that joke isn't funny anymore

Lately I've had occasion to think about what I used to sing when I didn't know from sad. When I was fifteen, one of my best friends, a girl who lived across the street, playfully tackled my boyfriend in someone's yard after a Fellowship of Christian Athletes meeting, and then she kissed him. The boyfriend I had already decided I didn't like anymore. Her act should have been a mercy, a convenient ending to a relationship I likely wouldn't have had the gumption to cut off myself, but instead of making up with her and thanking my lucky stars for an easy way out, I suddenly decided that I did after all want to keep him as my boyfriend. I don't think it's any coincidence that my change of heart allowed me to draw myself up to my full sanctimonious height and, wrapping myself in a shroud of wounded trust, inflate her act of treachery until it was so huge that we almost never recovered. So this is what betrayal feels like, I kept telling myself, my chin held at a proud yet mournful angle. She felt guilty for the rest of high school. In my yearbook, she wrote, "Thank you for forgiving me for something I haven't forgiven myself for yet."

july photo-a-day challenge

Here is the photo-a-day challenge for July.

What follows are my photos from this past month. For most of that time, I was staying in Knoxville at my Nana's house with her sweetheart Al and my mom, waiting with Nana as she was dying. I will have more to say about that in the next post. In the meantime, here are the pics:

june photo-a-day challenge

Yay! More photo-a-day assignments!

And here are the pics:

absolutely cuckoo

Okay, I've got some chicken lettuce wraps for you today that are crazy delicious.

But first, here is one of my favorite songs by Magnetic Fields (or here's another version, which I can't embed, but which comes with an adorable animated video someone made):

maïs, je t'aime

Which translates: "Corn, I love you." When I typed it, though, I realized that if you omitted the umlaut over the "i" in the initial word (hence altering its pronunciation slightly), you would have this sentence instead: "But, I love you." Ah, the knotty and fascinating problems of translation.

I've always studied French as my foreign language. This, I think, is a perfect example of the wide impractical streak that, à la Pepé Le Pew, runs the entire length of an otherwise fairly down-to-earth person. (Maybe it's my Pisces moon?) If I had really set out to navigate the actual linguistic terrain of the modern United States, I should have studied Chinese, and certainly way more Spanish than the bare-minimum, single semester of "Reading for Spanish Knowledge" required by my doctoral program. (We had to have "familiarity" with two foreign languages—i.e. just enough to be able to grasp the gist of an academic article or, more likely, just enough to get us into trouble abroad.)

may photo-a-day challenge

Hooray for the May photo-a-day challenge!

a bouquet of cauliflowers for mother bear

It's Mother's Day. Today I'm reminded of Billy Collins's poem "The Lanyard." Go on, click play and listen. I'll wait right here for you:

I had the pleasure of hearing him read this live a couple of years ago, and I was struck both by how funny and how heartbreaking the poem was. Collins calls it an "archaic truth: that we can never repay our mothers." All right, it may be archaic - but it's still the truth. 

I mention my mom so often that when she said, "Well, are you writing a post about me for Mother's Day?" I sputtered, "Mo-om! I have to work hard not to quote you every other sentence." 

But she's right, as usual. There are still some things to say.