Apples in Our Eyes Mix

“Nothing Matters When We’re Dancing” – Magnetic Fields

“Sea of Love” – Cat Power

“I’ll Be Seeing You” – Billie Holiday

“Chariot” – Page France

“Thank You for Your Love” – Antony and the Johnsons

“Let Me Be Your Bride” – Virgin of the Birds

“Fade Into You” – Mazzy Star

“Peace Like a River” – Spoon

“When the Night Comes” – Dan Auerbach

“Honey or Tar” – CocoRosie

“Ask Her to Dance” – Coconut Records

“I’ll Come Running Back to You” – Sam Cooke

“By Your Side” – CocoRosie

“Heartbeats” – Jose Gonzalez

“You Really Got a Hold on Me” – She & Him

“Home” – Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros

“Can’t Help Falling in Love With You” – Ingrid Michaelson

“I Summon You” – Spoon

The Blood Off Your Tendons (and thoughts on circles)

It's the blood off your tendons that makes the leather of your new shoes soft. The pain of a long journey and the regrets we feel when we step on cracks in the sidewalk. The backs we've broken. The callouses we've built that our loved ones won't rub at night. The pain of a long journey and the burn on our cheeks where our rose-tinted glasses failed us.

It's strange how we soldier forward; strange that we've stood naked- in degrees between literal and analogical- so proud, so strong and sure, for men we've lost the addresses for. Strange how we looked with eyes so soft and shaded when the winds blew wild enough to knot and noose our hair.

The pain of a long journey, like when you stare too directly and too long at passerbys on the train, when you look at the edges of two objects too color-contrasted they seem two-dimensional, the embarrassment you feel when you're caught. The vanishing of the thought that maybe one day you'd mindlessly rub their callouses in front of a blaring television without wondering where they came from, that one day you'd stand naked in front of them- in degrees between literal and analogical.

It's the blood off your tendons that makes the leather of your new shoes soft.

Harmony

"Took some broad here on our first date cause shes vegetarian. I figured "hey, its a chinese place i'm sure i'll like something." I figured wrong. Everything tasted like funnel cake! I don't get it. Granted I'm sure if I was a weirdo vegan and this is the best I could do I'd love it but alas I'm normal and like meat. Vegan food is too much for me and I would assume the same for most normals."

an actual review for Harmony Vegetarian restaurant in Philadelphia (via www.urbanspoon.com)

Just Old

I just feel old.

Every morning I'm more surprised that my knees don't creak and my back still straightens. My chest feels old, my stomach, my eyes- all old.

All "oh, I've seen it all before." All "time will tell."

I think I've always been this way. Maybe I was born like Benjamin Button, except different.

If I feel this way now, how will I feel when my skin is actually crumpled crepe paper? When I actually have clouded eyes? When I can open pickle jars or button my clothes?

I do wonder if I'll get any better at crossword puzzles...

Georgia

With stakes and some twine, we made a rectangle and decided which soft green bed of grass would be turned and made to garden. Not for ourselves, but for those who let us sleep on the floors of their now-grown children. We were in the mountains somewhere, in the South somewhere, sometime in the spring, but the sun beat down on our cheeks and made them flush, coaxed the sweat and salt from our skin.

I had a shovel, and you had one too. Carefully, I lined up the back of my shovel with the twine on one side. I bore down, with the handle pushing hard against my ribs. I didn't make it down more than a couple inches, embarrassed and frustrated with my feminine physical incapabilities. My cheeks flushed more. The sweat dripped and dampened the small of my back, and the back of my neck, and my underarms, the space behind my knees. I watched you, casually, pick up a shovel- its handle like splintered bone and its dull metalic blade- watched you position next to the twine and drive deep straight and solid into the grass to the blade's hilt, reared back, and turned the soil.

I watched your arm bulge when you lifted the Apalachian soil, turned it and pushed aside the rocks. I saw the rivulets of sweat on your temples and through the hair on your chest, the beads on your forehead, saw the veins in your arm deliver oxygen to your extremities. I watched you drive deep into the earth, over and over, and over, turning it inside out, leaving it exposed and rough.

Hurricane Musings

I didn't want to stay. In fact, I protested quite violently that mandatory meant mandatory. But no, my father paid for a week and we would be staying for a week, in this house by the sea. Just wind and some rain.

That ended the family meeting. Patriarch had spoken.

Over a dinner of box pasta and sauce out of a jar, of salad out of a bag, served in a pot, we held hands and they said grace.

"Jamie, you're not saying grace with us?"

"Grandma, I've told you I'm agnostic. I don't say grace" She frowns the same way when I told her that my boyfriend's an atheist (even worse), that eating animals is cruel, that I don't believe in Santa Claus, or for that matter, Jesus Christ, that I was drunk and upset that we were still there while a hurricane loomed off the shore and our neighbors' houses boarded. She pressed on to find happy things to report, but we all did the same thing today- sit in front of the weather channel with the evacuation notices scrolling across the bottom, fancy maps with possible path projections, stock footage of floating dumpsters and traffic signs bent nearly ninety degrees.

We bring in the rocking chairs.

The house owner, the management company and a local government official called to remind us that after the storm starts, there will be no emergency response, but father said, "I think we'll wait it out." No response say if my father has an overdue heart attack, or my grandmother falls down some stairs with her bionic hips and knees, or if our entire matchbox house is lit up like a lantern. "I think we'll wait it out."

After dinner, dad fell asleep upstairs from too much wine. Little Brother and my grandparents ate icecream and watched a spaghetti western with an actress strongly resembling Bridget Bardot. I drank in my room with the windows open- the breeze flowing in from one window, swirled around my the ceiling fan, and out the other window. I kissed everyone goodnight, moody, so they'd know I still stood where I stood. Kissing everyone goodnight is mandatory so I do that, even though I'm mad.

Friday, September 3, 2010 - 4:09am

My bed is shaking. The whole house is shaking. It sounds like waves are crashing outside my window. It's the sound of waves climbing on each other's backs until their knees are taken out by a sand bar and they come falling one top of the other onto the shore. We're flooding outside. I can hear us swished like the inside of the washing machine. Rain is coming down not evenly. I secretly wish a plank flies through the living room window so that they know I had been right.

I'm lying in bed, listening. I hear a bird somewhere outside and I wonder why it hasn't left. Why it didn't feel the drop in pressure, heed warning and leave. Then I remember that we didn't leave either.

"As of 2 a.m. Eastern Time Friday, Earl was located about 85 miles east-southeast of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, or about 515 miles south-southwest of Nantucket, Massachusetts, and had top winds near 105 miles per hour. This makes Earl a category 2 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson hurrican wind scale. Earl is moving to the north-northeast near 18 miles per hour, and is expected to speed up its forward progress and make a gradual turn to the northeast over the next day or two. Earl is also expected to gradually weaken, but its wind field is expected to spread out. " - Mark Avery, Lead Meterologist, The Weather Channel