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3 matches found for: loins
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On page /rachael:
March 10, 2003
Jean makes me want to smoke cigarettes. She makes me want to light the next one with the one I’m finishing. I haven’t really smoked consistently in seventeen years and it was never my biggest vice. But Jean could change all that. I see her twice a year at a mutual friends house. The house in question is a non-smoking residence (as is my own—depending on what you’re smoking) so we lurk in the kitchen with the window open and blow our second hand smoke out the crack. We sit on stools and talk to each other about our lives. About how winter kills us. How cooking saves us. About how our friends annual Robbie Burns night, where we always see each other, positioned in the calendar at the arse end of winter, drags us through this treacherous seasonal passage and girds our drooping loins for the onset of spring. Jean reminds me of why I took up smoking in the first place. At boarding school girls can be divided into two camps: the smokers and the non-smokers. Those that spend huge tracts of time in bathrooms with cans of ozone depleting deodorant gripped in their hands, behind the bicycle shed, sheltering under the cricket pavilion, negotiating the muddy paths of the nearby woods, all in order to have a smoke. I don’t know what the other camp does as I was never part of them. I suppose they went to the tuck shop, toasted white bread, chatted up boys, maybe even studied. But I was smoking. It takes a surprisingly long time to get the hang of smoking as any smoker will tell you. Hours of green gill inducing nausea on buses returning from away hockey matches, bathroom dizziness, head bobbing over the bowl, horizontal spins. All this was an initiation ceremony worth enduring for the pleasure of the company of women. A certain kind of woman. When I look at the smokers in my class, some of whom I am still close to, they are the ones still getting into trouble, still turning their lifes around in their hands looking for new surfaces, new shapes.
I know other smokers, but Jean is the one who instantly transports me back to this society that adopted a very specific ritual to denote it from all other lodges.
Lately I have been listening to Jean. When I hear her voice I want to run out and buy a pack of high tar smokes and gasp through them in quick succession. I want to brush my teeth, like I used to in school, and then light up in order to taste the tobacco better. Jean works as an interpreter at the United Nations. She has a voice that reassures one that all will be well with the world, and this in spite of the subject matter she is interpreting. She fulfills the requirements of her job with such grace, imagination and passion, converting the discourse of desiccated nations into an urgent poetry. If you listen to the Security Council hearings (my only concession to the impending war as I have couched my ostrich-like sloth in the convenient stance that I hate war-mongers, but I also hate the anti-war mongers: down with mongerers!) she is there telling you how important it is to talk. To sound the voice. Her Scots inflected speech can make you hear the time we are in. And it can convince you that whatever happens we must go on talking into the night, against the odds, channeling streams of sound into gummed up ears in the hope not of boring a passage to the brain, but simply because defeat is to lose one’s voice. To concede that we are rendered inarticulate is a fine admission, but silence is still a fair approximation of death.
All that smoking has only made her voice more beautiful.
rachael
------------------------------------------------------------------------
On page /rachael:
Mar 7, 2000
As I was circumnavigating the toilet bowl of the restaurant last night with a piece of paper towel wiping away the vomit from the latest bulimic assault it had endured, I wondered about the identity of the vomiter. It's part of the pleasure of being a hostess: spot the bulimic. I also wondered why I had been saved from this fate. I love to eat and I also love to fit into my tightest pants, the logical extension of this conundrum is to throw up your food. However, you're either a puker or you're not. To me it's just too radical, all that peralstisis in reverse. So I just prefer to oscillate between the two: eating a lot and then eating less/fitting into pants; ocassionaly the extremes are tempered by regular visits to the gym or during periods of interferon injections taken to ameliorate the ravages of hepatitis c on the liver. Interferon is probably the most effective diet drug you will find on the market (by prescription only and with the slight drawback of flu like symptoms, depression, suicidal ideation, hair loss, muscle wasting, dry skin, loss of libido, intestinal problems, fatigue and anemia.) I can't imagine puking several times a day is any better, but that's just me. On a lighter note: yes the loins never lie, was that not the first sweet smell of spring in Manhattan today? I smiled at people and they smiled back; such sweet pleasure this simple wave of delight at another passing soul. Guthrie, C and M's Chinese girl arrives in New York on March 29th. They asked me to be her godmother.
rachael
------------------------------------------------------------------------
On page /rachael:
Mar 5, 2000
Haven't been here for a while. Winter creates those numb interstitial bits. I like the display of abandoned garments on the railings on the south side of the street on Rivington between Norfolk and Suffolk. It changes regularly and I have no idea where it comes from or who takes advantage of it. Entertaining in a way that an installation could never be. I went to Asbury Park, New Jersey today; I'd like to know what happened there. It looks like it took far too much LSD. It's nearly 4am and there is a BBC voice floating out of NPR reassuring me that the opposite end of the spectrum to Asbury Park does exist somewhere on the planet. Or does it? Apparently we have forgotten how to nourish ourselves. The statisticians tell us that the number of obese people have caught up with the number of malnourished. Complicating the matter is that many of the obese are also malnourished. Have decided to approach Lent with seriousness in the year 2000, as an Irish Protestant I thought it might be fun to go the whole hog and besmirch myself with ash on Wednesday coming and give up something really fundamental, like liqour, again. It feels like it might be time for a little sackcloth and self-flaggelation. Ah, spring's sweet tremors toying with the loins.
rachael
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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How transparent technology can render us!
rachael
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Web page search results (results for comment pages are below)
3 matches found for: loins
------------------------------------------------------------------------
On page /rachael:
March 10, 2003
Jean makes me want to smoke cigarettes. She makes me want to light the next one with the one I’m finishing. I haven’t really smoked consistently in seventeen years and it was never my biggest vice. But Jean could change all that. I see her twice a year at a mutual friends house. The house in question is a non-smoking residence (as is my own—depending on what you’re smoking) so we lurk in the kitchen with the window open and blow our second hand smoke out the crack. We sit on stools and talk to each other about our lives. About how winter kills us. How cooking saves us. About how our friends annual Robbie Burns night, where we always see each other, positioned in the calendar at the arse end of winter, drags us through this treacherous seasonal passage and girds our drooping loins for the onset of spring. Jean reminds me of why I took up smoking in the first place. At boarding school girls can be divided into two camps: the smokers and the non-smokers. Those that spend huge tracts of time in bathrooms with cans of ozone depleting deodorant gripped in their hands, behind the bicycle shed, sheltering under the cricket pavilion, negotiating the muddy paths of the nearby woods, all in order to have a smoke. I don’t know what the other camp does as I was never part of them. I suppose they went to the tuck shop, toasted white bread, chatted up boys, maybe even studied. But I was smoking. It takes a surprisingly long time to get the hang of smoking as any smoker will tell you. Hours of green gill inducing nausea on buses returning from away hockey matches, bathroom dizziness, head bobbing over the bowl, horizontal spins. All this was an initiation ceremony worth enduring for the pleasure of the company of women. A certain kind of woman. When I look at the smokers in my class, some of whom I am still close to, they are the ones still getting into trouble, still turning their lifes around in their hands looking for new surfaces, new shapes.
I know other smokers, but Jean is the one who instantly transports me back to this society that adopted a very specific ritual to denote it from all other lodges.
Lately I have been listening to Jean. When I hear her voice I want to run out and buy a pack of high tar smokes and gasp through them in quick succession. I want to brush my teeth, like I used to in school, and then light up in order to taste the tobacco better. Jean works as an interpreter at the United Nations. She has a voice that reassures one that all will be well with the world, and this in spite of the subject matter she is interpreting. She fulfills the requirements of her job with such grace, imagination and passion, converting the discourse of desiccated nations into an urgent poetry. If you listen to the Security Council hearings (my only concession to the impending war as I have couched my ostrich-like sloth in the convenient stance that I hate war-mongers, but I also hate the anti-war mongers: down with mongerers!) she is there telling you how important it is to talk. To sound the voice. Her Scots inflected speech can make you hear the time we are in. And it can convince you that whatever happens we must go on talking into the night, against the odds, channeling streams of sound into gummed up ears in the hope not of boring a passage to the brain, but simply because defeat is to lose one’s voice. To concede that we are rendered inarticulate is a fine admission, but silence is still a fair approximation of death.
All that smoking has only made her voice more beautiful.
rachael
------------------------------------------------------------------------
On page /rachael:
Mar 7, 2000
As I was circumnavigating the toilet bowl of the restaurant last night with a piece of paper towel wiping away the vomit from the latest bulimic assault it had endured, I wondered about the identity of the vomiter. It's part of the pleasure of being a hostess: spot the bulimic. I also wondered why I had been saved from this fate. I love to eat and I also love to fit into my tightest pants, the logical extension of this conundrum is to throw up your food. However, you're either a puker or you're not. To me it's just too radical, all that peralstisis in reverse. So I just prefer to oscillate between the two: eating a lot and then eating less/fitting into pants; ocassionaly the extremes are tempered by regular visits to the gym or during periods of interferon injections taken to ameliorate the ravages of hepatitis c on the liver. Interferon is probably the most effective diet drug you will find on the market (by prescription only and with the slight drawback of flu like symptoms, depression, suicidal ideation, hair loss, muscle wasting, dry skin, loss of libido, intestinal problems, fatigue and anemia.) I can't imagine puking several times a day is any better, but that's just me. On a lighter note: yes the loins never lie, was that not the first sweet smell of spring in Manhattan today? I smiled at people and they smiled back; such sweet pleasure this simple wave of delight at another passing soul. Guthrie, C and M's Chinese girl arrives in New York on March 29th. They asked me to be her godmother.
rachael
------------------------------------------------------------------------
On page /rachael:
Mar 5, 2000
Haven't been here for a while. Winter creates those numb interstitial bits. I like the display of abandoned garments on the railings on the south side of the street on Rivington between Norfolk and Suffolk. It changes regularly and I have no idea where it comes from or who takes advantage of it. Entertaining in a way that an installation could never be. I went to Asbury Park, New Jersey today; I'd like to know what happened there. It looks like it took far too much LSD. It's nearly 4am and there is a BBC voice floating out of NPR reassuring me that the opposite end of the spectrum to Asbury Park does exist somewhere on the planet. Or does it? Apparently we have forgotten how to nourish ourselves. The statisticians tell us that the number of obese people have caught up with the number of malnourished. Complicating the matter is that many of the obese are also malnourished. Have decided to approach Lent with seriousness in the year 2000, as an Irish Protestant I thought it might be fun to go the whole hog and besmirch myself with ash on Wednesday coming and give up something really fundamental, like liqour, again. It feels like it might be time for a little sackcloth and self-flaggelation. Ah, spring's sweet tremors toying with the loins.
rachael
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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- steve 3-12-2003 3:23 am
How transparent technology can render us! rachael
- anonymous (guest) 3-12-2003 4:39 pm [3 comments]