going full poet

i've got a major case of the novembers. it's not a bad thing. i am already in love with daylight savings and feel like i finally got that hour back i waited all year for. i have decided that while october could sink ships and win wars, november is like home.

full disclosure: i have a nasty habit of reading gossip magazines and watching reality TV. i blame it on my mind. that sounds like an obvious excuse but it started in graduate school. creative writing school. i was like a poetry machine. the world was just a series of fragmented thoughts, emotions, memories, observations, and theories. i don't remember being able to shut that off. i do, however, remember an US Weekly creeping in and being bright and shiny and with the similar sentence structure of no subject/verb agreement as my internal monologue, i was easily hooked. pop-culture had lent itself unto me a little balance, a long-term addiction, and some welcome distraction.

november has been colder. i like colder, or at least i like how colder makes me feel. there are traces of holidays rising into the air, i feel that in a nice and haunted way. i swear i smell cinnamon everywhere. i feel a  sense of closeness as we all seem to agree that the end of the year is coming, so much has happened, as we all look toward 2012. while we share in thoughts about what has already changed and what we hope for in the next. i am excited to see lights everywhere. i am ready to wear something sparkly. i feel like baking.

but going full poet means that i think about polar bears and how they move like old, lonely men between sheets of ice. how there isn't enough food for them and they often are so tired that they die hungry and  alone. as much as i'd like to think about how justin beiber may have gotten a fan pregnant or beyonce having a girl, those thoughts merely go into the fold. in the middle of my dance class the other day i thought i was going to cry. it was so beautiful. there we were, all women, all different sizes, ages, and types, dancing. and for a moment--we lined that room like a poem. we were smiling and were right there and nowhere else. i have been waking up in the middle of the night and taking notes. my car stereo has a lot of interference lately. i was listening to NPR the other morning and the sound of a pakistani man who was a club owner in the 70's in karachi filled my car. i swear his name was tony toofail. he lost everything in 1977, the year i was born. his voice was cracked even without the static of my radio. he did not measure his own loss, of which he lost everything, but only of the collective loss of his country at the time. he used to drink in those days, he said. i thought i was going to have to pull my car over.

i was calling a friend the other day. i wanted to tell him about something that i have been feeling sad about. before he even picked up the line i was choked up. i was in a parking lot. he answered and told me that he had been so busy lately with work and with his swing dance classes. i have never seen him dance. i had no idea that people were still taking swing dance classes. i was laughing. he was laughing too. the world became a place where anything could happen at the exact same time as anything else and that was fine. it was funny and beautiful and complex and it was going to be winter and it will be warm and cold at the same time and the time changed and how everything will always be happening at the speed of feeling it all.