A Daily Dose of Zen Sarcasm!

Hi there! Please come visit me at my new place in the Interwebs:

http://madamemeow.com

A Federal City

Forty-Three/ThreeSityFive: Tangled, originally uploaded by Madame Meow.

What is there not to love about a city filled with idealists?

A city molded in marble and cool granite, shaped by utopia and good intentions, pushed around by the ignoramuses but championed by those who love it so.

A city daintily set upon a river plain, at the mercy of the tides and the mosquitoes and the leeches and the thieves.

A city still ready to love and live again, despite having its heart broken and its pockets ransacked over and over.

A city that wants to believe in the good of mankind, even as it keeps voting the asps into office, and holding them close to her breast.

What is there not to love about a city that is so much to so many, even as it's told over and over that it's nothing?

A city is only as great as the people in it.

Perhaps DC breaks even.

Made Ya Look

Coffee and Gum, originally uploaded by Madame Meow.

The problem with our increasingly connected world is that it gets increasingly and exponentially harder to keep your attention long enough to get to the end of this post.

This is part of the reason I picked this picture, because I know you're getting your judgmental on and going, "EW GROSS GUM NEXT TO COFFEE AND I BET SHE CHEWED IT RIGHT AFTERWARD!"

Naturally I assume that when you're grossed out you become internet-gauche and walk them fingers over to the Caps Lock. But so far, it seems you're still here.

And then, there is Twitter.

I've rediscovered Twitter after feeling like I was getting too damn old for that particular crap. That and that one crazy chick who was using my nom de plume as her own had hijacked the username MadameMeow.

You understand how that could make someone at least a little uncomfortable.

____________

But Twitter, overused and underutilized though it is, is quite a charming tool.

Why spend hours agonizing what kind of post you will be writing-- and which tenor you will use, and how it will sound and what people will think, when you can just jot one down and put it up?

Here's one from today:

MmeMeow

I may have an overactive imagination, but when it smells awful and yellow "crime scene" tape pops into view, it's hard not to think amiss.

Curiously enough, this one got no replies-- too macabre? Incidentally, the smell was just car fumes, and the rotting-carcass-y stink from the Anacostia river, but apparently no body had been found.

Yet.

But you get my point, right? No?  Here's another one:

MmeMeow 

Toilet paper commercials are infinitely disturbing.

Which they are, incidentally: ALL toilet paper commercials seem to be coyly hinting that, tee-hee, you know?  PEOPLE POOP.  But none of them can tell you why or how you will utilize this portent of modern living.  Instead, they have dancing bears and overjoyed people finding new places to decorate with toilet paper rolls, and adorable puppies. 

Puppies --as if I need to remind you of this fact-- eat shit.

So you see the beauty of The Twitter?  It's like a memorandum of topics upon which NEVER to expound.  It's like What Not To Wear, but for blogs.

The smell of victory wafts in the air, ladies and gents.  And no, I'm not close to yellow tape.

Beginning and End

We're more than twenty days into 2011 and I hadn't felt the need to blog.

Okay, well, I HAD felt the need to blog, but I just hadn't done it.  There is that whole "failed marriage" specter which is kind of clinging to me like a very large and sad cobweb, and which makes it hard to be completely frank and straightforward about many of the thoughts I have been having.

But it's the sad truth: marriage, ending.  It's amicable.  We are working on it.  The less that can be said about it at this point, the better.  After all, I do still have two munchkins who may someday read all this crap, and the last thing I need is for them to read things that may make them resent one or both of their parents.  Or at least read things that may make them think their mother sure was one hell of a dumbshit.

Anyway, here we are: the first year of a new decade.

I confess: I have the old-feeling thoughts often.

But perhaps it's enough for now to dwell on the endings, and on the old-feeling, and on all the things that could have been but never were-- life is painful enough as it is to focus on the bad right off the bat, when the year is still young and the gyms are still overflowing with grease-faced hopefuls who want to feel better about themselves at least until Punxsutawney Phil sees his shadow or not.

I'm back for now, bitches.  Deal.

Topsy-Turvy (Day three hundred thirty-five)

Topsy-Turvy (Day three hundred thirty-five, originally uploaded by Madame Meow.

Normally I change the name of the post from the original Flickr picture name.

However, allow me a STET-type mulligan here. You may have noticed that,

1. Now all my posts come with pictures,
2. I've somehow started using my real name around these here parts,
3. But I've become really cryptic and mysterious,
4. The "Daily" part of the blog's name has become a sad little lie,
5. And that it seems I'm no longer afraid of showing you my face on here, as well, even if it's upside down.

Live with it: I like this picture. You can always click through to Flickr if you would like to see my photoset lovingly and narcissistically called, "All About Me(ow)" if you would like.

I've been remiss in writing, mostly because... well, we're going to have to hold off on that a little longer. Suffice it to say that I am still around, even if my life feels exactly like the picture implies: upside-down and topsy-turvy and not the way it used to be.

But that's not bad. And, honestly, neither is this Hail Mary picture.

It's just different, and that suits me fine.

Now maybe I can update my About Me page before the end of the year. Ha! Who are we kidding here?

Oh yeah! I was quoted in The Atlantic Wire! I'm still excited about that, so I am sharing my link here. Go read!

Hope the peri-holidaze period is being kind to you all out there in BlogLand.

 

PS: I need to write about my sidebar experiment, the 101 in 1001 deal.  Let's just say I failed.

PPS: Do you like me on Facebook?  Yay!

Platitudinal

But You Should Have Heard What Was Coming Out of My Mouth (Day three hundred twenty-two), originally uploaded by Madame Meow.

Just because something is trite, doesn't make it less of a sentiment or less of a truth.

Yes, it's trite: said a million times before, sometimes inelegantly and mostly clumsily, but if it's been said it's most likely because it's the truth.

Is a sunset any less beautiful-- any less a sunset-- because it's been oohed and aahed and admired and sighed the world over?

Does it magically become high noon or sunrise, just because you happened to call it sunset yet again? It couldn't be anything other than what it is-- and yet--

And yet, some sunsets are more sunset-magical than others, are they not?

Some days, we remember that fateful, iconoclastic, sweetly sorrowful moment where the illusion of light is shattered and we come face to face with the impending darkness that surrounds us as we hurtle through space within this squashed sphere we call earth.

Some sunsets, though sunset be a trite word, are more than just sunsets.

And yet, we still call them that.

Blame Google Maps

A tangled web of streets, leaning slightly in every direction.

A spangle of names, some of which trigger primal memories.

A third-world city, tucked in amongst the mountains.

A wave of patched memories surges from deep inside, but crashes nowhere. 

It's been twenty years, but that time may as well never have existed.

Maybe someday I will be back again and explore something I will not recognize at all.

The streets will bend into themselves, making knots and revealing buildings that were never there before

Maybe someday I will feel the early morning mountain frost on my bare knees again, and feel like I never left at all.

Craftiness

A Tiny Crane (Day three hundred eleven), originally uploaded by Madame Meow.

This is just a tiny reminder always to find something interesting where others see only garbage.

Also, a reminder that sushi can save lives.

We will not enter a discussion of how this statement is rendered invalid by the mere existence of the puffer fish. (Fugu you)

I hope wherever you are there are scraps of paper that can be turned into friends; the color red to bring you luck; sushi; and alcohol.

xoxo

Thrills

Precinct Eighty-Eight, originally uploaded by Madame Meow.

I don't even know how to describe it, but today was one of the most thrilling days of my life.

Today I had an interview for graduate school (*squee*), and sometimes I would become so incredibly excited that no voice would come out-- all that would manage to squeak out of my throat was an excited squawk.

And then, as if that were not exciting enough, I got to vote.

Ninety years ago, as a woman, I would have had to be content to know that maybe my husband and I shared an opinion, but I would have not been able to voice it.

Today, I got to walk down to the church close to my house, wearing PANTS and walking by myself, and I was able to have my voice be heard.  (Tip of the hat to Alejna!)

I know this means little to some.

But the fact alone that I, as a woman, can be independent of thought and means, well.... it means the world to me.

Today is a wonderful day. I hope you all get to live a day as wonderful and pride-inducing as this one was for me.

Unrelated: tequila, lime juice and ice are also excellent.