The Art of Poetry

To gaze at a river made of time and water
And remember Time is another river.
To know we stray like a river
and our faces vanish like water.

To feel that waking is another dream
that dreams of not dreaming and that the death
we fear in our bones is the death
that every night we call a dream.

To see in every day and year a symbol
of all the days of man and his years,
and convert the outrage of the years
into a music, a sound, and a symbol.

To see in death a dream, in the sunset
a golden sadness–such is poetry,
humble and immortal, poetry,
returning, like dawn and the sunset.

Sometimes at evening there’s a face
that sees us from the deeps of a mirror.
Art must be that sort of mirror,
disclosing to each of us his face.

They say Ulysses, wearied of wonders,
wept with love on seeing Ithaca,
humble and green. Art is that Ithaca,
a green eternity, not wonders.

Art is endless like a river flowing,
passing, yet remaining, a mirror to the same
inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same
and yet another, like the river flowing.

Jorge Luis Borges

Today was just all kinds of harsh. But I had a very good healthy lunch and discovered a great new recipe for spicy cold cucumber and yogurt soup. Seriously. It’s got paprika, onion and cilantro in it - in addition to cucumber and yogurt - and it was light and refreshing and tasty. I might make some this weekend just cuz it’s good.

We put a full-size spare on the car today (we being my mother and I since I have only one functioning hand) so that tomorrow night/Friday, I can take the car to the shop to get the tires replaced. I think I will drive in tomorrow, but I will be that annoying person going 50 mph on the highway, and then I have the CT scan, the doctor and then the tire place. I’ll have to have my mother or sister accompany me to the tire place so I can drop it off and then drive home with one of them since I can’t wait there until the car’s ready the next afternoon morning. Or it might turn out that I have to bring it on Friday morning if they’re not accepting any more clients tomorrow night. I’ll find that out tomorrow night, I suppose.

Argh. Ugh. Sigh. I cried for a while again tonight because I was just wondering why my father (and even my mother, though to a lesser extent) seem to truly enjoy making me feel like a total f**k-up and loser whenever I make a mistake and expose the fact that I am - gasp! - HUMAN. Nothing I ever do is good enough, even if I think it’s pretty great, and when I feel like I’ve screwed up, he makes damn sure that I know JUST HOW MUCH I screwed up. It’s really kicking someone when they’re down, so it’s not just the universe. My father’s in on the act, too.

I actually broke down in a minor fashion and was telling my mother, while I was crying, that this constant sense of “not being able to do anything right” that I get from him really doesn’t help me. One of the things I find myself thinking - even on a good day - is that I’m not good enough to deserve happiness or things like appreciation or praise. So when my father or mother heap crap on me for making the tiniest mistake or just being human and fallible, I extend those thoughts into the much more detrimental, “Why even bother trying? I’m not worth it…” and I give up on whatever it is I’m doing - trying to lose weight, managing my finances, etc., since it doesn’t seem like all that hard work is worth it. It certainly doesn’t make any difference since all my efforts go unnoticed, but the moment I misstep, I am the stupidest, laziest, most irresponsible, ungrateful, waste of an education my father has ever seen (or so he’s said on various occasions - sometimes in exciting combinations of two or more!)

I have a very painful zit festering under my eyebrow. It’s going to be one of those painful ones that never looks like much, but hurts like a bitch. Kind of like me?

Or maybe I’m just a bitch.

Nah. I just let my cousin borrow another bunch of my DVDs to watch at night. By the time she leaves the States on Tuesday, she’ll have seen practically every movie in my collection - except for the rated “R” ones and the musicals for some reason. I guess they’re both obscene in their own ways.

Sleep-time for me. It’s been a long mutha-f**kin’ day.