to go forward you have to come back where you began.

I'm sitting here on this overstuffed living room chair in my yellow polka-dotted swimsuit, I've been sitting here for several minutes writing beginning lines and watching the black letters disappear one at a time as I erase them.

I didn't go to school today (it's fortunate that I had no school today), I didn't go to work today (also fortunate that I wasn't on the schedule. I make the schedule). Instead I talked to Kate on her bed this morning, then we went swimming and I attempted again to read Julio Cortazar (it's in spanish and despite being in Uruguay for 18 months, my vocabulary could use some serious expansion). We came home and were quite meticulous in making a salad and boiled eggs. Both of us agreed that it was perhaps the best salad we've ever had. I will tell you what it contained (because the contents and history of the salad is related to so much of what I've been thinking about lately and which I will expound upon in a later post).

The salad contained two types of lettuce (while eating Kate said she read once that real lettuce is supposed to glow), a third leaf that had the most fresh lemon taste, a small twiggy herb that was a little sweet and a little like thyme. (All these things from Oliver and Raquel's garden, which is only 2 blocks and a backyard away from my kitchen). I cut up miniature carrots and boiled 7 miniature eggs, both of which I also bought at the farmer's market on Saturday. We ate it with seasame bagel chips, mason jars full of lemonade and some balsamic vinegar and olive oil. I'm sure there are a lot of other things we could have been doing, but God is a divine interviner, and sometimes, perhaps more often than we think, preparing a meal and talking is what we are intended to do. The most productive thing we could have done today.

I am reading Middlesex by Jeffery Eugenides, I've been thinking a lot about this piece:

The ceremony took place on deck...Bride and bridegroom performed the Dance of Isaiah. Hip to hip, arms interwoven to hold hands, Desdemona and Lefty circumambulated the captain, once, twice, and then again, spinning the cocoon of their life together. No patriarchal linearity here. We Greeks get married in circles, to impress upon ourselves the essential matrimonial facts: that to be happy you have to find variety in repetition; that to go forward you have to come back where you began.