the sound/video quality of this is not super terrific - Sunnie took it w her phone - but it's so friggin adorable - it's Crown Chakra singing a song he wrote for his kid, and he brought out the kid to harmonize w him (teaching him to be a little rockstar, teehee). when the kid chimes in at about 3:20, it's sooo cute omg, then Thighs backs him up with the guitar riff, it is cute on steriods (that's me you hear giggling next to Sunnie): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qt2eKTXFRVs&feature=youtube_gdata_player

then Clyde, LMG's band, which was okay but I wanted to hear the whole last set and had arrived just in time for it, perfect timing to get a drink and hug Tony cz they're on a break (who made a beeline right for me, BIG HUG, he loves the wallflower in me, and I appreciate that), Badfish for me when they started up again . . . but The Hydra went with me to Waterstreet after all, and after sitting still for 3 songs it looks at itself and thinks "we could be fighting or fucking right now" (SIGH) so home I go cz they want to get into their hot tub to hate or love each other . . fair enough, I kinda want a hot tub, they are nice on a chilly night I must say.

it was a good night, "good people" (I like good people)

You may be rethinking upcoming travel plans that you thought were already set. Or, perhaps, you're juggling your responsibilities so you can fit everything into your schedule. But it's tricky now because you cannot do this work alone. You'll improve your chances for success if your co-worker or partner supports you, so include him or her in your scheming. Remember that nothing is etched in stone yet. Today's decisions could change as soon as tomorrow Virgo.

ha ha - I didn't book it anyway, I was chatting w a student and forgot (whatever)

M

VIRGO Some of your thoughts are the same as yesterday and will repeat again tomorrow. There will be completely unique thoughts, too -- ones you will never think again. Capture them somehow so you will remember.

I have pretty feet (?)


yesterday I went to a fiction/poetry reading for students and faculty who published stuff in the campus lit magazine. I always feel so awkward in chitchat situations, but I don't feel awkward about feeling awkward anymore cz that's just how it is and there are worse problems to have (I could have 3 tits, or elephantitus, ya know?), I just observe my awkwardness from a meditative distance and let it go then concentrate on other feelings without hardly trying at all. I've gotten so much better at just letting shitty thought just offgas itself out my ear before it hits my stomach. M was there. She looked beautiful, really she is very beautiful in that fragile poet way w pale perfect skin and a face that flits from troubled to laughing and back again constantly. I like to look at her face. I emailed her afterwards just to tell her that. She emailed back that she had had the same thought about me looking good and that it had made her jealous and grumpy. I thought about that and in all truth I have zero jealousy that I could find in my mind, of her or anyone. I think there must be some kind of envy tucked into that social awkwardness of mine, a wish to be more like someone better than I am, but I honestly don't feel it as such - it must be offgassing w the fear of the awkwardness itself, I think. I even tried to pull up an image of FPH's new love interest to see if I could turn green mad, but all I could find in my feelings was a very deep tender spot. I like my mind/heart for being that way - that's a new thought.

What is not new is feeling shitty about every thing I have ever fucked up. And now a relentless (as opposed to intermittent) skittishness about ever being sick again in any way whatsoever, a near-crippling aversion to Needing Anything eats my liver in the lightless night.

it warmed up above 70 degrees for the first time and stopped raining for an hour and my rusted-shut heart made such a painful straining noise creaking open that I swear people could hear it standing anywhere near me, a now-unfamiliar trickle of actual joy (versus ironic dark humor, which is a very very poor substitute) flowing in [cry]

I grow stronger, fitfully less tired . . It’s curious how many types of exhaustion there are, once you start to think about them. (You need to overcome the heaviest before undertaking the exercise.). . I’ve come out of steady-state exhaustion and moved into stop-start. I keep making lists of what to do . . 4. Have more sex and more loving sex, 5. Bewitch, bedazzle, and otherwise coax students into surpassing themselves . . 9. Cultivate gratitude, I’ve had a good life, 10. Get down to writing the hypothetical book. "Undying", Todd Gitlin

VIRGO Someone close to you has become too isolated, and you're just the one to help. This person is floating along in his own bubble, but you can burst the bubble with honesty and plain words.

I am in pain.

my rising sign: The next phase of your life will be an excellent time to unbreak your heart. Here's what I mean by that: You will have extra power to dissolve any pain that still lingers from the romantic disappointments of the past. You'll be able to summon acute insights into how to dismantle the sodden and unnecessary defenses you built to protect yourself from loss and humiliation. You will find it easier than ever before to forgive and forget any close companion who hurt you. So get out there, Capricorn, and launch the joyful process of restoring your love muscles to their original potency.

you have nothing to fear when you have nothing to be ashamed of (you proud of yourself?)

update: I'm perfect (eyeroll). so I'm going to take one of those magic painpills now, oxywhateversomething, and wash it down with a nice cold beer and enjoy my brief stint this week as a painpill addict. by Saturday mid-morning, I'll be free of both a grain of pesky sand in my guts and people who have proved themselves to be not good people, and insurance will cover the process of having had both hacked out. so mote it be.

"It's so easy to laugh
It's so easy to hate
It takes guts to be gentle and kind" - Morrissey

lucinda williams - weren't born to be forsaken
---------------------

I hate mornings and I hate the cold and I hate hospitals >:(

2nd of 3 times I have to drag my ass there first thing - today I find out if I'm dying of something I don't know about, like I dunno what, kidney failure or something - and if not then yay I get to go back Sat and have the grain of sand cut out so I can go back to dying like everyone else (ie not so's you'd notice, and thus have to be thinking about Life Death Issues Shit all the time which fyi is a total bummer). so far the results of all these tests are that I'm in shockingly good health. I heard "wow" half a dozen times at least yesterday. and here's me: GRUMPY. grumpier by the second. I'm so healthy that Cal is chattering away about the gG gene sequence, and how if I have 2 g's he might have 3!! which is the most anyone can have and then you live to be 120 years old easy!! (doesn't that sound like fun?) I know I should be pleased, I honestly don't know why I'm not, but something about "wow, 99 of 100 possible circulatory, you have fabulous oxygen exchange - hormones like you're 20, better watch out ha ha - that was my fastest ekg ever young lady" pissed me off royally by the end. if I'm so damn healthy, a grain of sand should not be able to take me down like this. and if it can, then what is the good of being healthy?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?! sigh, I guess I shouldn't think that cz if I go back in now and they tell me wait no you're not healthy, well I will surely be even more pissed >:(

we are all hanging by a thread over a pit of obvlivion at the mindless mercy of even the most innocuous threats

telekinesis - I cannot love you

telekinesis - I cannot love you

today is going to suuuuuuuuuuuuuuck - and each day, I sort things in my mind by whom and what I respect (and do not)

telekinesis - I cannot love you

Hello, my name is Gina, I'm a self-asshoholic.

Quan Yin - I pulled that card for advice a few days ago (upshot), and I'd been thinking about self-compassion (vs self-pity, which I have a lot of lately) and here's the thing: 1. compassion begins with the self (it's true, the Dalai Llama and others have explained this at length, if you don't know what compassion feels like wholly then you don't know shit about it and you've had pity/guilt [at MOST] instead) and 2. you have no compassion for yourself.

Maybe you've had a bolt of it, here and there? Like when I looked at Ears, like looking in a mirror, and he was new and I felt a bolt of my own total vulnerability, that I had come into the world just like he had, at the mercy of who/whatever, and I had compassion for myself. It lasted a microsecond, but so unusual a feeling was it (unlike self-pity, which I takes baths in) (or self-scrutiny, therapuetic as that may be, bla bla) that I still remember it. Look inside your mind - do you even have a microsecond of self-compassion to remember? A moment of real tenderness? Not understanding and not pity, but tenderness. Have you ever smoothed the hair away from your own forehead in your mind and thought how beautiful and fleeting you are, how tiny and brilliant, a flame sputter in the wide universe precious enough to rend your heart? Have you ever thought of yourself selflessly, something like "I'd do anything for you" - ? I doubt it. I bet you suffer yourself, not suffer WITH yourself.

I've been thinking of these things in the last couple weeks, mostly hating myself, hating my body for sure, and scared for it. Hating my weaknesses, which I could go on cataloging forever and never run of ones to note. In pain a lot, the dishes undone, the laundry undone, my legs unshaved for weeks, as if flipping myself off in every little way I can think of, like I'm my own unwanted lover. I'm surprised by how much simple affection has come my way in that time from others, a LOT of it - I have not been surprised at the lack of affection in that time too - but though fleeting, I have had moments of thinking "I do not respect a lack of compassion" in those instances. ("Deliberate cruelty is not forgivable." - Tenessee Williams) It is a very subtle shift in thinking going on, which might well be what I take away from this whole thing. It's not "why don't you love me better wa wa wa", ie self-pity. It's "I do not respect your lack", and/but that lack started with me in the first place and I'm exhibiting it every day, flipping myself off and kicking myself out of the way, trying hard to break up with myself without even bothering to say so, just doing it via disdain. If I were my own lover, I'd be appalled at my lack of giving the slightest shit - I'd think things like, 'you can't even say something nice, once a day or even once a week, to someone who has tried so hard to be decent? not even when she's upset and not feeling well? you can't do a dish or even SMILE at her? NOTHING?' and I'd not respect that.

I do not respect myself for my lack of compassion towards myself (nevermind anyone else's lack). And so now I have self-disdain for my self-disdain. How the hell does a person begin to turn this around and find/have/practice self-compassion? Honestly, I dunno. But I've read a million times that to bring about change, you have to not want it, you have to "accept where you are today", the yogi mantra: accept. So, I'm trying to have acceptace of my lack of compassion hoping it'll bring on some compassion: I am self-assholic, I accept this as true.

and LMG, at a benefit he put together for a guy who died named Ryan, who died on the RT 104 last year smalltownstyle, meaning that we had all heard of a crash and were wondering which one of us it was and it turned out to be him

(and I have a crush on him too, and he has one on me too - and I think 99% of the time maybe that's ideal, just that, just ILIKEYOUSOMUCHness whenever you see each other. friends w real human benefits)

Thighs, Throat and CrownChakra

(their real name is Whatever, as in band names change every time one dude swaps out, which is every other day)

(I've got a big ol crush on Thighs cz he has a big crush on me and omg you should hear him play Folsom - !!! - holy shit)

compassion
mid-14c., from O.Fr. compassion "sympathy, pity" (12c.), from L.L. compassionem (nom. compassio) "sympathy," noun of state from pp. stem of compati "to feel pity," from com- "together" (see com-) + pati "to suffer" (see passion). Latin compassio is an ecclesiastical loan-translation of Gk. sympatheia (see sympathy). An O.E. loan-translation of compassion was efenðrowung.

do you have it? (are you sure?)

iron and wine - freedom hangs like heaven

hockey was good. I watched it on a split screen. would have been better if Canada had gone down in ignomy. but you can't have everything.

I love this:

I drive to the accountant, Ernie, first thing in the morning and pass on the way a little falling down bungalow with peeling paint and two large quancet style greenhouses in the yard. I wonder how long it would take me to

thought I might delete this blog. I dunno what the point is. guess I'll hold off (for now) cz I'm too icky to decide things and besides here I am bla bla'ing away. at nothing/nobody, like graffiti on the walls of confinement. like, what?, is the next prisoner going to find solace in the trace? days scratched off? messages of longing and survival whatever? I dunno. so anyway, M at work is a "textual scholar", meaning she studies what you write before and during the time you're writing something, and now that we all just delete as we go instead of crossing stuff out and leaving a trace, it's all f'd up cz it's as if we just barf up finished products but those products are kinda like dying gasps as much as the upshot. like your death isn't the PRODUCT of your life, right? it's all that breathing beforehand that's the meat of existence, not the end. so I decided to print out Wantdog before I ax'd her, expecting it to take 15 minutes. it took half the afternoon and nearly 4 reams of paper. I think of myself as someone who was maybe going to become a writer but who didn't. that's true, and it isn't. (someone to write at has/d value.) ---
spring breakup - it's not me, it's you
the little willies - it's not you, it's me

today was better, the weather was better, birds chirping etc etc. it helps. still though my guts are hurting me. my body has betrayed me. it has failed, and that feels like a betrayal. I'm appalled that it is forcing me to face things I find abhorrent. doctors scare the bejesus out of me. and FPH is not dead he is just dead to me. I am the thing that can be cut out, like a gallbladder. and that feels like a betrayal to me. I'm appalled to have to feel like a gallbladder. and my heart aches for both my body and its fragility and for him and his sake, so my heart is failing and betraying me too. and I would so love to think about other things, the birds chirping and shit, but my mind comes back to the pain(s) and the fear(s), constantly betraying and failing me worst of all. my spirit is all that's left to count on

I'm making a Carey Price voodoo doll and then hacking its head off with a puck. (or #5 looks good, that'd slow a man down - in fact, the history of NHL injuries gives a wronged and wounded girl some bright ideas in general)

realized why smoking is allowed around the pool table then realized why I'd not gotten the drift before when a woman named Olivia took the stage sign your name across my heart (cover) if for no other reason (which there are a lot), music would be a good reason to be alive (while it lasts)

doesn't cure me but it doesn't hurt

A friendship may no longer and not primarily consist in a resolute and thus mutually generous way of siding with one another in the world, but in a constant and prior watching out for how the other sets out to deal with what is meant by friendship, in a constant check on whether he turns out to be one or not. --Heidegger The problem with everyone you know is that they think they know you already, and it's nearly impossible to disabuse them of that assumption.