You know what I love? I love “yes”. I love “yes” so much, and so hard, and  also its more boisterous adjutants “hell yes” and “fuck yes”.

A couple of days ago when I was stopped at a street corner waiting for the light to change, a man walked up from behind me, stood beside me, looked at me, smiled, and said, “Nice legs, librarian.” Now, I’m really not a woman who enjoys strangers making commentary on her appearance but he didn’t have the stink of testosterone poisoning about him so I didn’t just default to my “Fuck you, you fucking fucker” setting. Plus? He called me “librarian”. And oh good lord, I do love me a librarian, so very very much I do, and am always so happy to meet a fellow member of that tribe, which obviously that man was.

Butcher’s charts take it all apart.

Sewing patterns put it all together.

The sundering and the reconciling … they interest me, both. I maybe love taxidermy because it requires both; I should maybe love the jigsaw puzzle more than I do, for the same reason.

You know what I really love? I love to go to art galleries and museums to look at what humans have made, with intention. But I also love to walk out in the world and find the deliciousness of happy accident. I sure do. I really love both the incidental and the accidental. Like, really a lot I love them. All the funny found little bits and pieces of art or music or poetry that jump out at you and yell “Boo!” or maybe they peer around the corner and breathe “Pssst!” at you but however they approach you, they can all be filed under the heading “Ambush, such a lovely”.

I think I think too much about clothes — mine, yours, his, hers, theirs, whoever’s. Because really? I think an awful lot about them. Like, an AWRFUL lot. Thing is, when the world is being beautiful, I don’t want to be a blight on it and when the world is being unbeautiful, I don’t want to add to the ick, so I end up thinking a lot about my clothes. And in my thinking, I also think this: I think style is an act of generosity. I think fashion is just merchandising. I think one is qualitatively superior to the other, by a lot, and in my mind it’s clear that the superior one is style.

“Mother” … now there’s a big topic for you. I’ve been thinking about this post and trying to fashion this post and I’ve been uncharacteristically lacking synaptic activity or volubility. Sometimes when this happens, I hurl myself off the precipice into the unknown of the internet and find words by finding pictures. But the problem with the pictures you find when you Google “mother” or “mom” or variations on that theme, is how reductive they are: it’s nearly all glowing pregnant ladies or beaming ladies cradling babies or high-heel-and-pearl-clad June Cleavers doing housewifely things, and there is so much more to motherhood than changing diapers and running the vac.

Oh. My. God. The happies, they are upon me.

If you’re a bling-averse ladyperson like me, then you don’t give a fiddler’s foxtrot about jewellery and have spent precisely zero time in your life thinking covetously about shiny, sparkly gems.

Lately I’ve been thinking quite a bit about body hair, especially women and. I am intrigued by the fact that we live in a time where we aspire to near-hairlessness. It’s a lot of fucking pressure, is what it is, to be sufficiently depilated to please that body hair–governing cabal known as They. They are merciless taskmasters, for sure, because They are relentless about pushing the hairlessness agenda and making us feel ashamed if we don’t thread our eyebrows and wax our pits and pussies and pins to perfect glassine smoothness.

Imagine if we could remove the mortar that holds all the disparate elements of our selves together. Remove it and fiddle the bricks of character around a bit and repoint, so that we could be remade. Or maybe that’s too drastic (altho’ I am a woman who likes the grand gesture) — it’s not a complete rebuild that interests me but the jimjummery of a rejig.

How to catch an octopus
by Patrick Widdess

Here’s a thing I just realised. Chet Baker had it right: let’s get lost. That’s what running is, for me: a getting lost, the way you can get lost in very few things, maybe only love and sex and music and physical exertion and the way the air smells in the woods in the fall or the way a cold lake feels on your body when you jump in naked and let all that cold swirl across all your bare skin to leave you gasping and shuddering in a strange beautiful release that’s almost like the moment of orgasm, in the pleasure/pain aspect of it and also in the being completely present in your body aspect of it.

Actually … actually … I’m a very bling-averse woman.

The carapace is a wonderful thing in its own right and I can celebrate its utility and its beauty — I can, I honestly can. But I never really forget that for all its protective value, it’s also a small, confined place, like a pedestal … or a prison.

Ice is nice. Okay, if you’re me, it’s more than nice.

Want. These. Want. These. Want These.

Blue-and-white china is a lovely thing indeed. I have rarely seen any that I did not like, at least a bit, at least the colour scheme if not the pattern. Because while green is queen, blue is definitely her consort, and the consort’s most worthy consort is white.

Lisa Auerbach’s Tract House project is full of badassery and makes me happy.

And here we are in a brand-new decade. I like that, a lot, because I’m much attracted to notions of new beginnings, even tho’ a new decade is no more a new beginning than a new day is and I’m still actually living the same life I’ve been living all along. I mean, the digits 2-0-1-0 don’t in any way change the unfoldment of a life. But the symbolism is juicy and yummy and also the questions posed to me about the last decade and the next decade by the very clever Sheila Killian are juicy and yummy and made me engage in some reflectional brain activity, which is generally a bit hard and scary and also deeply worthwhile.

If you take away my periodic PMS madness and my 92%-of-the-time short fuse, I’m a pretty fun gal.

Okay, so there’s this Canadian clothing designer, Natalie Purschwitz, who runs a small and very interesting operation, Hunt & Gather, out of Vancouver. A few months ago she got the genius idea to wear only clothes she has made herself, for a whole year, in a project she calls Makeshift. Makeshift, I find, is a very nifty notion, if not also a little daunting. (But of course most things worth doing are a little daunting.)

Dock Ellis Pitches a No-No on LSD
By Jilly Dybka
From Elysian Fields Quarterly

The ball’s big — like lobbing a volleyball.
And the batter’s box is so far away.
Tiny ball, red ball, white ball, rainbow ball.
Wasn’t even supposed to play today.
The batters are whiffing in slow motion
Because their strike zone is five miles wide.
The catcher is wavy like the ocean,
Before my release, have to time the tide.
Straight bat, bendy bat, big bat, little bat.
Feels like I’m pitching inside of a dream.
I’m flying as high as an acrobat,
My fingers feel every stitch in the seam.
I wonder what all the fuss is about?
I’m just trying to get the guy out.

I took my kids to see Zombieland the other day. (Because yes, I am an awesome mother.) It was a highly enjoyable experience, more than any of us had anticipated, honestly, and chief among the many excellent moments was the scene in which the four nonzombies who are our heroes realize the rules of quotidian life no longer pertain and lay waste to a souvenir shop, smashing and crushing and pulverising all the cheap tat that stocks the shop’s shelves. It is an exhilarating moment, for sure, because transgression so often is, and transgression that involves destruction? Ding ding ding! We have a winner, folks!

Today is the day for the beautiful bones.

When colour isn’t present to advance the story, form and texture are what keep the narrative moving.