Fresh Noons Blooming

All right, I've rolled up my sleeves and I'm cleaning house. Mentally, of course, and socially. I take out the spiderwebs, the spider veins that spread below, the pests. I weed the unnecessary creatures out, the pesky ghosts. My mind is a repository of bad sediment sometimes, the words and deeds of others stay with me - angry ghosts.
It takes a lot of courage to let go of a ghost, even an angry one. We are used to his voice, we think we need it. All along it was my own mind that fathomed you that fashioned you into significance. In the end, perception is almost everything it seems, at least when it comes to the power of reality and dreams.
The truth is, there's nothing wrong with anything that has happened. My only issue is moving on, moving forward and into the fresh light of a new day. I was held back a bit this summer by obligations and spoiled love like spoiled coconut milk in the Bahian sun. Sometimes are own obligations tether us to the wrong coconut. But that's ok....
I keep meeting little princes along the way and they are not the polite one fashioned by Exupery but the real whinging ones that are forever glued to the nipple. Oh Puer Aeternus, go find another temporary mommy to suckle. Ok? Ok.
In the meantime I'll go enjoy this Latin city properly with its European houses and mysterious ports.
"Follow your own star!" - Dante Alighieri

Clones and Buenos Aires

Should I get this haircut? That's my doppelganger right there. I'm wearing that same red shade of lipstick right now and it goes with all of the Audrey Hepburns and Marilyn Monroes that hang on the walls of hostels and restaurants in this city. Little kitschy items with their faces in the markets, old magazines with movie stars and fresh babes advertising cars. There is a repository here from the 30's-70's, a collection of odds and ends. Old children's toys, terrifying and dirty in their market stalls, the most fascinating little personalized postcards that parents used to send between countries of their children dressed up in the latest fashionable getup...I found most of this in the Feria de San Telmo.

My heart is heavy light at the moment. Flavored with Brahma Chopp bought at the corner store, unrefrigerated. I'm weighed down only by my own penchant for roller coaster boyfriends. Audrey how did you wear your love? And you Marilyn? Two opposite ends of the feminine spectrum it seems...both adored and salivated after to this day. Phantoms.
Are we stronger in flesh or in after-flesh? Sometimes the answer is less obvious than it seems.

I am not the woman of your dreams. I seem to wish to make that very clear very quickly. Maybe because fantasy is terrifying? I overdo it. Fantasy is what we need to survive. We need Audrey and we certainly need Marilyn. Buenos Aires has a point.

Grey sky calls for writing

Although actually I'm starving. How wonderful that I trained all over the campus of Rio Grande do Sul today, on a gray warmish Saturday when most people were out and I practiced capoeira kicks in the windows of the buildings and did cartwheels across the lawns and did pushups on random cement blocks that lay on the grounds.

I had my palm read after the Batizado in Rio. It was a spontaneous thing, there was a sweet old woman sitting there, taking palms and telling their stories.
Mine seemed to cause a lot of emotion in the woman. My tiny soft hand had her exclaiming that I was feminine and delicate. At another point she kissed it saying I was very spiritualized. It was a sweet reading all in all.

I'm running away from Porto Alegre for a week on a beautiful trip to the Argentinian border...and at the moment I'm running away to the supermercado because my new amiga and I concur that food is pretty damn important.

calling on my orisha, my baba yaga, my hatikva

I found this incantation/prayer to Yemaya, goddess of the sea, who last year was identified for me as my orixa. The sea has always been the most powerful, soothing, and grounding force for me. It's energy peaks my own and when I am in it I am a mermaid.:

Yemaya. Mother, goddess of the Sea,
Be in this place, come forth unto me,
Lady of the oceans, the lakes, and the rivers,
Beautiful Queen, ebb and flow bringer,
Heal my mind, my body
my soul.
For with your sweet love, I become whole.
Ashe, Great Mother
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Even seeing that blue depth from my window is soothing and perfect. I have missed you so, sweet ocean power. The sea, seeing and not seeing it, feeling its energy near me. The sea, the sea, the sea.

I give thanks. I don blue today and in my heart, the blue of endless possibility, and believe that the world will open its depths to me if I just give it a little patience, a little care. I believe that there is poetry out there, and it awaits me. Poetry on the doorstep of my heart. Poetry that will tear us clean and new. Words that strip the pain and bring the light, I believe in hearts that heal each other and hands that warm each other and minds that help each other. I believe that some day we will be without a catch, ready for a better day. I believe that in this path we wretch, there is a better hand to play.

This imperfect thing we love so much.

About a week, A WEEK, until I fly off to Brazil. It's sinking in and is a little terrifying. I'm terribly excited and as usual I'm finishing up a paper, getting last minute things together, and have not started packing. I lived in denial for 2 days this weekend during which I mainly slept and watched weepy lovesick episodes of Grey's Anatomy. I am a master hibernator, especially when there's work to be done. Ok, I also managed to go on a date on which I had fun stepping outside of myself and pretending to be some random hot woman in a pretty dress on a date, (dates are good for that because the role-playing is such a game), cleaned out my fridge, and had my first yoga class in years. Now I'm drinking some kind of coffee called "European" that consists of egg white and half-and-half and vanilla and attempting to plan a passable paper on the history of childhood in Brazil. (The coffee in my favorite local Chicago cafe is always really funny tasting but I'm mainly here for the calm, studious atmosphere and the soothing young Russian couple who runs it anyway...the caffeine boost can come in odd flavors and I don't mind too much.) Hardly easy considering kids aren't exactly anyone's focus most of the time historically unless considered a problem. My idea wasn't to write about pedophiles or child abandonment...though there it is, entire chapters dedicated to poverty and perversion.

I did however manage to find a subletter within about a day of advertising my place. It is a lovely apartment and made me feel so good to find a thrilled tenant in oh, about 5 seconds.

I also have a sperm donor in case I decide to have a child on my own. I like him a lot, I may be in love with him in a way, whatever that everlastingly loaded term means. God knows I freak out enough for my potential sperm donor and I and our beautiful unborn multi-ethnic babies combined. No committed partner as of yet, but hey Cinderella did you know that modern life would be so darn difficult to navigate for women with standards and brains?

The shoe might fit but we're a little past comparing men to shoes aren't we? Unless you're looking for a two-dimensional life, and some people do of course, a consumer metaphor is hardly appropriate. Fuck the fairy shoe and it's fatalistic implications. Of course, I'm a terrible shoe shopper though when I do find shoes I like they tend to be awesome shoes complimented by strangers so maybe it's not the worst metaphor in the world. But it's not just about taste. It's not just about a Bourdieun understanding of choice and class. There is something else some of us seek, something like the soul that cannot be pinpointed in music and food and the societal niche occupied by the Prince or the Pauper (whoever you happen to fall for.) There's something deep and terribly poetic and painful and inappropriate at the bottom of it all. Your mother probably wouldn't approve of it because it isn't right. It's uncomfortable. The connection with those we have that funny feeling for is somewhere in the neighborhood of the Id and some fairy space called Romance Fantasy and this fairy space is only somewhat rooted in practical teachings and tangible truths. We try not to Peter Pan into the great wide unknown but we do anyway, we have a mutual drugging experience that feeds into the fairy space. We float off. Things don't make sense. We try to explain it to our friends but we can't. We're self-fulfilling madmen.

On that note I'm going back to work, good evening fellow fruit loops. 

chocolate pie ...and this title is complete

I'm wearing a goofy shirt that reads "I <3 Capoeira". It's for a 7-8 year old boy and so it's a tiny bit tight around the sleeves. It reminds me of how when I was a teenager it was popular to wear itsy bitsy shirts and show off your midriff. I have backpedaled into my teenage self and my midriff is slightly on display in this way too small thing I'm not sure why I bought it (except that the mestre with the Arnold Shwarzenegger accent who sold it to me has a charm about him, so if he says it's woman's shirt maybe I'll believe it for a little while,) but maybe I should cut the sleeves off....my little sisters wouldn't approve. It's a high school thing, it's a petty thing, it's a family thing, how to display myself, it's a fashion thing, it's a bullshit, bullshit thing. They always judged me so harshly, my mom and sisters, ridiculing me like a gang of popular bossy girls on the playground. I always succumbed, if not in action, then in hurt feelings. Very hurt feelings and a very sore ego.

I had my first Batizado this past weekend. Mestres and students flew into Chicago from all over the country and world to teach workshops and to graduate students in an order of dancefightloving....I somehow passed, graduated into a level. A white-yellow cord signifying that I have some level of skill: totally unexpected.

I'm in from the "beach," the Lake Michigan Shore...this whole Chicago summer thing is a new and interesting experience for me. It's the first time I've experienced it at all...I'm meeting a lot of nice, fun people in this warm version of Chicago. Well I can befriend for a little while before I re-Brazil my life. Chicago will never be Brazilian or tropical or warm enough anyway. A part of my heart has given up on it even as I discover lovely new nooks and crannies and finally meet the kind of folks I could enjoy myself with.

Things, in some way only have substance if you believe in their thingy-ness. If you believe in them. And I make-believe my own things all the time and that's a good escape from the confines of a mostly senseless world. The only parts that matter are the warm ones. Not their substance but their temperature. Touch my forehead. 

back to the people planet

As if this reconnecting with what I care about meant coming back to Earth. Which it does. As if the sun warming my heart and hopes meant that I could wish and feel empowered on a daily basis about the things that push me out of bed in the morning, that stimulate me into engaging with the world.

When a man in a light pink shirt sat down across from me a minute ago and started staring as if I'm his lunchtime entertainment, I thought, maybe this is my cue to go?
This feels like a weird, unfathomable day/week/something. Span of time punctuated by the kind of heat that usually stays behind shower curtains in Chicago.

I feel, slightly, like I'm bouncing around in one of those pinball machines, back and forth in a frenzy to win points and make contact with momentary discotheques. Ok, it's definitely time to change locations, bump into other silly frenzied points of contact.