theology&geometry

Take it from me. Never underestimate the foontz.

So it’s not quite as easy on the eardrums as the far more common fifth-of-November trope, but everyone remembers the fifth of November. Why can’t the ninth of January get a little love? Sure, it exists in that no man’s land between New Year’s Day and Valentine’s Day, but that doesn’t mean it’s not important. In the sense that every day you’re not dead is important, I guess.

I figure anyone’s life can be judged fairly by the quality of his or her January 9ths. After I took this photo, I did some digging into my own documented past to see how January 9 has treated me all these years. Hilarity is about to ensue.

January 9, 2009: Ate leftover garlic chicken (that I cooked!) and baby carrots for lunch. Made a fantastic pot of coffee and added Irish cream to my first cup. Got excited about wearing the bright-green hoodie. Spent the evening at work up to my elbows in ink inside the morgue, reacquainting myself with 366 editions so I could pull the best-designed ones to enter in contests. It took a lot longer than I imagined it would, and I’m still not convinced I found the best stuff.

January 9, 2008: Too much caffeine (after nearly a year without any, if I recall correctly). Fretted over buying a new car.

January 9, 2007: Took pictures of light.

January 9, 2006: Breathed. Blinked. Blunk? Not sure, because I didn’t write it down.

January 9, 2005: Recovered from inventory night at Dillard’s.

January 9, 2004: Felt crappy, watched crappy movies.

January 9, 2001: [from black diary, kept briefly during college] “I returned to the campus on Saturday. It is now in the wee hours of Tuesday morning and already that sinking, desperate melancholy has seeped back into my brain. Perhaps it’s the weather.” It gets way more emo after that. Waaaay. (That was the year I was stuck in a big ol’ delicious freshman-year-of-college depression.)

January 9, 1998: [from brown corduroy diary I inherited from my grandmother] NSFW. No, really.

Honorable mention — January 8, 1997: [in green Beatrix Potter journal with Toad on the front] “I come to you in a state of bitter turmoil and panic. My life is becoming hell.” Cue story about how my boyfriend Jeremy said he was going to call me, and then didn’t. And then said he was going to come over, and didn’t. Ahhhh, the trials of youth.

[Project 365]

I like shiny things.

When I was growing up, there was this book floating around our house called Speaking Southern Like It Should Be Spoke, and it was more or less a dictionary of Southernisms. What I can’t say for sure is whether or not it was mean or nice. Like, was it playful self-parody, or mean razzing from the outside? I’m not sure, and it’s even harder to tell since I can’t really find much out about that book online, almost like it only exists in my memory. And on this one random site. I’ll need to rifle through some drawers in my parents’ spare bedroom the next time I’m home to see if I can find it.

Anyway, what got me to thinking about Southernness was tonight’s potluck at the Yarbro-Dill estate, which was Southern-themed and so ridiculously delicious that it defies description. Maybe that’s just my own proclivities busting through the crust there; we’ve done an Indian food night and an Italian night (which I missed due to a case of the barfies) but I tell you, that Southern home cookin’ just practically begs to be lumped into a giant pile in the middle of your Dixie plate and shoveled into your mouth with reckless abandon. The color palate of all the food (save the pomegranate-cranberry deliciousness) was yellow in color and therefore simply had to be mashed together with a hunk of cornbread and shoved down the ol’ gullethole. I defy you to find a better way to feed yourself.

This idea of Southernness is something I find fascinating because I am one of these people who loves and appreciates where I came from and the undeniable Southernness of it, while still rejecting the idea that Southern equals ignorant and racist and hyperreligious. I did my fair share of rebelling against that idea in high school and college by purposefully altering my accent to squeeze out the majority of the drawl — saying “ahn” instead of “ohwn” was the biggest challenge of my life — but now I’m glad I’ve still got quite a fair amount of South in my speech. I never managed to get rid of it all and I can’t tell you how grateful I am because of that. I go home and people accuse me of being a Yankee (walking around downtown Saltillo on River Day with a camera I was told I seemed like a tourist); everywhere else I’m just a country bumpkin. So I can enjoy the awkwardness in both places, and take comfort in the knowledge that I have a home, but I’m not necessarily trapped by my roots.

As I left the potluck, I listened to this voicemail from my mom and grinned like a moron re: its country sweetness:

Southernistic from Lindsey Turner on Vimeo.

Part of being Southern is being told that you’re a joke. That you’re inferior. Southerners tend to shoulder an inferiority complex that most people don’t quite understand. I love knowing so many Southerners who are, in fact, fucking awesome, and who understand that the whole Southern underdog thing is just part of the story, not the whole story, and who blow right past that narrative and supply other much more interesting ones instead.

I’ll tell you what else I like: Going to a potluck where everyone else cooks amazing dishes, and feeling the need to contribute, and having the option to offer up pear preserves prepared from a harvest taken from a tree on your family’s land that’s been producing for four generations. And then having actual people enjoy that contribution. I don’t know. It makes the world feel a lot more manageable that way.

This is my oldest friend, Palm Tree. Tonight, we’ve been conducting what may be the world’s longest ongoing chat/Scramble match/conversation, involving Orc blood, bitch-goblins, Stadium Pals, grumpy exes, astrology, vibrators, and so much more, often in misspelled allcaps. And I have laughed my ass off the whole time. Heavy guffaws, my head thrown back to my shoulders.

All without uttering a single word, since she’s hours and hours away, in Buffalo, NY, a whimsical place where air conditioning is apparently a luxury. WTF.

Anyhoo, PT, thanks for the laffs. Ain’t the internet a magical place?

Smooches, kiddo.

“Want some of this?!” I yell to my brother over the shaky din of the front-end loader as he hauls his Dickey-clad lower half toward a location on the family farm that will make him some money. I shake a bright orange can of mosquito repellent at him.

He looks at me like I’m some sort of communist.

“NO!” he shouts at me, shaking his head. It’s like I’ve suggested that he take out twenty percent of his paycheck to solve the mystery of why men leave the toilet seat up and why women always think they can change a man.

“They’re eating me up!” I holler as a means of explanation for the intricate aerosol dance I’m performing as I glance at my bare legs. I scowl at the throbbing patches of skin where enterprising mosquitoes have already staked their claim. I squint my eyes, fan myself, and cover my limbs in sticky chemicals that supposedly will keep blood-sucking parasites at bay. The dogs, previously nosing pressingly into my creases, back off.

“You’ve been in the city too long,” my brother tells me. I don’t know what to say; I hardly consider Memphis a city in the traditional meaning of the word, and instead think of it as one big rural neighborhood with pizza delivery. I shrug off his comments and douse myself in chemical. The following day, my mother and I will spot a clandestine colony of honeybees constructing honeycombs out of sight behind plywood covering what used to be the door to the only bank in town and I will creep ever closer for a glimpse behind their buzzing curtain, but for now I will smack at a buzzing pest hovering near my thigh, wondering what’s in the repellent that keeps the blood-suckers at bay. The sky contracts. The clouds pulse silently and lower to cover the horizon in a full-court press. I smile, content.

This is my home, even if I’m the only one in the entire family that the mosquitoes still bother.

The mosquitoes, I remind my brother, have always eaten me alive.

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Today the clouds hung low and common like weightless glaciers, suspended in the sky above and beyond me. I kept my gaze trained to them all day, mouth slightly agape like some kind of developmentally disabled infant with her hands pointed toward a mobile featuring the skies. I say that because a big blue sky like that makes me feel dumb and happy. It didn’t seem real, the scale of it all. I wondered what it must be like to look into the near horizon and see an honest-to-god mountain or two. Every day. How that might affect perception for someone used to a flat plane. I think I might feel constantly watched if anything other than sky ever crept up around me. Or do the mountains push an illusion of privacy? I have lived in the flat lands of West Tennessee all my life and I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to answer that question.

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We watched a movie this weekend, a cautionary tale: Don’t let the machines evolve faster than we do. Wall•E is a Pixar flick with a calming political influence mapped in its bones. You watch it and you can’t help but want to say shucks, we fucked it all up, and then feed and clothe the lowly artists who have to cope with the mundane storytelling and shading of each animated post-apocalyptic form. I watched with great interest all the sci-fi homages. Johnny-Five and Hal, yes. And likely more that I did not tap into or have forgotten or am too lazy to mention.

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We buried two small, quaint bundles of treasure today. Stickers and typing-paper explanations. The geocaching community in Saltillo is no doubt fledgling at best, but could be bolstered by the unbridled enthusiasm of two pre-teens, a millenial, and a baby boomer. Funny to think that I’d never given geocaching a single thought until this past week when a soon-to-be-honeymooning friend mentioned it and suddenly the world skidded into silly relief in relation to the idea that people were hiding tiny treasures all over town. I don’t know; maybe it’s easy to ignore that fact and remain happy but as far as I know, you ought to seek shelter under the nearest ban on allcaps and just enjoy the summer from then on out.

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Would it surprise anyone to know that I was totally drunk as this post was going up?

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Update, from the future!!!: I sobered up and edited this post … extensively. Didn’t edit out the stupid, though. That’s going to stay for posterity. Honestly, sometimes I am amazed at the random shit that I will say or write once I’ve got a couple of drinks in me. I get mouthy when I drink. And lately I’ve been reading a lot of fiction, which tends to make me wordy when I write. Drinking while writing, well, I get mouthy and wordy and messy and then have to answer for it to my sober self the next day.

I’ve been on a real Billie Holiday kick lately. I attribute this development to something akin to typical mid-twenties labor pains and the fact that it’s already nasty hot and it’s not even summer yet. Putting a Billie Holiday record on has roughly the same effect on a room as turning on an oscillating fan and taking off a couple of layers of clothes. The only way the setting could possibly improve is if you’ve got one hand clenched around a glass of champagne, and your other arm wrapped tightly around a man who smells like soap and salt, your chin perched on his shoulder as you two shuffle side by side to the slow, swinging beat, your shadows long from the candlelight.

Early last year, I posted about an NPR segment called “Vocal impressions”, where listeners described various iconic American voices. I offered up a description of Al Green’s voice at the time that I’m still actually pretty happy with (“A lovesick panther with a shard of glass stuck in his paw”).

But Billie? She’s proving a bit harder to describe, though I sure would love to pin her sound down.

A fully-grown woman, sipping bourbon while playing hopscotch.

The dew dripping off an old wooden radio, left sitting on the porch.

A hot-air balloon drifting into the sunset.

Homemade lemonade and sweat at dusk.

A trumpet mute made out of daisies.

Help me out.

Y’all, check out my man Fritz, burning up the interwebs with his dating advice from circus performers. Effing awesome and hilarious and at least one of those questions floating out there was plucked more or less from my own life (I’ll let you guess which one).

I would also dote on another friend of mine who recently — by permission of an unusually amiable and serendipity-friendly Universe — got [some musician we adore] and her boyfriend to read one of her short stories and agree that the story was awesome and hilarious (duh) but I won’t link her or mention her by name because she’s modest and afraid of looking like a dork. I, however, have no such reservations, and will only delete this mention when she phones me in a few hours and tells me to. Or calls me something akin to “fuzzy bunny.” But only if she promises to have her boyfriend call me later and do impersonations of Marge Simpson again. Because that was all kinds of awesome the first time around.

I love you guys. Shit.

Note to self: During marathon early-morning phone calls, alternate water with all those glasses of wine, especially if you plan to do anything remotely productive the next day.

It’s 3 a.m. I’m not technically sober. I’m perched on three pillows on my computer chair so I can reach the keyboard. And it’s time to vote on some best-of Memphis stuff. So, have at it.