Did you know that if you’re a Netflix member you can now watch a ton of stuff online?  Don’t worry about mailing anything or waiting a couple days to watch a movie…now you can just immediately watch whatever you want to watch (the content is limited but they’re adding more constantly).  The picture is HD quality and freezeless via a new program called Microsoft Silverlining. Also there are no commercials, which boggles my mind!  How are studios, actors, directors, etc. making money?  Because of this…I do not think this will last very long without some sort of extra fee.   The only thing is that the convenience can create something I’ve deemed the “Life Vacuum.”  Like many modern day conveniences we are tempted to overindulge.  When the sea of possibilities is rich with pretty things it’s hard to take them in moderation.  Watching the entire second season of 30 Rock or Arrested Development has never been easier or more tempting.  Be careful not to fall into the Life Vacuum.  You’ll wake up in a sea of listless drool, missing your frontal lobe.

Flight of the Conchords’ new season debuts this Sunday on HBO.  There was a great segment on NPR this morning that gave a two minute preview of one of the season’s plotlines.  Jermaine becomes a Gigalo and Bret composes a Jamaicany-Roxanne-Red-Light-esque song to convince him that he doesn’t have to be a male whore.  I cannot wait.

Also on NPR is a new little thing called All Tech Considered, part of the famous All Things Considered. I cannot get enough of this for some reason.  I don’t even like technology that much.  Maybe it’s Omar Gallaga’s sexy croon.

An phenomenal way to manage your finances totally for free…Mint.com.  Import your bank and credit card information and it tracks everything you spend.  It sends you payment reminders (Dear Lauren, Credit card bills aren’t fun but neither are late fees.  You’re Visa bill is due in five days.  Cheers, Mint.com), it creates pie charts, and keeps you accountable for whatever budget you set up.  For a person who has as much financial cents as a kiwi, this has changed the way I think about my moolah.

This rocked my world but I haven’t even gotten to do it yet!  Next thing I know, I’ll be hanging from my living room ceiling.

Finally,  the best You Tube video I’ve ever seen.  If you don’t watch this you will be doing yourself an injustice.

When I stumbled upon the words “emotional healing” today, another paradigm shift came into focus. Only, I’d already had the epiphany…I just didn’t remember it.

I was sitting in Grant Park in Chicago writing in my journal. My arm was healing from a break–the result of an unsuccessful attempt at crossing a street. Everyone had been incessantly asking me “how’s your arm?” I don’t know exactly what happened next or why these two thoughts crossed paths but I began to think about how a few months prior I’d broken my heart. Everyone was very concerned about my arm…but no one (even myself) was concerned about the broken heart. No one ever asked. I never asked. So I was surprised when I internally asked myself the question I’d never been asked before…”how’s your heart?” And only when I really stopped to think about it did I realize that it was in fact…still in a sling.

So. Emotional Healing. Isn’t it just as important as Physical Healing? We break a bone and we give it our undivided attention. Go to the emergency room. X-rays. Pain meds. Cast/Sling. Rest. Disuse. Weeks of physical therapy.

Yet when our emotions are significantly damaged when do nothing of the sort. We may give ourselves a few days of bed rest (Simon & Garfunkel, three gallons of red wine, eighteen hot baths) but then we get up and go like nothing ever happened. No emergency rooms. No x-rays. No pain meds, slings, rest, disuse or physical therapy. It’s as if our emotions are shameful. Recover as quick as you can. Seamlessly.

Really though, we are our emotions. Look at how we behaved when we were children. Do you remember how we were all so driven by our emotions? Falling down, Mama leaving, Brother stealing our favorite toy…these were passionate injustices and we cried till our faces were red and we needed new diapers!

We get older and we learn to control them but it doesn’t mean our emotions just go away. They are everpresent. We are emotional creatures. We live by these things even if we don’t know it.

So… I’m very glad for these broken things…because now, at least, I know something more.

Epilogue: Both breaks still ache when it’s about to rain.

Here we are.  It’s Christmas.  And all I can think about are Mai Tais!

I blame it totally and completely on Barack Obama.

If he wasn’t on a Hawaiian vacation right now, CNN wouldn’t have shot a live segment from Waikiki Beach.  It was torture.  Watching some precocious journalist yap about insignificant details of the President To Be’s holiday while Diamond Head is looming in the background and the water is lapping onto familiar shores.  True I didn’t spend too much time on that beach but I have been precisely in the spot where the reporter was standing.  I know for a fact that he was steps away from a walkway that stretches up the entire beach that I walked one evening after a miraculous dinner of Ahi Tuna and Mahi Mahi.  The sun was setting, it was 80 degrees and there was a strange harmony in the air.  There is something about that area of the world.  It’s just complete perfection.  A wordless feeling.  My intense love for it is bizarre.  Maybe I lived there in a past life.

So it’s Christmas in Dixie and all I can think about is snorkeling with sea turtles, Mai Tais in the morning, and the most magnificent landscape I might ever see.  Thanks a lot Obama.  Thanks a lot CNN.  Thanks a lot stupid reporter man.

Speaking of tv segments…I’ve had two in the past week.  I marvel at how bizarre it is that six months ago I was living in Chicago, working downtown, finishing my Masters and now I’m living in a cottage in Alabama, working at a zoo and doing live interviews on the 5 o’clock news.  I can never say that my life isn’t full of surprises.

You can watch one of the segments here.  It’s quite special.

After three months of being back home I can resolutely say this was the best decision I’ve made in years.  Chicago, while being a wonderful city, was not right for me.  The past few days hearing of -25 degree windchills has only reinforced that the undeniable urge to turn my life upside down and backwards without knowing where or how I would land was actually the wisest move I could have made.

Merry Holidays.

What are we going to do now?  What will the lovely commentators talk about now?  Will they start scrutinizing our new president (Obama!)? Of course. Of course. But all the passion?  Where will it go?

Let’s hope it translates into passion for these issues we’ve all been up in arms about.  If we put all our fire into fixing what’s broken…we’ll eventually have less to fix.

Here are some golden nuggets, best read in the space between twilight and midnight after at least half a glass of something saucy.

“Drunk as Drunk”

by Pablo Neruda

Drunk as drunk on turpentine
From your open kisses,
Your wet body wedged
Between my wet body and the strake
Of our boat that is made out of flowers,
Feasted, we guide it–our fingers
Like tallows adorned with yellow metal–
Over the sky’s hot rim,
The day’s last breath in our sails.

Pinned by the sun between solstice
And equinox, drowzy and tangled together
We drifted for months and woke
With the bitter taste of land on our lips,
Eyelids all sticky, and we longed for lime
And the sound of a rope
Lowering a bucket down its well. Then,
We came by night to the Fortunate Isles,
And lay like fish
Under the net of our kisses.

_______________________________________

“The Rival”

by Syliva Plath

If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
You leave the same impression
Of something beautiful, but annihilating.
Both of you are great light borrowers.
Her O-mouth grieves at the world; yours is unaffected,

And your first gift is making stone out of everything.
I wake to a mausoleum; you are here,
Ticking your fingers on the marble table, looking for
cigarettes,
Spiteful as a woman, but not so nervous,
And dying to say something unanswerable.

The moon, too, abasses her subjects,
But in the daytime she is ridiculous.
Your dissatisifactions, on the other hand,
Arrive through the mailslot with loving regularity,
White and blank, expansive as carbon monoxide.

No day is safe from news of you,
Walking about in Africa maybe, but thinking of me.

_______________________________

“Tonight I Can Write”

by Pablo Neruda

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example, “The night is shattered
and the blue stars shiver in the distance.”

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her.  To feel that I have
lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense
without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is shattered and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the
distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight searches for her as though to go to her.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that’s certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another’s. She will be another’s. Like my kisses before.
Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that’s certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in
my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.

In his diary he wrote this:  “…They [the Arawaks] willingly traded everything they owned…. They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features…. They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance.  They have no iron.  Their spears are made of cane…. They would make fine servants…. With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”

And he did.

Celebrating Columbus is like celebrating Hitler.  The only difference between them is that Columbus did succeed in extinguishing an entire race of people.  It all happened under the guise of “progress.”  A holocaust that progressed us to Now.  And was it worth it?  Does the weight of all the advancements of Western Civilization equal that of mass genocide?  How does the tiny population of Native Americans feel when banks and schools close to celebrate the man who basically annihilated their entire culture?

On to happier trails…

The job at the zoo is stellar so far.  And so is being back in Birmingham.  I completely flip flopped my life.  Nearly every single aspect of my life has changed.  I feel like I jumped off a six hundred foot cliff and plunged into ice cold water and for the past 43 days I’ve been swimming slowly to the surface.  I still feel like I’m swimming to the surface.

Outside of metaphors, I’ve been hanging out with tv crews, snakes, bats, sea lions, rowdy birminghamians and my cat.

I have not…been writing.  There’s something suffocating about time and silence.  In the city it was too noisy, in the country it’s too quiet.  There is no reprieve in either extreme.  Like most things in life…the solution is in the compromise, it’s somewhere in the middle.

Oh.  And my new best friend is Rachel Maddow.  I love her.

And Bill Maher’s Religulous is out today as well.  However, living in the Bilbe Belt still has it’s disadvantages.  It is not showing here.  If someone has a pirated copy I will trade you some ripe bananas, otherwise I might be making a trip to Atlanta or anxiously await the DVD release.

Pantoum

You were my father briefly.

In hindsight—as clear as sunlight—

on a Wednesday in September…

I heard you leaving the night before.

In hindsight—as clear as sunlight—

I distinctly remember…

I heard you leaving the night before.

…the thud of the door, heels clicking.

I distinctly remember.

An argument in the kitchen—then

the thud of the door, heels clicking.

I thought you might be crying.

An argument in the kitchen, then

that ghastly, awful silence.

I thought you might be crying.

Did you look in to see me sleeping?

That ghastly, awful silence!

I hate it still today.

Did you look in to see me sleeping

before you slipped away?

I hate it still today—

the thought of that night.

Before you slipped away

you were my father briefly.

I try to take a nap but I feel terrible.  Odd.  Off.  Toxic!  I decide to order a pizza just for myself.  An hour and two liters of water later the pizza arrives.  I go out to get the thing and lock myself out of my apartment. I’m holding a hot pizza, I’m starving and my keys and cell phone are behind two very thick locked doors.  I can’t help it, I let a few tears spring up and out in front of the Mexican delivery guy.  “I locked myself out of my apartment,” I say as I’m holding the pizza.  “Oh…that’s bad,” he says.  I cry some more then say, “You’re gonna have to help me crawl through the window.”  He looks at me dead pan either because he didn’t understand what I said or because he’s suddenly found himself in a Made for TV Movie situation…actually it seems more like a Made for Cinemax situation.  Either way, he’s a little freaked out. 

I end up getting back into the apartment by banging on the back windows in hope that my roommate’s slumbering bear of a boyfriend might be there to open the door.  Turns out he was, he’d been there all day sleeping off the flu.  I thanked the delivery man for waiting for me, then go in and cry a little more while eating some pizza alone.  I blame it all on the toxic massage.

This year, I spent some time up in Blue Ridge, Georgia.  It’s one of my favorite places in all the world.  A little cabin just an hour north of Atlanta, nestled in some mountain trees, with a porch overlooking a river.  It is heaven.  Being there means ultimate laziness and nature.  River romps and apple pie and bargain shopping in downtown Blue Ridge. 

While there, I got the phone call I’d been waiting for.  Last week I interviewed for the Marketing and PR Manager at The Birmingham Zoo.  On Friday they called and offered me the job.  It was described to me as a “high profile” job.  Meaning that I’m the media contact for all zoo business.  TV interviews?  Radio spots?  That’s me.  Plus lots of other things like website maintainence and newsletter and magazine production.  All this goes on at the zoo.  Outside my office: parrots, peacocks, ducks, camels, etc. etc.  This is a huge deal. 

This year, my birthday (and the days surrounding it) is remarkably better than the last one.  Except for one of my crowns breaking while eating lunch today.  Now when I smile, I have a huge black hole in one of my molars.  It’s so very sexy. 

And for the birthday dinner?  I had my choice of anything.  This past summer having provided me–in abundance–with literally every food I could possibly ever want (thank you Adam) I made a simple choice for the Bday Dinner:  Pizza & Wine.  A damn fine combo. 

Cheers to me.  Cheers to 27.

Only as you age can the Past become a word deserving of a capital letter.  I have only now realized that.  Up until now I do not think I had a Past.  Bringing a different Me home to my roots feels like it caused a rift in my space-time continuum.  Driving into the city during week one, I said out loud with the utmost sincerity, and concern for my mental well-being, “When am I?”  For a brief moment I felt all at once that I was on my way to class or rehearsal at UAB, that I was home from Chicago visiting for the holidays, and headed to meet a friend for lunch after moving back home.  Three very different stages of my life.  I suppose when you attach a setting to a point in time, there will be confusion when you go back to that setting.  Or when you have a strong emotional attachment to a time or place then you attach identifiers to them.  For example, Fall in Chicago always reminded me of beginnings because it was Fall when I moved there and certain temperatures mean love and electricity because I fell in love one January.

So now, the timid scent of Alabama and all the rolling hills are becoming something other than the Past.  It is now the Now.  I’m loving it more than I thought I would.  I’ve been eating lots of milk and cookies.  I’ve been reading lots of books.  I’ve adopted the rouge, neighborhood cat and named her “Detective.”  I’ve reconnected with familiar faces.  I’ve watched all of Planet Earth and have moved on to The Blue Planet.  I’ve painted my front door.  I’ve bought new shoes.  It’s a new life but an old life.  It’s wacky-colored, unusual, refreshing.  It’s a new, wild perspective.  It’s a Picasso.