what's making me happy today: rediscovering this!

I forgot about this blog of daily things that make me happy/ wondrous for over a year. And you know what? Just reading it over is what made me happy today. So I'm starting it again.

MAY DAY!

Today I biked to a stranded patch of grass and water in the middle of the city, watched my neighbors re-enact the rat race (and the birth of the tree of life) dressed in tinfoil and cardboard, danced barefoot with people I didn't know, and cried at the beauty of a bunch of Indian kids in polo shirts banging on drums.

I also explored a dumpster wearing pointy paper mache ears and learned a lot about a show I didn't go to from an awkward boy on the lightrail.

Somehow, I have more faith in humanity today...

abundance

Things I ate today:

a spicy patty melt from a cafe named after a dragon

a free hamburger and veggies with dip outdoors listening to music

a couple chips (both tortilla and chocolate) baffling at the Eyes of Tammy Faye

warm carrot cake sitting on the floor of long lost friend's kitchen

Dahl, quiche with peas, and cooked artichokes freely shared family-style

An oatmeal cookie I helped make

I ate too much luxuriating in the abundance

A vanity license plate that said AIEOU and the slimey roundness of a middle aged avocado pit

Last Friday

I went to get a massage from a woman I used to know. I felt a little proud to see her set up with her own massage room in a salon, all amber and ethnically confused. The last time I had seen her she had just finished massage school and it was all up in the air whether or not she could establish her own practice. I remember then listening to her spark up as she talked about the moment before she touched a body, how she was learning to summon up love and caring in the breath before she laid her hands down. That neccesity of emotion for a profession struck me at the time, and stuck with me. As I laid on the table on Friday, hip aching and eyes blankly staring through a cushy round hole to the floor, I heard her suck up her breath. Something about the recognition of her intent in that moment was embarrassing and oddly touching. It felt strange to just lay there and take the care.

A staircase of water

Left work today huddled against the sudden flurry of wet thwacking snow/rain. It was the type that plunks its way under your collar to the warmest parts of your collarbone and instinctively flicks the muscles in your neck into turtle mode. Thus huddled and struggling desperately to keep my hair from whipping across my face, I looked up and saw this.

It's stairs leading up to the parking lot flooding over with runoff from the snow melting into rain. The running water is almost two inches deep and running strangely evenly down the wide concrete steps. It reminded me a bit of a modernist fountain in an office building, except chucked upside down outside and falling into urban decay.

For some reason, the discordance of the light snow and rushing water and how the water ran evenly and thickly but very quickly struck me as absolutely lovely.

What's making me happy on Wendesday

I finally looked up the origins of that strange and evenly spaced Lorem Ipsum text that comes up every time I revert to a template in design stuff and found this:

"Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged... Lorem Ipsum comes from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum" (The Extremes of Good and Evil) by Cicero, written in 45 BC. This book is a treatise on the theory of ethics, very popular during the Renaissance."

How strange and strangely perfect. The ethics of more than 500 years ago, jumbled together in a throwaway practical whim and and now mistranslated Harold Bloom-style into the ether of my computer screen. Detritus of human thoughts and all that. Someday all that will remain of me is a Target receipt caught underneath a plastic bag and half a phrase slurred to a bartender on a cold night.

I think I'm spending too much time in InDesign...