clothespin

So I've been thinking a lot. About the papers I'm not writing. About when you're sick, you're reminded that time isn't your own, that your body demands its own time. About what failure is and if I'm in danger of it.

I've been thinking about privacy. I spend over 40 hours a week in one place with the same people, to whom I vent and elate, to whom I am more trasparent than I ever want to be. I am so easily read by my face and body; sometimes I feel naked. I'm so stressed out that I leak, say things I do not want to say, reveal disgust and contempt and frustration. Why would I want to reveal more of myself here?

Then I think about the people I want to be around me everyday but aren't. The things I want to tell them I usually don't want to put on a blog.

I've been thinking about playing, how I don't do it. How writing is playing, and I don't do it because I have so much work I feel guitly for every indulgence.

I've been thinking about this space, a space to play in, and why I don't use it more. Still thinking.

From her essay “Fun City: Las Vegas, U.S.A.”:

Every aspect of the American fraud is accentuated in Las Vegas, in rubbery victuals and false bonhomie, in meaningless greeting and programmed response. “Well, hi, howya doin’?” say the waitresses in their sincerity voices, “ready for sump’n to putya on top of the world? Howzabout our Pecan-and-Broiled-Lobster-Tail Pizza?”: and when one day, just as an experiment, I rang the Secret Witness line, upon which you may give confidential evidence to the police, exactly the same voice answered me, with just the same computer brightness. (28)

I'm working on a paper on Jan Morris' travel writing. I've only been to the airport in Las Vegas, so I can't vouch for her description. But when I read her, I feel like I'm going to a place in her acerbic, witty mind, and I just love that. Gotta love the prose. Had to share.

We visited the exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry, when we were in Chicago last week. J didn't like it. He'd just finished reading a book about mummies, and he felt the bodies in the show, even though they had in life explicitly given permission to be displayed in that way, were being exploited. Too sensational. I could see it from that perspective.

But I loved it. I found out exactly where my uterus is (and who's idea was it to put the bladder right underneath that anyway?). I know what my spleen looks like, where it sits in relation to my kidneys. I understand why my back pain radiates down my back and into my buttocks after seeing the sciatic nerve.

When I saw the whole people, their organs parted and separated, I could see how life actually lived. When I saw single organs, single systems (nervous, circulatory), I appreciated the simplicity and complexity of the whole. Yeah, some of it was gross, but it was so more informative to see a tumor than to see a model of perfect system, such as the ones they have in doctors' offices. I saw a brain with an aneurysm, and I said matter-of-factly to my brother, who was there with us, "That's what killed Grandmommy." I'm not sure how that sounds to someone reading this, but for me it was freeing. Like the hand of God or the will of Fate had been replaced with something normal, mundane--something I could see. No less tragic, but somehow more manageable. Malfunction, not malice. And I'm not saying that I thought God took her out of spite; I just mean that death often seems to me like a force beyond us, but in the exhibit--seeing death encased, notated, explained--it seemed somehow less arbitrary. I don't even know what I'm trying to say. I don't know why I'm trying to say it on a blog.

It's the first time I've seen any beauty in death.