Bright Yellow World

When I wrote a post about fish farts, I did not realize exactly how popular it would be on google searches. For the past four months and one day, at least two people each day have viewed this particular post. Now, I enjoyed writing that post. I enjoyed the inspiring conversation with the Horse Whisperer even more. But I had no idea exactly how many people were intrigued by fish and their gas habits. Hmmm.

Another interesting search that shows up a lot around here is “Clark’s Shoes Horse Whisperer.” At first I thought this was odd until I realized that one of my favorite brands of shoe does, in fact, have a model called “The Horse Whisperer.” And now I need them! Observe:

Rather cute!

I suppose what it all comes down to is that these googlers are inspiring me to learn something more about the things I write. Veddy interestink, I think.

This is a post about absolutely nothing. I’m sitting in an office on the sixth floor of an air-conditioning-less building, and it is 95-degrees in San Francisco. My brain has melted. Send popsicles.

It isn’t often that I feel pretty. I wish I could explain why this is so, but that would entail volumes upon volumes of writing… and probably some major therapy. Feeling “pretty” is generally a fleeting thing for me, a moment that passes after seeing myself in a store window. I analyze every flaw: my breasts are too big for my frame, my face is round, my butt and thighs are chunky. It doesn’t seem to matter what the tag on my clothes says, it doesn’t matter what the number on the scale says.

But some days the planets shift. Some days I put on an outfit that makes me feel like a million bucks, my hair does what I want it to do, and my skin behaves. Today was one of those days.

Until.

I headed to the farmer’s market at lunch, requiring me to pass the San Francisco Public Library. The library is the gathering place of packs of men. And as I walked by, it happened:

Hey mama! Mmm-mmm, that’s a nice shape. I’d like to get my hands on that. You married, baby? I’m just trying to give you a compliment! Can’t you take a compliment? Damn, girl, that is one gorgeous ass.

This is the reason that I wore men’s XXL t-shirts for my entire adolescence. This is the reason that I have covered my body in unattractive apparel over the years. This is the reason that I avoid clubs, abhor gyms. Over the years I have been grabbed, groped, and verbally accosted more than I care to admit. And I have heard from my male friends that I should feel happy that men notice. But I’m not happy. I’m not flattered. I feel mortified, exposed. It’s embarrassing.

It isn’t that I have a great body. For my size, my body looks… heavy. I’ve never felt comfortable in my physical skin, despite the fact that I’m inherently comfortable with myself in most other ways. It’s more that my body is like an exaggeration, a caricature of what it should be. And it makes people… it makes men… react.

I know this happens to all of us, but that doesn’t make me like it. That man (those men) ruined my day today. After that, I wanted to put on a sweater and fleece sweatpants, despite the fact that it was approximately one million degrees in my office.

If you want to make me feel a little better, do me a favor: in the comments, leave me a “snappy comeback.” It might help to start collecting them.

Preparing to move has opened my eyes to one key fact: I have a lot of stuff! And most of it is stuff that I don’t use or think about!!! It’s a strange thing, looking around at my accumulated items and pondering their value. Do I keep things that I don’t love, just because they serve a function? What about things that I do love but that are impractical? Or items that I keep for their sentimental value, what do I do with those?

I’ve moved upwards of fifteen times in the past decade, but I’ve lived in the same place now for about 2 1/2 years. The constant moving forced me to purge for the better part of my early twenties, and kept me honest on which items I needed and which I didn’t. Hunkering down in my apartment for the past few years, however, has caused me to hang on to things that bring little to my life… aside from taking up space. And although I’ve never been a “stuff” person, I find myself reluctant to purge as much as I want and need to. What is it, exactly, that makes us hang on to junk? I’m annoyed by it, yet I lack the conviction to let go. What is that?

I have a habit of living in fear of the what-ifs of life. “What if I get hungry later,” I worry, and then eat the third piece of french toast. “What if I regret not buying it later,” I fret before sliding my bank card across the counter for another impulse purchase. I’m getting better, having acknowledged those two particular habits, but I still notice my inner monologue cautioning against certain things, using the what-if as evidence to make a point. “What if my daughter wants to play dress-up one day, and I don’t have every single one of my old prom dresses? What if I want to read this trashy paperback book again in five years, and I don’t have access to a library? What if I throw a dinner party for more than eight people and have to use paper plates because I got rid of these ugly old dishes? Whatever will happen then???”

Writing it down, looking at it now on the computer screen, I see how ridiculous this is. I’m keeping at least one of my prom dresses (the one my mother spent countless hours making). Chances are, I will never read most of these paperbacks again. And if I throw a dinner party, I’ll get some nice biodegradable paper plates. And as for the IKEA furniture, I hope in three years I’ll have the financial ability to replace it anyway. Why keep it in pieces in the top of a closet, just to throw it out three years from now?

I’m sure I’ll throw out one or two things that I’ll think back on later with longing. But I’m also pretty sure I’ll get over it. Stuff is just stuff, and I can always get more. But I can’t get back the stress on my brain of feeling owned by my belongings, and so I purge. And I’ll keep purging until it feels good again.

Y’all.

I don’t know how that was for you, but reading your limericks had me in stitches. You people ROCK! And thanks, too, to all of you who didn’t rhyme but left a note. I know I came up with probably the most ridiculous challenge ever… but lord, was it fun! So the winner: Congratulations, Noelle, be sure to head on over to SarkaTrager and choose your prize! Your limerick about wanting to win a contest had me rolling on the floor, so thanks for that! You earned it, lady! And, because this contest required some actual work… the rest of you win something, too!!! Sandy, Pete, Melissa, Marci, Chiada, and Jules… send me your email, and I promise to send you something San Frantastic!

I just made that up. Should I copyright it? No? You say it’s too dorky? Fine.

A little bit about the prize from yesterday: Rich Trager and Sarka Holeckova are my two favorite merchants at the San Francisco Ferry Plaza craft market. This boyfriend/girlfriend couple have been out there nearly every day since I moved to this city. One of my earliest purchases was this photo,

which I absolutely adore. At the moment I own five of their prints, and I’ve purchased countless others for friends and family members. I’d show you what they look like matted and framed, hanging on my walls, but they’ve been taken down at the moment. Why? I’m so glad you asked! Because (segue to announcement number two)

I’M MOVING TO A MUCH COOLER, CHEAPER, MORE AWESOME APARTMENT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! With the best roommate EVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This all came to be two days ago, when one of my (hello, brain, let’s read what we wrote before publishing with sentence fragments) Wundergirl sent me an email inquiring whether or not I’d be interested. People. I have been talking about moving for over a year. (The linked post is less than a year old, but I needed EVIDENCE.) The timing is perfect, the place is fantastic, I’m closer to work and HW’s house… I couldn’t ask for a better situation.

All this is, of course, to forewarn you that you’re about to be inundated with posts about moving, selling furniture, buying furniture, window treatments, etc. There might be more voting. We’ll see.

There once was a blogger named Abby
Whose blog posts were sometimes not shabby.
Her blog had been started
When then-boyfriend departed
And she’d been decidedly crabby!

For two years she wrote about details
Of life, love, and therapy-retail.
She read blogs of others,
Marrieds, singles and mothers,
And became friends with many through email.

These friends tolerated her tales
Of stupid (and now BRILLIANT) males,
Of tits and of cats,
Of technology snags,
And her with their comments regaled.

Then one day our young blogger friend
Was trying some work to pretend,
When in her mind’s eye
What a glorious surprise!
An excuse for a prize out to send.

For five-hundred posts she had written
(A number with which she was smitten)
And wasn’t it neat!
A most fabulous feat!
Then with an idea she was bitten:

“A contest,” she cried, “is in order!
A poem like this, only shorter
And written by readers
From this site and from feeders
Or those stumbling upon this disorder!”

You have until midnight tonight
For five lines of rhyming to write.
The subject you choose,
But be careful: don’t lose!
For without this prize, cry you might.

A print from this shop, seen on Etsy.
How wonderful, heavens to Betsy!
The winner selects,
Then I’ll write the check…
You didn’t actually think I’d find one more thing to rhyme with “Etsy,” did you?

Ladies and gentlemen, I’m about to go all “teacher” on you. We’re going to talk about interesting facts about pitch, and the way that pitch relates to our lives. If you can survive this entry, there will be a pleasant surprise at the end! Woot!

This post came into my head as I was sitting here drinking my morning coffee, and a passing truck beeped its multiphonic (more than one pitch) horn. Immediately I exclaimed, “That truck beeps the opening chord for Vetiver’s Hey Maureen!!!” The one person sitting near me rolled their eyes. “No, I swear!” I searched my iTunes folder and pulled up the file. As I pressed play, the person looked at me like I was a freak, but admitted that yes, the beep was the opening chord of Hey Maureen.

I don’t have “perfect pitch.” For those of you who aren’t music nerds, “perfect pitch” is the ability to hear a note and identify it immediately. I do, however, have excellent pitch memory. If I’m singing a song without the radio, for example, I’m very likely to sing it in the same key just off my head. Or, if the radio DJ announces a song that I know is about to play, I’ll start imagining that song in exactly the same key as it comes on. Many, many musicians do this. As far as I know, pitch memory isn’t something that we’re taught. It either happens… or it doesn’t. Perfect pitch, on the other hand, is something that can be taught to anyone with a decent sense of pitch memory. Want your child to impress people at parties and annoy all his or her musician friends? Teach them perfect pitch when they are babies! The thing is, “perfect pitch” isn’t perfect. Why? Because pitch evolves!

I’ve lost you now, I’m sure, and the two of you who are still reading are about to go cross-eyed. Welcome to the wonderful world of the physics of sound, people! Pitch is determined by the size of a sound wave. A lower pitch will have a wider sound wave, like so:

A higher pitch will have a narrower wave, thusly:

Obviously, the waves can be any possible size, so an arbitrary “smallest distance” between pitches was chosen a loooooong time ago. In Western music, this smallest distance is called a half step, or a minor second. Anything between a half step is usually called “sharp” or “flat” (too high or too low, respectively).

Here’s where it gets fascinating (or, to most of you, boring as all hell). When musicians are sitting in an ensemble, our instinct is to try and hear our own sound. Hearing oneself individually is nearly impossible, so we unconsciously play a little bit sharp (too high) to distinguish our own sound. You can imagine what happens next: our neighbor, trying to hear his or her own sound, plays a tiny increment higher than we do. And so forth and so on, until the entire ensemble is playing just slightly higher than it was two years ago. These shifts take years to notice, but our standard of “correct” pitch gets higher and higher. For example, when I purchased my flute ten years ago, the note A was “correct” at 440 Hertz, meaning that the sound wave makes 440 cycles per second. When I played in an orchestra concert this weekend, we tuned to an A that was 442 Hertz. Two extra cycles of a sound wave might not seem significant, but when you consider that that’s a change over one decade, and music history has gone back thousands of years… it’s pretty stunning to consider how much the note A has changed. And when we think back to the concept of “perfect pitch,” it demonstrates why this is a fairly useless skill to have.

Let’s say you developed your perfect pitch 40 years ago. The pitch standard at that time would have been completely different than the pitch standard today, meaning that the pitch you memorized as “perfect” is lower than the pitch we consider “correct” today.

The moral of this story, aside from the fact that I am the most gigantic dork on the face of the earth, is that pitch memory is far more useful than “perfect pitch.”

Aaaaaaand since you read all of that… TOMORROW WILL BE MY 500TH POST! It’s strange to me that I’ve only published 499 posts in the past two years. I feel like I’ve written more than that, but so it goes. In honor of the Mighty 500, tomorrow I will be holding a contest. I’m not going to tell you what it is, but be prepared to be creative and rhyme. The prize will be totally fabulous (if I do say so myself), so bring your game face, people! The post will go up at midnight tonight, and the contest will remain open until 11:59 p.m. Pacific time tomorrow, May 8, 2008.

I’m even more excited about this than I am about soundwaves.

The Horse Whisperer has been in New York for five days. Five days isn’t that long, right?

crickets

I am ready for my boyfriend to come home. Thank the sweet baby jebus that’s happening tomorrow, because I am lonely! I, the independent spirit that was, am horribly lonely, and I just want a hug. It’s that bad. And pathetic.

The thing is, I absolutely realize that I’m lucky. I’m the luckiest woman in the whole world, I get that on a daily basis. But HW being gone has reminded me tenfold. On the first day he was gone, he called his roommates to ask them to check in on me (I think. This is unconfirmed. They called to check in, which seemed mysterious, and then he alluded to a conversation with them later on in the evening). The second night, they suggested that I come over and stay, which I did. Tonight, they called to see if I needed any help around the house. And confessed that he’d prompted that particular inquiry.

And I miss the seemingly unimportant little things too: the ability to ask him to put stuff away in the high cabinets, having someone remind me that it’s time to go to sleep, having him ask me if I want tea (rather than just asking if I’ll make him tea). It’s those couple-y things that I’ve gotten frighteningly accustomed to.

It’s a little bit startling, waking up one day and realizing that you’ve become reliant on another person. Not reliant in a way that prohibits you from functioning without them, but rather in a way that you feel their absence like a gaping hole, like a tooth that was recently pulled from your mouth. I have moved away from enough friends that I know what it is to miss someone. This feeling is like that, but multiplied by about fifty.

I’m glad you’re coming home, HW. Now, hurry up and get here already!!!

Alternately titled, A Really Boring Account Of The Past Few Days.

I put three items on Craigslist this morning, kicking off my purge of stuff. The three items in question were a dresser, a bike, and a TV. I find it awesome and fascinating that the dresser and the bike have each had about ten inquiries… and the TV has had exactly zero. Nevertheless, I’d still love to get rid of it. All in due time, I suppose.

I should state for the record, however, that I’m not “getting rid of my TV.” I’m nowhere near that cool.

Another unwritten goal of this month is to make myself happier by hanging out with the people I love. I’m pleased to report that I’ve made remarkable progress thus far. The Horse Whisperer is out of town, but I went over and cooked for his roommates and another friend on Saturday. On Sunday I spent the day playing in an orchestra. In between our rehearsal and our concert, I hung out with one of my all-time favorite people from grad school, who happens to live in the Bay Area now. And today I had lunch with Mighty Q.

I’ve also managed to dress myself in decent clothing for FIVE STRAIGHT DAYS. This is a shocker, folks. Nothing has been stained, ripped, or pilling. The downside, of course, is that today I put on one of my cute little blouses that I hadn’t worn in a while. All day I’ve been glancing down and remembering exactly why that is: after the weight loss of last year, this top is reeeeeeally low cut. Yowza. I was wondering why folks on the train were being so polite! I guess the next part of the purge will be getting rid of the stuff that’s super cute but too big… again. It kind of makes me sad.

If you thought “Maturity May” meant that I’d talk less about my tits… well… you were mistaken.