street food and unrequited love.

-Chatuchak Weekend Market, Bangkok.

'Literary Charlatan and Degenerate"

In high school, I had a wonderful friend who spoke slowly and was beautiful, even at age 15. She told me she wanted to become Colette and I thought she meant the orphan from Les Miserables, and wondered why anyone would want to walk around with smudged cheeks singing "Castle On A Cloud."


That's Cosette.


Colette is different; and while younger-days Colette may be a little much for me, old-lady Colette is a dream: living alone, fully content to sit quietly and think deeply and move slowly. She is a woman fully engaged in the process of becoming, one who does not rely on others to tell her what her name is. Having had a few decades of debauchery under her belt (that's not the word I want to use, but what else to call a lifetime of living life to the teeth and scandalizing people everywhere you go and making memories that people who become old too soon do not make? Perhaps I'll think of the word later), she is then happy to smell the smells her garden makes and to live to her own rhythms, now more peaceful.

Reading Break of Day is like looking into what I hope my own thought patterns are like when I'm older, and it comforts me that even the author herself admits that she hasn't arrived yet. "Are you imagining, as you read me, that I'm portraying myself? Have patience: this is merely my model."

And still, she is yet another grave at Père Lachaise that we didn't have time to find.

the history of beauty

I walked into the lunchroom today and immediately commented on my coworker Katie's cute heels. "I don't want to talk about it," she smirked, still reeling from a long lecture from another coworker, this one morbidly obese, on how heels are just one example of how our superficial culture tells women to present themselves. "You'll regret them later!" she declared, wagging her chubby finger toward Katie's toes.

"Maybe I will," Katie admitted. "But I sure as hell don't want to hear about it from her."

***

Malia, sitting cross-legged on a chaise lounge, raises her tone as she reads aloud to us from a book about the American trajectory of beauty and self-image. We hear of thinness and fatness and acne and sex and how our capricious culture defines perfection. It's a sad, helpless thing; to watch the values of a culture slip from internal qualities to almost exclusively external. "How do we stop this?" she asks. We throw around pie in the sky ideas like, "wear less makeup?" "stop looking in mirrors so much?" "read more?" but when it comes down to it, we were all forced to realize that, intentionally or not, we are interwoven into what our culture tells us to focus on. So: Are we beautiful?

***

9 pm. Yoga class. "Use the mirror to square your hips and balance yourself," our strawberry blonde instructor guided us. "Don't look at yourself like you normally would-- how does my hair look? Use it to force your body into a better place." Namaste, yoga. You are one of the world's best teachers of the lesson: Here Is Your Body. Here is How to Make it Work Well. Enjoy Your Strength and Guard It."

Sunday morning hope at the church of IHOP

I was given a reminder this morning of how mankind continues on hopefully, despite circumstances that scream at us to give up. IHOP on Mothers Day in Corpus Christi, Texas was a madhouse of balloon-sword wielding children, overlipsticked mothers, and waiters who literally sprinted from table to table, hurriedly rushing out "Happy Mother's Day" to no one in particular before taking orders.

The slowest moving of the waiters was a heavyset black girl with three colors of hair, who ambled from table to table, rushed by no one, refusing to notice the chaotic scene surrounding her. As I gazed at her nonchalant demeanor, which was set off even more by our tattooed Latino waiter with a bandaid on his friendly face (the classiest of Mothers Days, this was not) who spoke quickly and moved even faster, I noticed her eyes.

They were lidded with the thickest, longest false eyelashes I had seen outside of the Greek system on Halloween.

I whispered to Uncle Dave that I thought her eyes were a perfect example of how amazing humans can be. Humans can get up for work at a stressful, low-paying job serving people who tend to barely look twice at you and still take the time and energy to put on the fancy lashes. God Bless Us, Every One.