y tu?

Sonnet for Quiet Library....

The sweat, the blood, the tears upon the stage
paint not a valid picture of the heart
that constantly stretches more than with age
as we make our comedy; business; art.

Lifetimes stretch longer than time spent with ya'll.
Old men and their old wives die in their beds,
as mewling newborn babies learn to crawl.
Yet we continue beating on our heads:

"What is good? What is right? What is the point?"
Our tortured cries scream all throughout the night.
Our bodies ache, our hands reach past their joints
to find the Funny; Make the sorrow Flight.

In hopes of landing peacefully in death,
I'll laugh and laugh and laugh with my last breath.

Where does the milk go?

I am not sure if my boss was joking when he asked me that question last week. He wants me to find out why there is so much milk in the office refrigerator. There is always at least 24 cartons each of 2%, Half-n-half, and skim in the fridge. It really is a lot. And they're never expired. So his question is "What do they do with the milk after it expires? Do they just throw it all away?" I felt like I was telling a 7-year-old the truth about the Animal Humane Society (euthenasia) when I said "Yes, I think they do." He asked me if there wasn't something I could do about that. I said I would get right on it.
Apparently he was quite serious. Because today he "followed up" with me on the "milk issue." Where do I begin? The cows?
Back to the animal euthenasia topic: I have a vivid memory of a movie they accidentally showed us when I was in 1st grade. The title was something like "Save the Animals" and some idiot teacher assumed it was about rainforests or something. Without viewing it first, they played it for six classes of 1st graders. It was two hours straight of Humane Society employees carrying unwanted puppies and kittens and sweet old animals into a room where they either held them down or supported their heads as they gave them lethal injection after lethal injection. With horror we watched as dozens of sweet furry animals went limp and slowly closed their eyes. When the other teachers received their classes after the movie, they were surprised to find not a dry eye amongst us. They had to spend the rest of the day sitting and hugging kids and having meetings about our feelings. At the end of the day they sent letters home to all the parents explaining why their child might be weeping all through dinner.

If only life was like the novels

I am reading "The Birth of Venus" which is about a young woman artist in Florence at the end of the Medici era. She has all these exchanges with a mysteriuos rockstar painter who goes out walking late at night and then traps her against stone walls and whispers secrets in her ear.
A mostly unrelated epiphany: during a 90 minute meeting today consisting mainly of sentences like this one "The PTRS database won't allow mailmerges to include data..." (you get the idea) when a winged visitor stopped by to oversee the goings on. The thing I've forgotten about the Seagull, in my study of Chekhov's play, is that it is a hilarious bird. When I think of its body when flying (or dead) its a little more graceful, but standing up it looks ridiculous. It has a huge fat body and stick legs and a huge nose; not like a Dove or Robin or some such KatieHolmes-esque bird. It's the Cheri Oteri or Rachel Dratch of birds. This particular fellow had to know what he was doing to me. I had to lower my head because the corners of my mouth were turning up and tears were gathering in my eyes. Nobody else was facing the window. As the meeting leader talked, the bird crossed 3 (the magic #!) times in front of the window. From the time he appeared to the time he disappeared he never took his eyes off me. So the bird's body was facing one way as its head was turned to the side. Like a vaudeville act. I would not have been surprised if his third round had included a cane and top hat.

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