there's no i in spder

usually i can't tell spiders apart, like it is hard to positively identify them as individuals, but one came in my CSA share and i sort of developed a fondness for him because he had only five legs. four on one side and one on the other. so i brought him out to the compost bin because there are all these flies that live in there and spiders like flies as far as i know and i thought maybe i could help him out a little, because he was disadvantaged in the leg department.

but so a couple days later i was in the shower and who should appear on the wall above the tile, but the one spider in the world that i can positively identify. now how or why he made the trek 30 ft. from my compost bin to my bathroom is something that i can't begin to understand, but there he was, in the flesh (wait, do spiders have flesh?). i figured that he must have made that journey for a reason though, so i decided to let him be. but as i was showering he started repelling down a strand of whatever a spider's strand is made of, towards the tub and perilously close to the reflected spray of the shower and the river of water headed for the drain. now i know he didn't want to go down there, because there is no way he knew what terrible fate awaited him in the sewage system so i put my hand in his path and he climbed aboard and i placed him on the windowsill, above the tub. he was a little startled by this turn of events and he just sat there, trying to figure out how his scenery had been so rapidly altered. 

anyway, next morning i got in the shower and there he was, mister five-legs, waiting for me above the tiles. i turned on the water and hopped in the tub and we reenacted the same series of events as the day before. next day, same thing. so i was not surprised by my arachnid-accompaniment on the fourth day when i climbed into the shower and i was equally unsurprised when the steam animated him and he started wandering about.

now it is impossible to say what was driving that creature towards the stream of water tumbling down the drain and, if he wanted to be down there so badly, why he didn't just go investigate some time when i was not in the shower. but on the fourth day he either repelled faster or just leapt without bothering to secure his strand, or maybe i just wasn't really paying attention, but i noticed the blank spot on the wall where he had been hanging out and looked down in time to see him circle the drain once before succumbing to the whirlpool of wastewater.

it was sad to see him go, but his persistence paid off in the end and i'm sorry if that makes you sad. i have a hard time allotting too many emotions for creatures as small and transient as spiders, but i felt a tinge of sadness as i watched him disappear. 

and r.w. emerson said "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds" and i'd add that sometimes we don't really want what we think we do.

(and i'm sorry for assigning a gender to the spider, but it made him a more sympathetic character and i don't really know how to ascertain a spider's gender anyway, so lay off. and it is too late now.)

looks can kill, or whatever

look, i understand that some people find me physically attractive and most of those people are my mom's friends who, every christmastime, tell me that i'm such a handsome man, and so i grew a beard and it became you're such a handsome man, why cover it up with a beard?

but my objection is this, and it has nothing to do with my difficulty accepting a compliment, or wait, maybe it does have something to do with that, but look, why praise someone for something they have no control over? i would rather be noticed for something i do rather than for the way i look. and if you can find something redeeming about me when i look like a homeless man, then i know i'm doing something right. 

and there is a precedent for this attitude: nico? sinead o'connor? (man, remember that sinead o'connor reggae album? haha.) and so i feel uncomfortable when people tell me i'm good-looking and i find it difficult to tell other people they are good-looking (and that has gotten me in trouble with girlfriends in the past, that reluctance). it isn't like i don't notice when people are good-looking, more like i would rather focus on other aspects of their personality that they have more control over.

college

so when you get to the point in your life when you start to wonder what about you makes you you (and believe me, you will if you haven't already), you'll try to assess what you connect with in other people and why. and if that makes no sense, let me just talk about my five-year college reunion.

charlie stole this bmx bike from somewhere (he is a doctor or nearly a doctor) and i don't place a lot of value in partying hard (see my story about jcb, re: pleasure and happiness), but i had had all this purple malt-energy beverage called four-max and sometimes it is fun to go a little crazy so i was chasing charlie up and down the parking lot in a dead sprint taking photographs as he rode this bike around and i remember thinking "i feel insane" and "this is unsustainable" (which is funny, because the theme of our reunion was sustainability). and if you were there i probably announced to you that i felt insane and there was good reason for that. energy drinks and alcohol are a bad combination for me and luckily the worst that happened last weekend was i fell off a golf cart that i was dancing on into the corner of a brick wall and got a little cut up, but one time four years ago (the last time i mixed energy drinks and alcohol) i had all this red bull and vodka and i was at a party and i realized that i had to get out of there so i excused myself to the bathroom which was on the second floor. once i got upstairs i started to formulate plans for my escape, which was not actually that difficult, because there was this balcony over the backyard and obviously all i had to do was climb down the balcony and hop the fence into the alley and walk home. but that wasn't how it worked out because i stepped over the guardrail and started to walk my way down the pillar that ran from the second story down to the ground and it detached from the balcony, pulled right out, and i am not sure how long i held on, but it wasn't very long and i found myself on the concrete, 15 ft. below where i thought i should be and goddamnit, my elbow hurt, but goddamnit that was funny. until i woke up the next day and wondered how i didn't hit my head and if anyone would have found me if i had. i don't think so. 

but we were talking about reunion and it was one of the best times i've had in a long time or maybe ever, because after chasing charlie and after the golf cart and the pants-off dance-off and after meeting all these great people, who i didn't really know at school, two of my best friends and two other newer friends who happened to be pretty girls and i went down to the canon river at like 4 in the morning and went for a swim and the sun was starting to come up and rosali didn't go in the water, because she was afraid of drowning and maybe for good reason. and it was the summer solstice and then we went to perkins for breakfast at 5:30 and this waiter named "J" brought us plates of food that we weren't that hungry for and everything was hilarious. after breakfast we drove out to canon falls where there was a lake and on the way there was this grass landing strip with all these people getting ready to take their small planes out for the day and we did yoga on the dock and some of us napped and some fishermen set off from the boat ramp. and i guess there was no real fitting way to end our time together, because we just sort of drifted away once we were back on campus and how do you say goodbye after something like that? it was just so amazing. and i stayed up the rest of the solstice (more or less) and went to a second breakfast with president oden, but i was even less hungry then than i was the first time and then i bade farewell to everyone i saw and to carleton college and went up to st. paul to watch a baseball game. (and that was fun too, but more in the expected fun kind of way). it was the kind of experience that can happen only once in a great while.

now it's not like i wasn't expecting to have fun, because i was, but i was convinced that i was in touch with the majority of people that i wanted to be in touch with and reunion maybe would be an opportunity for us all to be in the same place together, but probably not anything more (and i'm not saying that's not a lot). 

(and a brief aside here, why are there so many double negatives in that last sentence?)

anyway, we had our cliques (or social groups or friends or whatever) in college and i expected the same sort of structure to persist ad infinitum. but the miracle of reunion was that something, maybe distance, separation or real life made us realize that we all actually had a lot more in common with each other than any of us ever suspected, and in realizing this, we were freed of our social constraints. we were suddenly free to engage and connect with people outside our groups of friends. now that doesn't sound miraculous, or even noteworthy necessarily, but what if that lesson could be applied to societies greater than college classes? what if we could suddenly see everything we had in common with everyone; our shared goals, as opposed to our disagreements? 

and no one likes to be told how something is, least of all me (and especially not when it is me doing the telling-how-something-is), and so i'm sorry for that, i just think it is so nice to feel optimistic.

rambling about books

i was going through the list of books i've read on this literary social networking site called goodreads, which is kind of fun and it is kind of fun remembering that you've read some of the books that you've forgotten you've read. and there is a function on the website where you rate the book from 1 to 5 stars and i realized that i almost never rate a book below three stars, which means that i like almost every book i have ever read, at least the ones i remember i have read. but i don't think that is the whole story, see, because i figured out that i wasn't rating the books i started and then put down, and if i like a book, i don't tend to put it down with some exceptions (gravity's rainbow, don quixote, finnegan's wake), so the books i would rate as one or two stars are books that i won't rate because i don't finish them. again though, that is not the whole story, because i don't put too many books down. i guess i like every book i pick up because i think that every book has something to offer if you're willing to pay attention.