the meaning of life.

Our purpose is to consciously, deliberately evolve toward a wiser, more liberated and luminous state of being; to return to Eden, make friends with the snake, and set up our computers among the wild apple trees. Deep down, all of us are probably aware that some kind of mystical evolution - a melding into the godhead, into love - is our true task. Yet we suppress the notion with considerable force because to admit it is to acknowledge that most of our political gyrations, religious dogmas, social ambitions and financial ploys are not merely counterproductive but trivial. Our mission is to jettison those pointless preoccupations and take on once again the primordial cargo of inexhaustible ecstasy. Or, barring that, to turn out a good thin-crust pizza and a strong glass of beer.

-tom robbins, wild ducks flying backward

the happy ones.

i already told you today was stunning. but it really was. today was a day for calypso, porches, frisbees, reading outside, bike rides, and puppies. i told jake we should take the dog to centennial. he laughed. we dont have a dog...

my friend frances had her senior harp recital this afternoon; it was wonderful. and so many people came from little rock to be there. but ahhh it really was fantastic. growing up with a friend who plays the harp is a privilege. and the bestcutest part was that she was accompanied by her bf, andy, on the piano.

then i worked on teach for america items. which i enjoyed, because my blinds were open, and it was like being outside.

the rest of the day/night was spent on jakes porch. its strange how peaceful the sounds of the city can be. and i mean that quite literally because jake lives next to i-40 (but then again, so do i, so maybe im just immune)

here's something from jitterbug perfume:

wait. stop. notice, my inadvertent, adventitious rhymage.

"I'm fine," she said. Besides, unhappiness is natural. I'm not one of those bubbleheads that spend all their time trying to avoid the normal misery of life."
She moved torwards the front door, but none too swiftly. He followed.

"Sure and life is a lot o' misery, all right, and death is more misery, yet. Dread, fear, anxiety, guilt, even a bit o' nerousis, are perfectly natural responses to a life that promises such an unacceptable end. The trick is to not take such responses too seriously, not to trivialize your all too short stay in your carton o' flesh by cooperatin with misery."

"Seems to me," said Priscilla, snapping and unsnapping the collar of her slicker,"that the so-called happy people are the ones who are trivial. Avoiding reality and never thinking about anything important."

"Reality is subjective, and there's an unenlightened tendencey in this culture to regard something as 'important' only if it's sober and severe. Sure and your right about the Cheerfull Dumb, only they're not so much happy as lobotomized. But your Gloomy Smart are just as ridiculous. When you're unhappy, you get to pay alot of attention to yourself. And you get to take your self oh so very seriously. Your truly happy people, which is to say,your people who truly like themselves, they dont think about themselves very much.Your unnhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that meas he has to stop dwellin' on himself and start' payin attention to the universe. Unhappines is the ultimate form o' self-indulugence."

ok i have to finish this book and then write a paper on it, so i will be drinking my biodynamic cabernet and snuggled under my favorite quilt for the rest of this perfectday.

cheers to a good week.

and ps. spring break is almost here.

thesis.

I've been in love with Tom Robbins since day one, and when I applied to the Honors program at Vanderbilt, he was at the top of the list for my thesis topics. Until recently, I have engaged in a sort of sporadic exploration of different representations of sex as communion in late 20th century American literature. The problem with this thesis was that I was starting below zero. I had never read Lady Chatterley's Lover (DH Lawrence was tirelessly overt in his sexual/communion language) and I had never read half of the texts suggested by my professors. I attempted Portnoy's Complaint, a novel by Phillip Roth, which is crassly devoted to the psychology and spirituality of "wacking off."And I could never even sum up the courage to buy a John Retchie novel (you can look up why on your own)...

lets just say, I didn't get very far and all of it was a bit too much.

Finally though, I finished reading Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (a novel about a giant-thumbed hitchhiker who joins up the not-so-traditional feminist cowgirls who preach freedom and feminine sexual hygiene at the Rubber Rose Ranch, and ends up proving to be the freest woman of them all), I had a new idea that allowed me to just write about Robbins (an author whose supporting literature is lacking in proportion to his brilliance) and do so without thinking about orgasm for too many hours a day.

all thats to say, my thesis will go something like this:

Tom Robbins: The Feminine Hero and Her New Frontier

sounds pretty right?

still life.

"How can one person be more real than any other? Well, some people hide and others seek. Maybe those who are in hiding -- escaping encounters, avoiding surprises, protecting their property, ignoring their fantasies, restricting their feelings, sitting out the Pan pipe hootchy-kootch of experience -- maybe those people, people who won't talk to rednecks, or if they're rednecks won't talk to intellectuals, people who're afraid to get their shoes muddy or their noses wet, afraid to eat what they crave, afraid to drink Mexican water, afraid to bet a long shot to win, afraid to hitchhike, jaywalk, honky-tonk, cogitate, osculate, levitate, rock it, bop it, sock it, or bark at the moon, maybe such people are simply inauthentic, and maybe the jackleg humanist who says differently is due to have his tongue fried on the hot slabs of Liar's Hell. Some folks hide, and some folks seek, and seeking, when it's mindless, neurotic, desperate, or pusillanimous, can be a form of hiding. But there are folks who want to know and aren't afraid to look and won't turn tail should they find it -- and if they never do, they'll have a good time anyway because nothing, neither the terrible truth nor the absence of it, is going to cheat them out of one honest breath of earth's sweet gas."

i just finished reading Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, and per usual, my mind was blown.

if you havent read tom robbins, you are making a mistake. you are succumbing to the dullness of the mind, the only tyrannical enemy (or at least that's what Delores del Ruby's fourth vision told her).

tom robbins is the shit.

The normal rectal temperature of a hummingbird is 104.6.

The normal rectal temperature of a bumblebee is calculated to be 110.8, although so far no one has succeeded in taking the rectal temperature of a bumblebee. That doesn't mean that it can't or won't be done. Scientific research marches on: perhaps at this moment, bee proctologists at Du Pont...

As for the oyster, its rectal temperature has never even been estimated, although we must suspect that the tissue heat of the sedentary bivalve is as far below good old 98.6 as that of the busy bee is above. Nonetheless, the oyster, could it fancy, should fancy its excremental equipment a hot item, for what other among Creation's crapping creatures can convert its bodily wastes into treasure?

There is a metaphor here, however strained.

- Even Cowgirls Get the Blues