Sometimes I feel slightly cheated when I tune my harp but then don’t play it before it goes out of tune again. Several points against me here: one, I should have played it after tuning, or at the least the next day when it’s still in reasonable tune; two, it’s good for the harp to tune it every day even if I’m not playing it every day–the more regular the tension of the strings on the wood, the more likely it is to stay in tune longer/require less involved tuning; three, those were actually the only two points against me and I misused the definition of several. Though in adding the third point, I corrected my definition of “several,” which then negates the third point…so essentially, this is a feedback loop of lies (and wouldn’t *that* be a good title for a Lifetime Original Movie about an audio engineer who’s cheating on her husband).

A friend introduced me to an app called Three Wins. It’s a simple conceit: type in three things that you want to accomplish on a daily basis, and check them off as you complete them. I save my paper lists for weekly tasks or ongoing projects and I don’t always get to check them off, so to have an app that presents me with a burst of confetti if I–1) harp 2) Duolingo 3) wash face–daily is reliably exciting. Originally I had “writing” as one of my three tasks, but that was too intimidating. And yes, I need a small digital incentive to actually wash my face with face wash and water at least once a day instead of relying on face wipes that smell like cucumber.

I enjoy having things that staple me to different points in my day, my week, my year. (months feel less predictable to me. They each have such different characters.) It’s always nice to have a structure to hang things on.

(I once had a dream that someone stapled me to a wall–by my clothes; nothing violent–so that I was just sort of hanging there, and it was incredibly soothing).

Today is pi day. It’s 3/14, 1:59 pm! Pi day was always one of the two days on which we were allowed to eat in the lab during chemistry in high school (I say always because I had this particular chemistry teacher for Chem and AP Chem and then was a lab aide for his Chem class during my senior year; also, I’ve already abused the definition of “several” in this post, so I might as well be consistent in my disdain for the accuracy of time words). The other eating-in-lab day was Mole Day, less frequently known as Avogadro’s number day. Conveniently, no matter which nomenclature you prefer, both titles lend themselves to punny dishes that have to do with avocados or guacamole.

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She was stretched against the castle, one arm shielding her face from the sunlight. Somehow she had managed a relaxed sprawl even though the concrete banks of the empty moat wedged her in. Windows like pinpricks let the light through in threads, wavering across her t-shirt and faded jeans, teasing the outlines of her arms and hands. Above her, the towers cast disproportionate shadows, appearing to loom high and away though they would reach only to her waist if she stood.

When she awoke the concrete beneath her was beginning to cool; its cobblestones had left their pattern imprinted on her back. She pressed an arm against the castle’s wall to stretch, bracing her foot against the ground. As she stood she leaned against the middle steeple, holding onto its scalloped edge for balance. After brushing the bits of dirt and leaves from her pants, her hands searched for, found, and patted her hair, rumpled from sleep. She had been dreaming of tiny horses, the pin-drop clatter of miniature hooves and the tossing of manes the size of her fingertips.

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A subway story

Two middle-aged women on the train:

Woman 1, complaining about her husband’s kissing style: “I want all lip! Nothing but lip. Did they get BIGGER in the last seven years? I did not sign up for this. I shouldn’t feel teeth. I don’t want to feel your goddamn teeth!”

Woman 2, making best efforts at sympathy: “Well, James is not the best kisser. He’s a sucker.”

An exchange

Me to young student: “What do you want to write your poem about?”

Student: “Well, I thought of three options: a princess, a stuffed lamb, or my hatred for Donald Trump.”

A cartoon idea

Young crow rolling eyes at old crow while group of other young crows loiters by: “It’s called a squad, Dad! No one says murder anymore!”

A definition

Snackered: exhausted from eating too many finger foods

Some options

Everybody wants to:

A) Feel important

B) Be a cat

Cure is a good word for:

A) Meat

B) Feelings

C) Diseases

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You can make almost any title better by taking a cue from nature TV and bestowing the subtitle “Spy in the Huddle.” (I actually wish they had confined that brilliance to Penguins: Spy in the Huddle rather than extending it to a trope. Spy in the forest! Spy in the nest! Kind of dilutes it.) But I also like to play with the Lifetime Original Movie structure and add “The __________ story.” E.g. Serious Colors: The Claire Dunnington Story. Or Herd Subjectivity: The Internet Story. Or what have you. Why do I like that calculus–phrase, colon, the (person’s name) story better than the repetition of Spy in the _____? I can’t say. Maybe the placement.

In addition to having titles swirling around us at all times, it would be fun to have chyrons floating around us with our personal brand slogans, like TV networks do. By fun I mean interruptive, and Philip K Dick-y, and cluttering to personal space, but also fun. I guess chyrons and slogans are two separate things. We could have both: a logo and a phrase.

Once we have all of these things…we should probably each have our own four-note (or thereabouts) personal jingles. I am still baffled when I think about how much major companies pay for those. Every time I remember I spend the next 20 minutes thinking about why certain things are valued so highly and others are not. (But really: the first four notes of this cost an absurd amount of money. Or am I wrong? Maybe that amount of money was for the entire 21 second songlet?)

None of this compares to my ultimate childhood dream of all people having their own combination barbershop quartet/Greek chorus to follow them around and sing about their lives. Don’t worry; you could make it disappear if you tired of it. Possibly by clapping. It would function under the same technology as “Clap On” (clap clap) “Clap Off” (clap, clap clap) lights. And I’m sure the jingle for THAT one was a kingly sum.

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Every Valentine’s Day–or when I realize it’s coming–I put on Outkast’s “Happy Valentine’s Day,” and every year I find myself wishing for more date specific songs. There’s Earth, Wind, and Fire’s “September,” which narrows down to the particular day (21st) within its lyrics, and there’s “Oh What a Night,” which never actually specifies which night in late December but does get bonus points for naming the year (1963). I’m sure I could find others via Google, but I guess I’m content enough to let them come to me one by one.

“Date-Specific Songs” joins a number of half-populated playlists in my iTunes. I think I like coming up with categories more than I like actually curating the lists. I have totally empty playlists titled “Killer Key Change” and “Kick in the back of the knees” and “Spin around in desk chair songs,” along with “Questionable Life Decisions,” though I have to say that one actually has a fair number of songs in it.

I also enjoy the Venn diagram union of themes + specific dates in the clothing arena. Holidays are a great excuse to dress monochromatically, or in a combination that wouldn’t ordinarily present itself. It’s like having constraints put on your writing: it makes getting started much easier and is paradoxically freeing. Sometimes I give myself a color assignment on a random day just to narrow things down. Sometimes I title a playlist and never put anything in it.

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Being a child is confusing, and there were numerous things that confused me as a kid, but only a few that truly baffled me.

One was Groundhog’s Day. Okay, if he sees his shadow he gets scared and goes back in the hole, and that means six more weeks of winter? But if he’s seeing his shadow, that means the SUN is out. If he DOESN’T see his shadow that should mean more winter.

Also: poinsettias. It was utterly beyond me, when I was five and my aunt told me that poinsettias are poisonous, why they were poisonous. “But no one eats them!” I kept saying, which must have been really fun for her to try to rejoinder. “What’s the point of a flower being poisonous when no one eats flowers?”

The greater than and less than signs really gave me fits in first grade. I understood what “greater than” and “less than” meant, but I couldn’t figure out how you could tell the two signs apart…wasn’t one number always greater than and one always less than? The crux of the issue was: I didn’t realize that you were supposed to read them left to right. So 4 < 12 … sure, I know four is less than twelve. But twelve is greater than four. So which is it? A greater than or less than sign? I couldn’t articulate my problem to my teacher, so I think that remained a mystery for a while longer.

Then there were the things that didn’t confuse me because I had no idea I was getting them wrong, or that there was a different – correct – interpretation. I believe I was in my twenties when I realized that the lyric “Call it sad, call it funny – but it’s better than even money! – that that guy’s, only doing it, for some doll!” was making a gambling reference: even money. Until then, I thought they were saying gosh, it’s just so great, it’s even better than money!

…I also thought that my devoutly religious relative’s car had an LED screen on its CD console that said “LORD” in digital type when the car started. It actually was commanding the driver to “LOAD” a CD, so I may not be the most reliable narrator.

(Come on! I figured you could probably program it to spell out whatever you wanted, or something along those lines! It was the 90s.)

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Last weekend I made a vision board, an activity I also partook in last year with a group of other ladies. Any time I told someone what I was doing on Sunday, I felt the need to hastily tack on “not that I’m a believer in The Secret or anything!”

And I’m not (I feel ornery about The Secret, but I have to admit I kind of sort of believe in a branch of magical thinking that could be described as the reverse, e.g. that if you worry enough about something highly specific happening, it WON’T, so I’m aware that that’s just the inverse…I’m also interested in the phenomenon of only getting a thing that you want when you stop pinning all of your hopes to it; again, somewhat the opposite of The Secret, which I guess I should also admit I haven’t read), but I’ve always felt that vision boards, tarot cards, and other talismans/crafts that have to do with The Future serve a function regardless, as Rorschach tests.

The phrase you often hear associated with psychics, palm readings, and tarot cards is “You hear what you want to hear” – which I think is great, not a shortcoming, because sometimes you don’t know what you want – or what you want to hear – until you hear it. You learn how you’ve been interpreting your life when you project its narrative onto the combination of cards that turn down for you, or choose the pictures from magazines that draw your attention and arrange them to form a story. Tarot cards and vision boards are ideal vessels for metaphor.

I also like making vision boards because I like to think about the various absurd ways the things depicted could indeed manifest themselves in the coming year, outside of however you may have intended them. Mine has some elephants. Some kayaks. Books. Last year I put two adorable babies, who happened to be wearing knit hats that looked like pandas, on my board and guess what?! Now I own two panda suits.

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I noticed the seasons shifting a couple of years ago, when October started to stay in the 60s and my birthday, at the end of April, was no longer guaranteed to be warm. When was the last time March came in like a lion and went out like a lamb? May has taken that over; April if we’re lucky.

It’s not that climate change has been a secret, but the last few years have been the first times I’ve noticed not just the changes in weather–polar vortex, unseasonable warmness, tornadoes in Queens, what have you–but also the shift toward those interstitial months lagging behind the seasons I associate them with (Granted, they are now more in line with the solstices and equinoxes…November actually still feels like autumn and March like winter).

At the same time, seasonal displays in stores have inched their way even farther forward, in the opposite direction of the weather–Valentine’s Day cards for sale in early January, back to school in July, Christmas decorations put on as Halloween costumes are taken off…the image that leaps to mind is of the year as a pepper grinder someone is twisting, wringing it out.

(I titled this post before I wrote that paragraph and realized…but I’m just going to leave it there)

I read plenty about life changes and milestones shifting later and later, and I think of that as I think about the seasons…but when those are delayed, they aren’t pushing something else back to the beginning. The seasons are on a strange conveyor belt.

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