1. Sprechen Sie deutsch?
2. Est ein underst campingplatz en der near?
Number 1 I said to Amie just before she went into her massage, and she replied, "No, but I love to sing in German. I can understand a lot of it, I just can't speak it." Number 2 is the one sentence I've committed to memory after listening to the Berlitz guide to German over and over again. And today, as I was finishing up the exercises (Ubungen) in my German lesson, I laughed at myself as I answered the question, "Sind Sie klug?" (are you intelligent?) because, not minutes before, I had been writing down the vocabulary (der Wortschatz) words from the lesson and had written klug = intellegence. Hmmmm. I know that intelligence doesn't necessarily have to do with one's spelling ability, but I have to wonder....
Last night at the Front Room I cut off the tip of my thumb, a very tiny tip mind you, but enough for it to take four hours to clot, and for me to panic just a bit about how it was going to affect my other profession -the one that I actually went to SCHOOL for. We had, just minutes before, been talking about how we liked this bread knife, how it glided through the fresh-baked foccacia bread; I had even called it SEXY! And then it became my enemy. On the bright side, it got me out of closing the restaurant and home to my freezing apartment where I lay in bed watching Al Jazeera cover the beginning of the war in Iraq (movie: The Control Room) and propped my left thumb up above my head while I pinched it against an ice pack. Around midnight the red stuff finally stopped flowing and I let my droopy eyes close and I slept. I was so tired I didn't even brush my teeth.
Now, brushing my teeth is not a practice that I skip often but it seems that desperate times call for desperate measures. I've been interested in the idea of practices lately. I've started a writing and meditation practice in the mornings and it's not nearly as ingrained as my practice of brushing teeth, but I hear it takes awhile to make a habit of something.
Other things I've made habits of or wanted to make habits of are: playing violin or piano, running, yoga, a morning cup of tea, eating a sit-down breakfast looking out over Casco Bay, emptying my capture tool, writing in my journal, keeping my room tidy, washing the dishes, locking my bicycle, watering the plants, practicing a foreign language.
Habits I've tried to break: drinking out of the milk or juice bottle, eating in front of the refrigerator, having a bowl of cereal before bed, leaving my clothes and bags and other belongings strewn about the house, letting the tea kettle boil itself dry, leaving all the kitchen cabinets open, having 5-7 different programs running on my computer at once....
I'd love to hear what those habits are that you've tried to make or break over the years....
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Lily, I love your rambling way of writing in this piece - it fits the way my mind works (and is how I like to write best) Habits I've tried (maybe succeeded) to break: thinking I'm going to remember some date or book title without writing it down, picking my nose while driving – in case someone I know is passing me in the other direction, being a know-it-all, being overly helpful (another version of being a know-it-all), smoking, needing to tell someone how I feel about what they did, needing to be right (know-it-all redux). Positive habits I've tried to acquire: drinking jasmine tea, saying yes, throwing out junk mail the day it arrives, listening without reacting, remembering what I'm grateful for, listening to what my body tells me, letting other people be who they are and have their lives. Love M.
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