the future is now

"Tang is futurist orange. Tang is orange designed by astronauts. Tang is from a time when we all thought we’d be wearing unitards and eating freeze-dried soy extrudate by now. Tang is Eisenhower food. It goes very well with jello salads and a scoop of cottage cheese on a lettuce leaf with a ring of pineapple. Tang represents that pure thought that food is safer and better for you if no part of it ever touches dirt."

That's from an email my mom sent me a while ago. That kind of brilliance is just one more reason that I'm entirely comfortable with the inevitable fact that I'm going to grow up someday and be just like my mother.

mauve

It's about translation, about language, both written and spoken, read and heard. It's about rereading, rephrasing, rewriting, and reimagining. It's also about sex, about skin (on skin), about adolescence and about the frailties of aging, about explosion, death, surprise, and dull, extended aches. It's about the desert, about driving through the night, and about the tensions between desire and maintenance, passion and fear. In the book, a girl drives her mother's car, meets a woman, watches her die. Then, a woman works to translate the book you've just read. Then you read the translation, which is both very much different and exactly the same.

Oh yeah, and the copy I'm reading is in English, translated from the French. Which just adds another layer of complication to all of this, because you can feel the language barrier sometimes, notice that the sentences were constructed with a different kind of grammar.

I can't remember when the last time was that I was able to give a clear, concise answer to the question: "What's that book about?" Any book can fit into that question, but now I'm talking about this one.

green mercedes

she's more than
a little bit nuts, the woman,
the artist (you say that
with a certain tone in your
voice), but she has the best
hair you've ever seen,
and she drew a beautiful
picture of your cat
the day before he died.

an obsession, the color green

It started as a system, a genuine way to keep track of things. A way to ensure that you had a firm grasp on what you had worn the last time you had seen someone, and a way to ensure that you wouldn't repeat yourself too often. The fear was that, being someone who considered one's friends' preferences when choosing clothes, one would remember that Lucinda liked green, and so wear the green sweater when going to see Lucinda.

While this may not seem like something to fear, it's important to consider the possibility of repetition, or coming to that same conclusion over and over again, so that one wore the sweater every time on saw Lucinda. The resultant (feared!) tragedy, of course, being that Lucinda would not assume that the sweater indicated a shared interest in all things emerald, but rather that it indicated a limited wardrobe, possibly that you even only had the one sweater.