Advice from me to me after a long, tiring, HOT, wonderful, exhausting, HOT, friend-filled day in Chicago:
1. Drinking 2 beers when it’s 90 degrees out gives you the same feeling as drinking 6 when it’s 70.
2. There is nothing better than riding your bike through the flood of an open fire hydrant.
3. Taco Bell will never get your order right. Ever.
4. You should NOT eat Taco Bell after college because your stomach has graduated, too.
5. Laughing until you cry is fine unless you’re crying because you can’t breathe.
6. You should probably keep an emergency ice tray in the freezer for those moments when you get home and the other 5 ice trays are not yet frozen and you feel like you’re gonna die if you don’t have ice in your water.
7. No matter what shape you think you’re in, you’re really not in that good of a shape to run 2 city blocks in one minute. It’s impossible. And you might throw up if you try.
8. Always, always, always make time for friends — no matter how tired you are. They make you feel better.
9. When it’s summertime in Chicago and you don’t have AC: Cold showers. Cold showers. Cold showers.
10. It is TOTALLY appropriate to do a victory dance after an exceptional parallel parking job — just make sure no one’s watching.
11. You may complain that Ross lives too far way in Albany Park and that the hour and a half commute isn’t worth it, but it always, always is.
BZ
an excerpt from her facebook status today:
Saturday was 96 degrees, which is something I very deeply do not approve of. I find summer challenging, even under the best of circumstances. It is my least favorite season—all these horrible perfect young people racing around wearing next to nothing; all those repellent tan washboard midriffs. Who needs it? It is such a young, loud season. i like a nice wrinkly middle-aged season like the fall. Plus there are so many young people driving way too fast in town, putting at risk all the neighborhood children and pets and slightly older space-cases at risk. I want to shake my puny fist in the air after them and shout, like the various shrill nutbags who lived in MY childhood neighborhood… And the afternoon was so hot again. A bunch of family and friends came for lunch. We all complained that it was too hot, and that most of us had dead fathers, and how how festive was that? But we were all secretly relieved to have each other in our lives, not to mention blueberries and watermelon. Jax and the dogs kept making us laugh, like a vw car full of clowns, and we sat in the shade and came through the hot day together. If I was God, or God’s West Coast Rep, I would never have included summer in the line-up. If anyone had asked, I would have just recommended that we scrap plans for a hot season altogether and go directly from mid June to September.
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorable.
She may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
Rumi
happy international women's day!
http://www.pitchfork.com/news/45672-listen-sufjan-teams-with-rosie-thomas/
(Source: fuckyeahsufjanstevens)
give my friend jake's band some love today.
so beautiful i can’t take it.
(Source: tballardbrown, via npr)
A Fresh Basket of Bread
by Rumi
The mystery of spiritual emptiness
may be living in a pilgrim’s heart, and yet
the knowing of it may not be his.
Wait for the illuminating openness,
as though your chest were filling with Light,
as when God said,
Did we not expand you?
Don’t look for it outside yourself.
You are the source of milk. Don’t milk others!
There is a milk-fountain inside you.
Don’t walk around with an empty bucket.
You have a channel into the Ocean, and yet
you ask for water from a little pool.
Beg for that love-expansion. Meditate only on THAT.
There is a basket of fresh bread on your head,
and yet you go door to door asking for crusts.
Knock on your inner door. No other.
Sloshing kneedeep in fresh riverwater, yet
you keep wanting a drink from other people’s water bags.
Water is everywhere around you, but you only see
barriers that keep you from water.
Mad with thirst, he can’t drink from the stream
running so close by his face. He’s like a pearl
on the deep bottom, wondering, inside his shell,
“Where’s the Ocean?”
Your mental questionings form the barrier.
Your physical eyesight bandages your knowing.
Self-consciousness plugs your ears.
Stay bewildered in God, and only that.
Those of you who are scattered, simplify your
worrying lives. There is one righteousness:
Water the fruit trees, and not the thorns.
Be generous to what nurtures the Spirit and God’s
luminous reason-light. Don’t honor what causes
dysentery and knotted-up tumors.
Don’t feed both sides of yourself equally.
The spirit and the body carry different loads
and require different attentions.
Too often we put saddlebags on Jesus and let
the donkey run loose in the pasture.
Don’t make the body do what the spirit does
best, and don’t put a big load on the spirit that the
body could carry easily.