Friday, April 20, 2012

mine and yours

all the talk about babies and weddings and all the updates on facebook, friends and friends of friends -- yeah, they're pretty far removed -- and then GOOD friends, like my roommate from a couple years back, pregnant, due in late july with a little girl whose name they're keeping secret and whose room they want to paint blue, who she insists will be a giants fan and he a redskins fan, who they're buying a "family car" for and giving up the hot vw convertible we used to drive down rock creek parkway with the windows down and tom petty playing... and then he sends me pictures of rings and asks my opinion, time to make their little family official... in the next month or so he'll ask the question and she'll say yes and then it'll be three, their dog, their condo, with the new hardwood floors and the blue nursery...

the wholeness, the comfort of it, the THIS IS MINE,
the smell of baby cheeks,
baby kisses,
baby fingers,
looking at something that your love created it and loving it more than you love each other and even yourself,
deciding -- enough playing,
you are mine, i am yours,
forever.
here is our baby
our house
our dog
this is where we live
this is what we like to do
this is how we love.

i can't wait for that feeling.

Monday, April 9, 2012

sci-fied

Since childhood I have had an almost instinctual revulsion to anything related to science fiction. The blame I attribute almost entirely to my father.

I recall so many afternoons coming inside from playing, or settling down from dinner, to head to the couch to watch some television, only to find my dad had already overtaken it with ancient episodes of Star Trek. Oh, the theme song. Oh, the "Captains Log"s. I still remember the different varieties -- Deep Space Nine, Voyager. Oh, how I sighed. "DAAAAD! This is SO BORING! Can't we watch something COOL?!" I sulked and moaned, but he was hooked. "Sweetie, this IS cool! You just don't get it!"

My father's love of science fiction doesn't end with Star Trek. He also loves Star Wars, and has recounted his story of the excitement of watching it in the theater and how the graphics were so surreal and mindblowing (for the time) to me so.many.times. His first favorite book was The Hobbit.


So it's always been a point of pride of mine to turn down anything science-fiction related, to shrug it off as "geeky," to tease my dad about being such a big stinking nerd.

But lately, it seems my afore-dreaded sci-fi is all I'm reading. First it was 1Q84, by Haruki Murakami, a tale of parallel universes and star-crossed lovers, featuring elf-like creatures and double-moons. Then there was the Hunger Games, which was, I almost hate to admit, fast and fun and exciting, even with all the futuristic and dystopian setting. Now I'm on to Brave New World, which my boyfriend picked up at the used book store a while back. I picked it up last night at about 1 am, right after reading Hunger Games, my appetite for other worlds insatiable. Despite my sleepiness, I could NOT put it down.

For all its space-iness and futuristicness, it has so many amazing truths. So many beautiful ideas to chew on. Every couple lines I feel I have to pause to digest what was said. I don't want to miss a lick of it. What a heavy piece about the human condition. Written in 1931 and just as true now (if not more) than it is then.

All hail science fiction!