I like trying an accent out. It’s like when you’re a baby
and you have to put everything in your mouth. I like to put the accent in and
mush it around like marbles. Some marbles fall out, some stay in. I say, “How
ya garn?” which is like “How’s it going?” in Australian. Aussie’s also say “toilet”
when I would say “bathroom” or “restroom”. Which I mean technically is more
accurate. I’m never really bathing or resting in there.
I had to pee and was standing in the back of a café with
three doors. One was labeled male, which is my usual option. But it was el ocupado
and I was under some urgency. The other two doors were labeled handicapped and
female. I chose handicapped.
Which could mean a couple of things. It might mean I’d
rather be mistaken for a handicapped person than a woman. Or I’d be better at
pretending to be handicapped. Evaluating my choices, I might be better off
fighting a handicapped person than a woman, should an altercation occur (like
someone would really fight me for using the wrong bathroom??). It could be that
I’m more OK with making a handicapped person wait, than a woman. I mean they
already have a seat.
Mostly though, the moral of the story is that when you have
single room bathrooms you don’t need to label them for gender.
There are a lot of parrots around here.
I like to go to the water and look for things. I like
looking for fish in the rock pools. There’s lots of little zebra (pronounced
zeb-ra, in Aussie) fish and gobies. But today I saw an eel! I used to take care
of an eel in Costa Rica when I volunteered at an aquarium there. Eels are crazy
mean. They snap you up like goldfish. Mine was a small moray family guy, like 2
feet long.
They have weird, poorly understood mucous toxins that make you bleed weird. Hemagglutinin which clumps your red blood cells together, and there’s another that destroys them. Bites from morays are described as “much more painful than a bite from a similar sized predatory fish”. But worse is the high likelihood of infection cuz their mouths are so nasty.
I’ve doing a lot of music recently and been writing lyrics
furiously. For myself as Taylor Nodell, for this stoner metal band I’m
auditioning for, and for my voice lessons I started taking. It’s kind of great,
kinda of hard, kind of overwhelming.
I’ve been reading this book “Freeing the Natural Voice”, recommended
to me by a previous voice teacher. It’s really helpful and so far it’s all
about relaxing and paying attention to your body. It’s kinda like yoga but more
internal. And I was doing these breathing exercises and all of a sudden I just
started crying. It was like a sudden fear that I had all this work to do and I
was really really late.
I’m lucky enough to know what I’m supposed to do in life.
That alone is pretty rare, a lot of people walk around for like 25 years, shit
out a kid and then that’s what they pour their love into. Nothing wrong with
that, but I was just having this convo with former co-acapellan and I was
saying how I think living for another person seems really sad. We had watched “Mr
Happy” starring Chance the Rapper where he plays a character that wants to kill
himself, hires a service that sends someone to kill you, but then finds love
and wants to live. I argued that that’s a really shitty way to want to live.
Especially since they had just met in the film.
But I know that I’m supposed to sing. And I’ve been doing it
allllllllllllllllllllllllllllll wrong. Not all, but a lot. Reading this book
and taking lessons for the first time has opened up a whole new bakery full of
bagel flavors I didn’t know existed. I had only been eating blueberry. And blueberry
is great and I love blueberry bagels, but now I see sesame, everything, cinnamon.
They even have cream cheese! I can eat them without burning my tongue, and even
the blueberry tastes better here. And maybe maybe I can even help make the
blueberry bagels! This is metaphor. I know about bagels.
And I think there was something else when I cried. It was
like releasing a bunch of emotions that you usually keep down. The books is just
a tiny bit hippie/new age/ here’s a meditation crystal hold it towards the moon
oh child of the sun wolf, for me. But I mean, it’s right. It tries to connect
your breathing and body to your emotions. It’s directed towards actors, so it’s
all “you must breath as an open vessel”. And I don’t know it shook my feelings
all up like when a dog yawns and stretches out and then shakes all about. It
triggered all these sexual memories too, since that’s a pretty physical and
breathy activity.
Anyway, I am pro narcissism. Narcissism, of course coming from the Greek myth of Narcissus, a skier who fell down the slopes of Mount Olympus and proclaimed his ride to be “Narly” (a “g” was later added to denote a Greek origin). Narcissus, despite taking a tumble on his run, remained in love with himself and went back up the mountain to continue his sport eternally, falls and all.
I think the actual story has something more to do with
vanity and a mirror or something, but the moral is to not love yourself I’m
pretty sure. And if you’re called a Narcissist it’s usually an insult. But I’d
like to argue that you kinda have to love yourself, or be totally miserable.
You’re with you all the time, if you don’t like you that’s going to be a real
pain. So there’s this automatic pressure to make yourself better or different
or fix the things you don’t like about yourself. And usually you can do that! I
mean if you’re reading this you’re probably in a good position to do so.
Maybe if you say, made a mistake when you were 17 and were
held hostage at an institution for four years and sunk a bunch of money into
some sort of promise that you’d be better off after those four years, but could
only receive said promise in an official capacity if you completed all the
activities at that particular institution and only that particular institution,
and then as a result of the institution being able to charge inflated rates, because
you can profit off of the naivety of children and the aforementioned love a
parent biologically needs to put into their children and give them a better future, then you had to take out
a loan that would accumulate interest while at this institution and then when
you finally completed all your tasks you would be indentured to your debt and
therefore limited in options post… I don’t know.. let’s call it “graduation”,
then maybe… maybe you wouldn’t be able to make the necessary changes to better
yourself.
Also systemic racism. Or imprisonment.
But yea, if you find something you don’t like about
yourself, how can you not at least try to change it. I’m not the best guitar
player in the world, but I want to get better and play a lot now. And I’ll be
damned if I don’t think I’m cool for doing so. Don’t you wanna be cool to you
too?
But usually I think you have to love yourself. And usually I
think it’s normal, good, and semi-automatic to do so.
I kinda have so much more to say but my egg is a head and
needs to incubate. Today’s song is brought to you by the letter “wef” which I
made up to refer to a previous post where I described a dream I had about Jeb
Bush. Here are the lyrics and accompanying annotations to make sense of it.
Rows and rose with apropos
Through the mansion looking for me( for me, the Cross Country boys who are just like me)
A couple kids with slanted lids and a (Some XC boys are Asian)
Few with some blistered up feet (You get your feet busted up from running)
I ran around in Harmontown but I (Dan Harmon has a mansion)
Couldn’t muster the speed (Couldn't find the XC Boys, they're faster than me)
So I took a lift to day light shift (Came up from the basement to ground level)
And stepped into a garden of green (Went outside)
Timmy slood me (Timmy is a friend of a friend who grabbed me in the dream)
At such a perilous speed (And dragged me way faster than I could run)
I laid sideways
Full of lateral Gs
Through the scrub where I was drug
I popped up next to Momma T (Momma T is Timmy's mother, T for Timmy and the strong T in her name)
She wore a hat and had a chat (She likes hats)
And though the bushes what did I see
I spied Jeb, faceless then, (I have no mental image of Jeb Bush but knew it was him)
But I said confidently
“Momma T, that’s got to be
A candidate candidly” (Mother's ((to me)) often refute the obvious truths, so I did this with confidence, in my dream Momma T denies that it's Jeb)
Timmy slood me
At such a perilous speed
I laid sideways
Full of lateral Gs
Slid to Jeb and what was said
When I tried to get him to speak
Was a
platform bred on a city lead
By a few guidelines to get us to peak
He spoke around and around and around
Of a single place to be
The name written down was Snazzy town
And he told me this was his key
Timmy slood me
At such a perilous speed
I laid sideways
Full of lateral Gs
I looked around for Snazzy town, but I
Couldn’t find what he means
So I did a search with mobile perch (Did a search on twitter for Snazzy town)
And found it’s a betta with streets (A town that worships a Betta fish)
Jeb wanted all of America to be
Focused on a fish that breathes (Bettas "breathe" air with a labyrinth like lung structure)
He thought that this was a special fish and
All the country would need.
