Sunday, Lazy Sunday

Oh, thank heavens for lazy Sundays. Warm, quiet ones, when the phone doesn't ring, the neighbor's dog doesn't bark, the trash chute in the airshaft is mercifully silent. The swoosh of traffic outside takes on a rhythmic flow like pounding surf.

Thank heavens, especially, if I've managed to do laundry on a Thursday night, rather than having it all pile up to put pressure on Sunday. Sure, there's always more to do, but on a lazy Sunday, you can decide to wear something from the B-list next week, and that's just fine.

Lazy Sundays are about sleeping in late, and making tea instead of coffee, so you know you'll even get your caffine buzz at a more leisurely pace. They're about taking time to stand in the stream of sunlight filtering through the gauzey curtains, eschewing a bra, and walking about barefoot in yoga pants. They're about looking at the stacks of filing, and CHOOSING whether or not to dive into them. Sometimes it feels good to get through them all, sometimes it feels good to not. What feels best is having the option to opt not to.

Most Lazy Sundays I inevitably lose track of time - something my brain rarely lets go of - and I marvel at how the hours flew by. Not in a stressed sense, as that same sensation brings on, say, Stressful Mondays, or Anxious Tuesdays, or even Exhausted Fridays. This break from time tracking is more about feeling the earth's rotation slow, or waiting to watch the grass grow.

This is the battery recharge time; the refill of the cellpack. It's the closing of the all the various mental software programs that allows you to hit a 'restart' button on Monday and get a fresh boot-up. It's time to decompress your spine, stretch your muscles, and soothe your senses.

My favorite activities for Lazy Sundays: Repotting plants. Rearranging visual displays in my livingroom. Changing out the linens for a new color theme. Reorienting the dining room table. Throwing open all of the windows for a few hours and letting the whole place breathe. Catching up on correspondance to old friends. Grooming the cat. Sketching.

And my favorite activity for Lazy Sundays? Extolling and revelling in the virtures of them, of course.

Textural Reflections

I adore textures. Anything I can glide my hand over, for that sensory experience. Smoothed down cotton twill sheets. The tips of dew-moistened blades of grass. The rough, sun-split bark of an oak tree. The cool, rubbery feel of a smooth blade of aloe. The taut tingle of freshly washed skin. The nubbly feel of a berber rug. The billowy feel of a freshly plumped down duvet. The resilient tension on the surface of chilled jello. The ultra downy feel of my cat's undercoat fur. The silky, bristley feel of a newly razored crewcut. The glossy slick of a brand new lipstick.

Stream of Consciousness

It takes a bold soul to write On The Road style. Steady stream of consciousness, verbal diarhhea, call it what you may, it takes a willingness to just 'put it out there'. I've never been an Unselfconscious Producer of the likes of HMatt or MLW, or others. I like to write, like to edit - fastidiously - and then like to put it aside and revisit it again much later, to gauge whether or not it is still pertinent to me. And I LOVE spellcheck (wish it could be applied to every written format I employ - hint hint blogger.com...). I love dictionaries, thesarauses, emtymology (?) books, books on quotations, books on books. I'd have a special stand made for a classic old fabric-bound dictionary to display in my study (that's what I'm calling my studio these days). I'd decorate my walls with quotes: quotes on food, quotes on art, quotes on life. All the relevant stuff. I'd volunteer to work at an art museum just to learn all the sources they use for the wall graphics for each show. I just love words. I love type. I love alphabets, gaelic and foreign. I love sign language. I love reading a passage that conveys a very specific image or emotion just by using words. That an author can use common (and not so common) words to create a truly unique experience is fascinating to me.

The Demise of Matrimony

A lunchroom theory is that men are 'hardwired' to lust after many skirts - pants, too, depending upon the proclivity, of course - while women are programmed to bond to one partner. If this is true, is my wandering eye a sign that I'm more guy than the next gal? Or is our generation shattering the myth that women simply long for One Good Man? Or it is more of an indication that the OGM is just a fiction? Or is it all of the above?

Women of my generation have had a glimpse of the harsh reality of modern domestic relations - that sometimes, even if a woman DOES get ahold of a prince charming, that Cinderella-story often ends in a Grimm tale (pardon the pun) of power-struggles, philandering, and in shockingly high percentage: divorce. And statistically, a divorced woman remains single far longer than her ex-husband. Hence, we've been taught that even if the fairy-tale ending IS within reach, we'd best not give up our burgeoning careers, our separate credit histories, our maiden names (btw, some of us learn this the hard way). In short, women are being EDUCATED against the 'one woman/one man' concept. It certainly isn't a surprise, then, to see that more independant woman are behaving like their bachelor counterparts.

Not so surprising, when the current dating climate makes it difficult to get parties to commit to a 3-day-out dinner date. And if an everlasting marriage is rarer than the dodo bird, why not eschew the Mr. Right concept completely, and embrace the opportunity of Mr. Right Now? I'm completely open to the idea that a second marriage might not be in the cards for me at all - I'd happily join the Georgia O'Keefe bandwagon and embrace the life-long, live-in love. Maybe even the life-long separate-abode love. There's still romanticism in there - 'life-long' and 'love' are both pretty naive concepts in and of themselves, in this day and age.

Too cynical? Maybe, but only Cinderella had a fail-safe method for determining her 'true love', and I bet SHE never had to reclaim her maiden name.