Saturday, January 03, 2004

When I stopped to buy my flowers this afternoon, one of the florists asked me if they were for my wife, or a hot date. I explained that after years of only buying flowers for girlfriends or dates, I finally realized that I enjoyed them more than they did - I think, in fact, that one of the reasons Claire claims that there wasn't a day when we were dating that she didn't have flowers in the house (partly because Suzy would sell me her nearly gone flowers cheap or free), was that I wanted them around. That's something that's probably more profound to me than any of my gender justice work and training - the ability to actually assert my interest and right to have beautiful things in my life, without having them attached to a gender, or sexual orientation. My first response to their question, though, was that I was metrosexual, and just liked have flowers in my life. I just had a visual of doing a single rose as an ichibana influenced arrangement, wired so that it is curved down and around at a gravity defying, dendrobium angle, and wired to a weighted base for cantilevering. Tonight, as excited as I was at getting the night off, not for some hot date, but so I could come home and put flowers out and read and do planning and play computer games, the thing that makes me feel like a bonafide nerd is my bloody nose, with a tissue stuffed up my nostril, like some later day weird kid, who, among his other eccentricities, had thenthitive thinuthes. But the delphinium are so beautiful, like some platonic perfect blue, poking into the cave, if just for a moment, to let us know what we're missing. They and the dendrobium lock their blossoms in some fierce copulation, a battle of attachment rather than confrontation. It makes me wonder if humans learned to be a little more loving, a little more human, watching flowers in their beautiful embrace, among their own vines, and relying on a web of nature to ensure their surival, in return for nothing more in that unforgiving chain, neither food nor predator, than spreading their color into the world. 6:12:42 PM

When I told everyone at Sqwires how much I missed them, someone told be I should quit my job and come back. I joked about how I made more money waiting tables, thanks to that cheap ass boss. Which will probably still be true for the next couple years. After having a crappy cup of New England Clam Chowder at the Bread Company, I finally figured out my defense when people tell me I'm very picky and finicky about food and restaurants. There's a huge difference between irrational dislike and refinement. I prefer to think of myself as a discriminating diner - not picky, discrimate. 12:21:18 AM