Pisces

[I don't know how much I believe in any of this, but I guess I'm a fairly decent example of a Pisces. Pleasure-loving, somewhat weak willed, creative, romantic, feminine, artistic. Tendency to dwell in a fantasy world. Flirt. Procrastinator. Lover of water. Mutable.]

Feb. 19 to March 20

[March 20, right on the cusp. In less than a month, I'll be twenty-seven. That seems unbelievably old in comparison to how old I am in my own head. I am not ready to be a grownup. My wish list is here. I was born on the first day of spring and I've always loved that.]

You've put away the fairy dust and dream catchers and are actually zeroing in on doing stuff like taxes and learning how to fix bikes.

[I don't know how to fix my bike yet, but I thought the fact that bikes were mentioned was kind of freaky. I guess I will be figuring out how to install my new seat at some point. I did reattach my car's rear view mirror yesterday, though. I got this special industrial glue just for rear view mirrors. I had to scrape the old adhesive off with a razor blade first. There was this glass vial within a plastic outer vial, and I had to squeeze until the inner glass vial broke, releasing the blue liquid within. There were all these warnings basically like, "If you so much as touch one molecule of this liquid, you WILL DIE INSTANTLY." Scary stuff. Then I had to add one tiny, teeny drop of orange glue, and hold the mirror on for fifteen minutes, but it seems to be staying on, with industrial strength, no less.]

[Oh, but I don't do my own taxes. The one year I tried, it was a nightmare. It's too complicated with school and stocks and stuff.]

You shouldn't freak out though, 'cause it totally suits you.

[Thanks. I'm so glad being a bicycle maniac suits me. The only bicycle maniacs I have ever known have been complete annoying freaks, though. I really don't want to be one of the complete annoying freaks.]

Someone will enter your life after the 11th and you'll immediately dream up the names of your future grandchildren.

[Yeah. Apparently they left out the next sentence due to space constraints. "Of course this will be completely delusional of you, and it will result in nothing but embarrassment, humiliation and heartbreak. Run away!"]

In the middle of the month, you'll feel extremely lucky with loot.

[Or not. Um. Hmm. My mom is giving me $50 to buy new pants for work. Does that count?]

This year: Commitment is the key.

[Of course when I first read this, I was thinking along the lines of that whole naming the grandchildren thing. But the big commitment in my life, of course, is to this whole biking thing, and the AIDS ride. And it is a huge, scary commitment. Eek.]

You'll grow closer to a lover, your family and friends.

[A lover? Yeah, kiss my ass. But as for family and friends, I hope so. I've been making an effort to return phone calls and spend time with people. There are a lot of people in my life who I love, which makes me quite lucky. It's important to me that I connect and reconnect with them. This site is one way of doing that, but it's the one-sided, all-about-me sort of way. I'm working on the other ways.]

This will be nice because everyone you work with is, or will go, totally psycho.

[They must mean our customers. Our customers are definitely totally psycho. Okay not all of them. But many of them. We had one customer who came in and yelled at my assistant manager. She had just seen I Am Sam (where Sean Penn plays a mentally retarded person who works at Starbucks) and was all, "You LIED! You lied in that movie! You never hire retarded people!" My manager was like, "Um, yes, Starbucks does hire mentally challenged people, actually." She came back with, "Oh really! Well WHY DO YOU DO THAT? What can they even DO?" My manager said, "They do bus runs, they take out trash, they handle dishes, they stock... they do a lot of things." The customer just looked at her and said. "Well, I'll take a venti latte, then."]

Joey had a commonplace book party last night.

What's that you say? What's a commonplace book? So glad you asked. A couple of weeks ago, we were studying the poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt, who was a member of the court of King Henry VIII. (Had an affair with Anne Boleyn and was almost executed, like, ten times. Quite a story.) The reason his poems have survived was not because they were published in the traditional sense, but because they were in one of the common books of the court.

You see, members of the court (I think mostly women) would have these books called commonplace books. And people would circulate poetry and stuff, and if you liked something you read, you'd copy it into your book. Sometimes you'd get a poem and then write your own response to it, and then pass that along. They sort of became community anthologies, with random bits of writing (some attributed, some not) and this is how poetry was passed down.

So we were all told to make a common book, and put our favorite poems and some of our own work in them. Joey, Laurie and I also introduced the slam book element, having pages for, like "Who in the program do you want to have sex with?" or "Top 50 rumors about our school" which ended up being the best one.

Then we passed around our books, reading things aloud to each other, copying things into our books, etc. The first thing I put in the book was the first poem I ever wrote, which is unintentionally such a funny poem. I wrote it, apparently, on January 17, 1989. My nom de plume at the time was, no kidding, "Zosia Moon Belmont-Madrid."

Ballet Slippers in Spring

I walked
down
the path.
Spring.
The green shoots
new
alive, vibrant.
In ballet slippers.
ready for class.
ready for life.
the sweat
the work
the dance
the grace
the beauty
and gruel.
But now,
a stolen moment to dream of the dance.
Ballet slippers.
in spring

The word "gruel" is supposed to mean, like, "grueling" or something. Unfortunately, it just sounds like I'm about to stop off for a bowl of porridge before class. I also enjoy the one random long line, the emphatic punctuation, and the randomness of the capitalization. I also love how there's a period after almost everything except the last line of the poem.

One guy (the new guy to the program, Martin) totally got the joke of this poem, copied it into his common book, cracked up with me and said the poem was cute. Heh.

We listened to Renaissance music, had fresh fruit, cheese and wine. I copied a lot of amazing stuff into my common book. I also brought the quill and ink that Martie gave me for my birthday last year. I did the front page inscription with it. It's hard to write with a quill, but fun. Nice to have such an appropriate writing instrument for a Renaissance party.

I really reconnected with poetry-- people had amazing, incredible stuff in their common books. I loved filling mine out, too-- random Shakespeare quotes, a couple of favorite poems that I have in my memory banks, some of my own stuff. It was a great night.

Except that between this and reading Slaughterhouse Five, I'm beginning to think I can't write at all, and I never will be able to. Damn, how do you learn to write such amazing shit? I mean, come on. One poem ends: "I married the way moths marry. I married hard." Who can live up to that?

Here's one by Georges Batille:

Death dwells in my heart
like a little widow
she sobs she is a coward
I'm afraid
I could vomit

the widow laughs to the skies
and rips the birds to pieces

"I was sobering up, and she was getting drunker, which perhaps explains why she was the more successful flirt. We were offering to be the strippers at his bachelor party and she said, 'I'll take off my clothes, jump out of the cake, cover myself with frosting and let you lick it off.' I just couldn't trump that."