easiest job in the world? What is the hardest? Why?
The easiest job would be human resources, because those people don’t do any actual work anyway. The hardest would be something disgusting that everybody takes for granted, like being a garbage man.
what
dr. seuss book warped you?
Yes, I am the classic.
~S.