My tongue
admires their plastic sheen
runs across
the single dimple.

My teeth release
an anointing of
smooth
oil.

The center—-a stone.
It is so rough.

]]> http://allthere.wordpress.com/2009/10/11/olive/feed/ 0 allthere http://allthere.wordpress.com/2009/10/11/everytime-i-try-to-button-up-my-shirtsleeve/ http://allthere.wordpress.com/2009/10/11/everytime-i-try-to-button-up-my-shirtsleeve/#comments Sun, 11 Oct 2009 02:55:55 +0000 allthere http://allthere.wordpress.com/?p=227 ]]> I think to myself, “This is bullshit.”

It wasn’t so much that they were so enormous as it was that they were so close I felt I could reach out the window of Emily’s car and touch them. Just roll down the window of her sedan, casually throw my arm into the air while speeding down the interstate, and stroke the belly of one of those big, fat clouds, like…hey there, cloud, I hope you’re not ticklish, cause if it rains, we’re driving along a very steep and moutainous slope in Pennysylvania nowhere near SoHo or Pinkberry.

Some 2,000 feet above sea level, numbers and altitude take on a whole new level of significance. It was like those clouds had arbirtrarily decided to sit on a number in the sky.

Two weeks ago my friend and I drove to NYC. All the way there. And all the way back.  And for those of you who don’t ever, say, drive anywhere when you can fly, I snub my nose right back atcha. Surely, you cannot appreciate the grueling, ten-hour, buttcheek-numbing excursion called a ROAD TRIP WHOOO! on which I embarked.  Your loss. The drive was my favorite part.

Not that I don’t enjoy going to places to meet my friend’s boyfriend and all (more of those to come, I’m sure, my friends are in high demand these days), but I’ve realized that in the daily rush, it’s the in-between rather than the destinations where I can truly just relax.

Despite my love affair with the interior of Emily’s car, though, the City did not disappoint once we got there. I can’t help feeling, everytime I drive into a large city, a little awed and a slight pang of remorse. Detroit used to be like this. I’m very defensive about Detroit and am very proud of the fact that I grew up there, despite the fact that I actually did not grow up in Detroit, and was in fact raised in one of the surrounding suburbs which accelerated its demise. Details.

But the lights! The people! The diversity! The action! The mangos cut like flowers…!!!

I don’t want to go back to school.

… and HELLOOOOO Michigan.

I’m bummed. But I’ll get over it.

Taranita was impulsive.  Generally, she gave off the impression that she was was rational, careful, prudent—a reputation she tried to maintain.  But to a certain few, close friends, her mother, it was understood that Taranita’s devotion to logic, science, and well-structured arguments tempered a deep and burning conviction that the world was so maddening and exhilaratingly chaotic, that sometimes the only explanations to life were those which she understood to be purely romantic and entirely nonsensical: things like true love, God.  It was during those times that Taranita, caught up by the rapture of the sunset, the last red rays grasping at the earth before they sank into the horizon, or the breathlessness which accompanied the vertigo she always experienced while stargazing—she was going to fall into the sky!—that Taranita felt overwhelmed by a sense of love, of joy brimming over her innermost being.

It was the lack of this rapture, lost in the mundanities of academia and too many routines, that Taranita sometimes made rash decisions.  She had learned to obey these impulses when they came in small ways (buying the $100 pair of insensible stillettos, driving her car nowhere) because she knew from experience that built up, they would explode, and lash out in big ways.  Big ways which sometimes resulted in embarassment, heartbreak, and damage control.  

Damage control.  Taranita decided that the history of humankind was damage control.  She had recently started reading  a history book her little sister had left behind called Guns, Germs, and Steel.  How fitting, she thought, and a little sad.  She imagined humans as ants, living and building their anthill before it washed away in the next rainstorm, only to survive and build again.

I loved it! Even though I watched on the regular movie screen…

Charley: I have to see it on IMAX.
Helen: Nausea.
Me: Magnified pores.

True, I’ve yet to overcome the jet lag which hit me the worst while helping a family friend shop for her wedding dress. I still feel a little guilty that my exhaustion handicapped my ability to provide constructive feedback (they all look the same after you’ve been there long enough…I mean, they are, after all, ALL THE SAME COLOR), but all in all, I’ve readjusted. Although I miss the fam, the island, and the food, one thing’s for sure: I do not miss the mosquitoes. My disproportionately swelled body parts have finally returned to normal…my forearm, my calf, my thigh, the sole of my foot.

Every time I’ve gone back to Taiwan, I’ve spent the nights tossing and turning, sweating under suffocatingly dense bed sheets. The sheets are a necessary evil. Leave one limb, one finger uncovered, and the mosquitoes will have their way with you. 

I’m like the Bella of the mosquito world. They find me irresistible.