freaky friday

Today...

... was my third complete day in a row almost without leaving the house at all - I didn't realize how unusual this has become until I realized how abnormal it felt when it happened.
... I didn't get dressed until almost 1:30 p.m. (in spite of the fact that I was up and at 'em with reasonable (I didn't say sufficient) earliness).
... a breakfast discussion, centered loosely on the significance and implications of varying musical tastes, lasted far longer than it meant to when it came in, and possibly accomplished less ... but had a middling to good time while it stayed.
... I was a little stir-crazy, but mostly happy. It's good to be busy, and it's good to take a break.
... my parents and numerous siblings were gone, or at least otherwise occupied, for much of the day - which left myself and a certain unnamed younger brother to console and entertain one another for that duration of time.
... that brother and I managed to accomplish a quite decent amount of school work in a few hours, with somewhat startling cooperation on the part of our junior member, and (perhaps in consequence) unusually durable good humor for the senior.
... I didn't do much at all in the way of anything resembling housework.
... we made banana muffins together, just for fun.
... we ended our just-you-and-me part of the day with a mammoth argument about whether or not the brother (now you know why he's unnamed) should do as he was told, even though the job in question belonged technically on someone else's chore list.

songs I really like right now

While I like to think that my taste in music stays approximately the same through the ages, it's still true that different songs resonate more deeply (musically and/or lyrically) during different life stages ... different moods ... different hours within a day, sometimes. This is, I've little doubt, true of almost everyone on the face of the earth, if they listen to music at all.

Lately I've actually been in almost an anti-music phase. I mean, not philosophically or even literally anti-music ... I just like the quiet, and even when music is on, I can ignore it (unless I hate the song; then I can't). But when I do turn something on, this is what I love right now. Maybe you'll love it, too - or have in the past - or will sometime in the future.

hair in my mouth

We stepped outside, and the wind whipped our hair into a mad dance, but we didn't really notice. Our voices were locked in deep combat, all eyes straining inward, intense.

"Yes," I said, not for the first time, "but how do you know it's real? Obviously you think it is, but you can't prove it. It's all words and ideas, all stuff anybody could have just made up. How do you know somebody didn't just make it up? It's just made up, you can't prove it isn't."

She looked at me intently. "It isn't," she said.

"That's ridiculous," I said. "Prove it to me."

today's beautiful discovery:

If you turn the heater up pretty high, you can start the sun-shining, no-coat, open-highway, windows-down, radio-blaring season fairly prematurely, and you can do it with gusto.

(Rear-ending the truck ahead of you would kind of ruin the morning, though, so unfortunately, you still have to watch the road.)

a cure for goosebumps

You know, sometime, if you ever find yourself really chilly some evening at the very beginning of April, when the daytime weather has just been starting to get its sunshine on, but when the evenings are still quite nippy; and if you are ever wandering around the house on such an evening, chilly (as mentioned before) quite possibly because you only have on a t-shirt and lightweight pajama pants and no socks ... and possibly, too, because your house isn't very well insulated; and if, added to all these things, you have a mother who bakes very good bread - in that case, I have an idea for you. My idea is that you should take the bread dough your mother has mixed up and set to rise in pans on the stove top, and when it's risen you should put it into a hot oven and set the timer for thirty minutes. When, from another room, you get an ethereal feeling that the bread should probably be done soon, you should trot downstairs and find that, incidentally, there's just one minute left on the timer; and when the seconds have ticked down and the beep resounds, you should shut off the oven and open the door and take out the loaves ... one by warm one ... slowly, so as not to be a disturbance. And when they're all on the counter, since the oven door is open anyway, you could probably just stand there for awhile, nice and close, and look in. You know. Just for awhile.

There are, quite likely, other good ideas out there that could help you out on such an evening ... but who knows, this might be one of them.