(via Laughing Squid dot com)

I hate it when polar bears die at the zoo and the new ones seem a bit odd.

Hate that your deo is filled with that yucky aluminum?  Here’s a list of the best organic deodorants that allegedly still work.

The New Oxford American Dictionary has made their biggest announcement of the year.  The 2009 word of the year is officially: “unfriend.”

Feeling rejectamundo? Here’s a list of 14 bestsellers that were each rejected at least 15 times by publishers before they got the good turn.  (Most surprising: Mad. L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time and James Joyce’s Dubliners.)

You say you want to read a decent book?  Here’s the UK’s Times Online’s  Top 100 Best Books of the Decade. (Interesting list.  But weird.  I’d quibble with their heinously putting Salman Rushdie’s work right next to Twilight.)

Lastly, as it is my birthday week, I offer you an old Tarantella from my great-grandparent’s Napoli.  Because it’s kind of awesome.

I have probably posted this photo before by J. Heineman, but it landed as my rotating desktop image this birthday morning and gave me pause.  This is, in part, why we have birthdays.  The momentary pauses collect us.

If you know me, you probably suspect I have a kinship with this photo because of the way it marries a handful of different Desire-rich images in my life.  The more I look at it, the more I notice.  I’ll leave the suspicions of their names to you.

I am breaking this horrible blog silence to be a part of Elizabeth’s “Blog Carnival” on Home. If you click here you can read her post on Home, while also sampling the delicious words of a handful of others taking part in this here Carnival.

The day was yesterday, the time was 11:05pm Eastern standard, and I was in seat 15A on a flight bound for upstate New York.  The lady in seat 15B was the chattiest of any of my seat neighbors in the day’s three connections from Los Angeles to Albany.  But she instantly won me over with her grandmotherly spirit and the fact that she was fiddling with an awkwardly shaped musical instrument upon her arrival.

“Usually if I jiggle it just so under the seat, it will fit.  Honest, it will!”

Her weird instrument is a lyre.  I know nothing of lyres except for the Psalm that says something about “awakening the harp and lyre.”  I always thought that sounded pretty.  The lady in seat 15B is my temporary friend and I really do want to hear about her weird instrument.

“Are you going home?” she asks.

I do not normally chat with my seat neighbors on aeroplanes.  Not, that is, unless you are one notably uncomfortable, noticably grouchy pregnant lady, and not unless I happen to have freshly baked chocolate chip cookies to share with you, as it happened on connection #1, just as we were about to land in Pittsburg.  Not, as it were, unless I feel cosmically bound to offer you, prego-lady, a delicious cookie a second time (though you politely said, “no” the first time and I knew you did not mean it) being as I had wept all over my new moleskine journal while we were at 30,000 feet.  I knew you weren’t asleep, and I imagine your motherly instincts might have kicked in as you awkwardly watched me cry while sitting in between two strangers, but we’d had no previous neighborly-seat conversation to merit your inquiring of my tears.  Since this probably caused you inner frustration, I felt I ought to offer a cookie to console you.  (Twice.)  And then we chatted about the laurels of good cookies made in real kitchens.  And that was that.

“I’m sort of going home,” I tell the lady in seat 15B with the lyre at her feet.  And then I let her know that I’m flying back to New York for my Grandma’s funeral.  She tells me she’s sorry for that.

What I do not tell her is that my Grandma suffered from Alzheimer’s for twenty years, and it feels as if we slowly lost her day by day.  I do not tell her that in many ways, Grandma’s final breaths have been as hands opening a ledger book of deeper losses.

I do not tell the lady in 15B that her benign are-you-going-home question has erupted in me an inner dialogue of secret narration that would loosely become a blog about “home.”

We land in Albany, she wiggles out her lyre, and we nod our goodbyes.  She is going home, and her husband is waiting to drive her there.  Her ride home will consist of stories from her visit with their four year old grandson, how Alabama’s weather was much milder than Pougkeepsie’s, and how much she missed him.

The more I consider the idea of home, the more I believe that home is where the ache is.  It is not a geography of latitudes and longitudes.  It is not just a bloodline or a shared surname.  Home is where you ache from the violence of separation, however temporary or eternal that separation might be.

(Photo by Vox_Efx)

It was the Summer of ‘09, I was with Luisa, and we were at Rocky Mountain National Park (Colorado).  In this photo we were about half-way there, going up a trail with a series of the most beautiful frozen lakes you can imagine.

By the end of the day we were nearly caught in a storm, we both had some blisters, and we’d been separated for about 5 miles.  Lu had wanted to climb a summit and I had wanted to rest on a rock.  Then came the almost-storm, me huffing it back trying to avoid it, and Lu huffing it back trying to catch up with me for a few miles.  She did.  And we laughed.

(My Holga, Expired Film)

Welcome to Wednesday.  Now get wonky.

It’s probably high time that you call your Grandpa and tell him you love him.  He’s probably just as much a hero as this guy, in his own way.

Here’s an article in Scientific American that suggests thinking about (or actually) falling in love makes one more creative.

If you ever do get to meet my dog, Zeppe, you might find him slightly more endearing than this puppy.

FTW = Twitter lingo for “For the Win.”  If you are behind in your Web 2.0 etymology, you might need this.

Insound.com is pretty much awesome.  Here is their latest free 15 mp3 sampler. File under: indie, neohipster, PBR.

If you exist anywhere near that musical filing cabinet, you probably would also like to know that Brian Eno has released his 2nd (yes, 2nd) iPhone app.

Last but not least, paying homage to Qdoba, here is some killer Burrito trivia.

Once upon a time, I was a blogger who ran faster with her posts.  As in, I posted more often and didn’t drag my feet as much.

For a variety of reasons of which I will not spin out here, I have never experienced the heartbreak of a painful breakup.  I have only observed the heartbreaks of others’,  a stance that is still painful for the other, but still admittedly detached.

I do not understand, therefore, why all of my favorites songs have historically been breakup songs.

The Local Natives are a outlandishly fun band from Silverlake in LA.  I like them.  I also really like this (“I want you baaack”) song of theirs’, “Airplanes,” and I welcome you to psychoanalyze such strange preferences in me.

(Holga by Bastet)

We are still waiting.  But we pray the same as the day we waited on the abandoned porch of 540.  I heart Restore LA.