(Friday)

Today I've decided that I hate the phrase "tickling noses". Tomorrow or perhaps in a week or nine years from now, I may or may not feel differently. Until then I will judge derisively anyone who uses this phrase I have just realized, today, that I hate.

I love this song but I cannot listen to it right now because, I could say most easily, it hurts. I think that's lazy reasoning however, because it's not so much that it hurts as that it is annoying the shit out of me currently to the point of feeling viscerally bothered even though usually I find it enjoyable, aurally pleasing, moving. (I am large. I contain multitudes.)

I do not feel like using as many commas tonight as I, often, do. Small rebellions.

My name was on the chalkboard every day in French class and my Main Lesson teacher wrote home each year about my outstanding obedience. What provokes us to please? To rage against? I liked both of my teachers, equally. I cried when my French teacher left.

I remember when I was going to travel to France. I was going to sit in the fields with thousands of unwashed souls and I was going to sing. To pray. That person seems so distant from me now, like the woman who planned to walk across this country, in her bare feet if it came to that, with nothing but a headlamp and a tent on her back.

I guess what I am struggling with is what to DO with all of these multitudes. I am quite comfortable knowing that I'm full of them but at a loss as to the appropriate response. Do I say to the Buddhist monk, No. Do I say to the high school biology teacher, No. To the nomad? To the leader of young people through bogs and across mountains, who wore earth tones and rarely showered and happily plunged her hands into compost? To the woman who loves so many, who answers to none? To the aunt piloting her plane home from Africa? To the zany literature professor? To the farmer? To the overworked waitress with hair stuck to her cheek? Do I say to the girl wearing all black, who starves herself, who is loved for her poetry and her etherealism, You Cannot Exist.

Who decrees it?