You guys know that my luck has been all but perfect and so it goes without saying that I know everything in the world. But here's a mystery that has troubled me since the beginning of time, the jinx or the evil eye. My older female relatives always warned that as soon as you speak of something in glowing terms, you lose it. I already wrote about Jesse James' first mistress (and then there were four!) and how much I loathe the kiss and tell. But here's another question that the scandal brings up for me, unrelated to the various doomed tattooed love mistresses on Jesse's gun magazine of misery. When you give voice to something wonderful (ie, Sandra Bullock at the various awards shows, praising her husband), do you put yourself at risk?
The first time I managed to water ski, I remember not thinking at all. My dad's friend Larry had sat with me in the water, smoking a cigarette while I put on the child skis. It was labor day, the summer fading, a sad holiday filled with inchoate longing. I had tried all summer to ski, my face bunched up in concentration. I had just damn near given up on the idea. So I lifted out of the water without realizing it and went for a bit until I realized I was skiing. Then I got nervous and fell into the wake. That was my first zen moment when I realized I could do something if I didn't think about it which was counter intuitive to all my usual striving. I remember years ago when my marriage was failing, I put a picture on my desk and my next boyfriend put a post-it note on it that said, "Stop flaunting your happy little love affair. It makes the rest of us depressed." I wasn't flaunting, I was showing the flag, the one that let everyone know I was drowning, not waving.
Michelle's Spell of the Day
"To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of magic over the brute." Vladimir Nabokov
Cocktail Hour
Drinking documentary suggestion: Good Hair
Benedictions and Maledictions
Happy Thursday!
17 comments:
Leaving the service was a zen moment for me!--John Yossarian
Vladi Nabokov wrote more than 100 lectures to get his teaching position at Cornell. Perhaps his best student there was Thomas Pynchon.--Herman Northop Frye
...are you in DC? Washington DC? Uhm... dude-- DRINKS!
For reals.
One of the saddest people I've ever met is a woman who became semi-famous for writing a book on how to keep the fire in your marriage and she was using her own marriage as the supreme example of the success of her methods and suggestions. She was interviewed on NPR and on national television shows. I think she may have even written a follow up book on the subject, although I'm not sure about that. You, of course, know where this is going. Her superb husband left her to live with one of his students. It seems that I encountered this woman at almost every reading and literary event I went to for at least two years or more and she seemed sadder and sadder as the months and years went by. I always wondered which was worst: the hurt or the humiliation?
In any case, I've always felt uncomfortable telling people that I'm a writer and I could never pin down the reason why until reading "Becoming a Writer" by Dorothea Brande. She gives good reasons for not telling people that you write. She doesn't use the word "curse" but that is what she is saying to some degree.
Then again, as the the Bible says, "Pride is before a crash, and a haughty spirit before stumbling."
Michelle, our dear friend Stacey used to say that in S./Texas N./Mexico the Mexican women used to shield thier bsbies from the 'evil eye'. I am the least superstitious person you know. Sharing your love affair happiness with others could provide vicarious happiness!
Call off the evil monkies!!!!MB
speak to neither the good nor the evil. Just speak to the moment and let the conversation pass just as swiftly.
Does anybody really know what time it is?--Chicago
Meditation will remove the darkness, Michelle.--Naga Sadhu
An Evening With Stink!--DTE Blackout Theater
Some people will tell you that suffering is good for the character. You're free to believe anything.--Ray Carver
...but something in myself or maybe
from somehwere other said: not too
many words, please, in the
muddy shallows the
frogs are singing.--Mary Oliver
In the book of life, each page has two sides. On one side are our aspirations; on the other side is what is meant for us. Seldom are the two the same.--Nizami
Love is that which unites self and other while maintaing the integrity of each. The moment of ecstatic union of lover and beloved, whether shared in a moment of sexual ecstasy or of emotional understanding, is just that--a moment. The boundaries between the two are relaxed but not erased. It may be love in this sense that sustains the universe, preserving all things both from the annihilation of assimilation and from the death that lies in total separateness.--Richard Smoley
Excellent post. Often felt like this as well.
And trully, it's good for some, in its own peculiar way. Keeps one humble.
interesting thought
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