TheBanyanTree: piddly details of my day

[Cecil]

At 1:36 PM -0500 1/25/05, Julie Anna Teague wrote:
>Which is going rather strangely.  I woke up very puffy, looking like
>someone had punched me in the eyes while I slept.  Like a pink toad.  I
>have no idea why. I look somewhat normal now, but am having an extremely
>bad hair day, far worse than usual, and along with the pink puffiness and
>the scratchy tag in my tshirt, it is making me grumpy. The full moon has
>been at me, as well. 
>
>Due to odd circumstances and forgetfullness on my part, I had a tuna salad
>sandwich for breakfast, which was both non-vegetarian and non-breakfasty
>and should've been skipped altogether.  For mid-morning snack, I chewed
>all ten fingernails off, one by one.  Zip zip zip zip zip zip zip zip zip
>zip.  Down to the quick.  And then I polished off some cold poptarts for
>lunch.  The package assures me that they contain "10 essential vitamins
>and minerals" but other than that, they have very little to redeem
>themselves.  Bad choices all around. 
>
>Sometime over the course of the last few days, I decided I'm going to buy
>a guitar and take lessons.  When I told the boyfriend, he made fun of me,
>singing Kumbaya very off key.  Since we'd been getting along better the
>past couple of weeks, after I gave him my "start being a decent human
>being or I'm out of here" speech, I was caught off guard by his teasing
>and started to wonder if we are, again, backsliding, or if I'm just being
>hyper-sensitive.  Maybe it had to do with the swelling and the scratchy
>tag.  Maybe it will never happen, but I am already picturing myself around
>a campfire with friends and family, singing Aimee Mann's "The Moth" or
>Neil Young's "Love is a Rose":
>
>    I wanna see what's never been seen
>    I wanna live that age-old dream
>    Come on baby let's go together
>    Let's take the best right now...
>
>Everything seems possible sometimes.  The boyfriend quickly weighed the
>cost of a guitar and lessons against my potential success with it, and
>advised me to save my money. I do not cotton to naysayers and so I left
>the coffee shop and took my little dream with me.
>
>I forgot to mention that the guitar would be in place of the Italian red
>leather chair I found.  The one I wanted with every fiber of my being.
>The one I did not allow myself to buy because it felt completely
>materialistic and unnecessary, however beautiful, and if I really wanted
>to spend money, I should spend it on something more life-affirming.  Like
>guitar lessons.  I came to this realization, that guitar lessons were
>inherently more valuable than Italian red leather chairs, while in the
>movie theater watching Steve Zissou's A Life Aquatic.  Somehow these
>things are all related in the world inside my head.
>
>And thus I stumble through another day, dealing with work and kids and
>squeezing the hours till they cough up every last drop of minutes, while
>my head and my heart whir away on their own tangents.
>
>Julie
>jateague at indiana.edu

By all means go for the guitar and lessons. Do it while you're still 
young, 'cause you ain't never gonna get no younger. I wish I'd 
learned to play the violin. No better sound on earth.

Cecil






























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