Stop.
What are you doing right now? Right this very minute.
Stop for a couple of minutes and answer that question.
What are you doing RIGHT NOW?
music
Say You’ll Go
love just wasn’t enough anymore—
until, five years after the divorce,
it’s the only thing they have left.
[sc_embed_player fileurl=”http://moriahjovan.com/mojogce/sayyoullgo.mp3″] Janelle Monáe: Say You’ll Go
“Tess … ” She stopped cold at the breath of a whisper, her heart slamming into her ribs so hard she thought it would fall out right there on the table and flop around. She turned slowly—so slowly.
She opened her mouth to scream at him for ambushing her, but she realized just in time that he was as stunned as she was.
And he was beautiful. More beautiful than he had been when he was nineteen. More beautiful than he was the night he’d left her. Yet nothing about him had changed.
His hair was still a mass of long mahogany-red waves past his shoulders. Bunches of hair at his temples had been braided into tiny plaits fastened behind his head. His earrings were medium-sized gold hoops. His stark art deco sun tattoo still spread its rays down along his neck, chin, and jaw. His shirt was blousy white linen floating untucked over oxblood leathers, the ties at the neck hanging loose. His wrist tattoos were on full display. Then she looked at his hands.
He was wearing his wedding ring.
She blinked and looked down at her own left hand. There they were: the circuit board wrist tattoo that matched his and the diamond he’d presented to her in an elaborate, public proposal. Because why do it privately when you could put on a show?
She looked back up at him, knowing all her heartbreak and joy and sorrow and love for him were written all over her face—and it was reflected in his.
“This is exactly what I wanted to avoid,” Sebastian drawled with great irritation. “If some people had picked up her phone!”
She should’ve picked up the phone.
Tess didn’t move—couldn’t—but Étienne could and did, skirting his chair and striding toward her with that look, the pirate king, the one who wouldn’t be denied.
She sighed when he slid his big hands around her face, tilted it back, and brought her up to him for a kiss that scorched her soul.
It was magical. He was magical.
She closed her eyes and opened her mouth, feeling his tongue, so familiar, so talented. Tasting him as he had always tasted with an undernote of Dr. Pepper. She whimpered into his mouth when the pressure lightened, but he only tilted his head and went after her at a different angle. Sensation shot downward, and she moaned softly, ready to spend the next few hours feeling his bare chest against her naked breast, his legs twined with hers, his body inside hers, stroking her and assuaging this ache for him she’d never been able to contain.
“GET A FUCKING ROOM!” Sebastian roared, standing and pounding the table. “You two drive me fucking insane!”
They parted. Slowly. So slowly.
“I did not sleep with her,” he whispered, dropping his forehead on hers, his chest heaving.
“I know.” That surprised him, and she was strangely gratified.
“Mon cœur,” he breathed.
“I love you, too,” she whispered back, equally out of breath. Then she gulped. “But love isn’t enough.”
He drew away from her, dropped his head back, gripped the back of her chair so hard it creaked. His chest heaved.
But somebody began to clap. A golf clap. Hushed. Mocking.
Someone else joined in. Then someone else.
Her heart was breaking—again—but she couldn’t hide her smile. Nor, it seemed, could he.
“Étienne!” Sebastian snapped. “Get your ass in this seat right now. Tess, siddown. Somebody has to be the adult in the room. As per usual.”
“We need to talk,” Étienne murmured, looking at her with those heartbreaking—heartbroken—ice blue eyes.
She nodded. “I know.”
“To a therapist! I do have other things to do, you know!”
Étienne tossed Sebastian a bland smile over his shoulder. “Keep it up. You know we like to put on a show.”
Sebastian snarled but sat, and somebody began to chuckle.
He turned back to her. “You drew those for me?”
Tess, as in love as she had been at seventeen, could only nod. “I draw everything for you.”
My angel is the centerfold
I sorted my music by Mojo-defined genre for a change and noticed a very strange juxtaposition in the category of “’80s Pop”:
“Centerfold” by the J. Geils Band directly followed by
“Black Velvet” by Alannah Myles (don’t hate me ’cause I’m cheesy).
and I’m like, why? Why do I have these together in the same sort because they represent two vastly different phases of my life.
The remembery I associate with “Centerfold” is a roller rink. I was 13.
The remembery I associate with “Black Velvet” is my room in the apartment I shared with 3 other girls in Provo, Utah. I was 21.
.
That’s not to mention all the flashes of rememberies in between the Centerfold part of my life and the Black Velvet part of my life, all rich in music, rich in experience, all helping to define my personality and philosophy, riding with me through alternating giddy and painful adolescence to adulthood. (Although to be fair, I don’t remember much between giddy and painful ’cause I tend toward the melodramatic. Betcha hadn’t noticed that yet.)
I have self-defined genres that fit a certain aspect of my life. I remember nearly every song on the radio the day I sat in my aunt’s house in Salt Lake, waiting for my parents to say it was time to take me to Provo and leave me there for the next 4 years of my life, 1200 miles from home. Shit, I couldn’t wait. (Never mind I didn’t make it 4 years and ended up with a home-grown degree from UMKC.)
I also have one that chronicles the summer I was 20, feeling my oats, not a care in the world and delivering pizza on a lunch rush for fun money. I went to Europe that summer for a month with my family and I couldn’t turn around in Holland and Germany without hearing Belinda Carlisle’s “Circle in the Sand.”
I did a lot that summer. I wish I’d done more.
Beethoven makes me peevish
Not really. I’ll take Ludwig over Wolfgang any day. But I have not bitched in at least 1/2 hour; thus, I am overdue.
One thing that totally gives me an emotional wedgie is this: When you reply to a blog post that asks an open-ended question, and you put a lot of time and care and thought into your reply, and you’re not acknowledged by the original poster, not told that you’re brilliant, not told that you’re a fucking idiot. What I mean is, NO ONE who comments is acknowledged and the blog doesn’t have enough traffic (read: any personality) to generate its own activity.
Hit’n’run poster who was doing her time on a group blog. I’m on several like that. They have one thing in common: They’re LDS. They’re about writing. PLONK
I don’t think I’ve done this (I try to be conscientious about commenting), but if I have, feel free to shove it back in my face.
And while I’m bitching, might as well throw this out, too:
Takes me about 3 days through the blogosphere these days to get tired of the latest catch phrases and buzzwords. And I’ve used some of them in the last 6 months. Well, no more.
drinking the Kool-Aid (thank you, O’Reilly, like, 3 years ago)
honing your craft (and plain ol’ “craft” by itself by now, no matter what it’s in reference to)
made of awesome
made of win
meme
OMGWTFBBQ and any variant thereof
FTW (for the win)
trope
srsly
And also? My blog is just way too cluttered for my taste. I’m going to have to figure out something workable before my ADD gets violent.
What are you latest internet pet peeves?
For fun and a free e-copy of The Proviso, be the first to peg the reference in this post’s title.
Oz never did give nuthin’ to the tin man
that he didn’t already have.
This is one of my favorite sentences and has been since I was a child. When I was a child, I didn’t quite understand it (and some days I think I still don’t), but it resonated with me deeply until I was old enough to at least grasp the intellectual concept. (Some of the best things I’ve ever read/heard come from a subconscious wisdom that it took chemical enhancement to drag kicking and screaming into the light, but what the hell, right?)
I still draw on it for strength and encouragement fairly often, at least once a week. I don’t have it posted anywhere; I don’t need to.
Go ahead. Be brave. Pony up with your guiding maxims.
Jukeboxes and libraries
I have a bunch of beautiful books. They’re mostly in hardback because I don’t see paperbacks as objets d’art the way I do my hardback books. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I read hardbacks, certainly. If I have it, I read it. But there’s just something substantial about a hardback book. Specifically, I’m thinking of my faux leatherbound books, but no matter.
As I go around the ebook blogs like Teleread and The Book is Dead, a bunch of dissociated rememberies from my childhood plague me. They’re always the same ones, played in different order, but in a loop:
Remembery #1.
The mp3 player was only a Wish when I was a child (think 1970s) with my little panda transistor radio barely capable of tuning in the jazz station, but playing disco just fine and dandy. Rock the boat, don’t rock the boat, baby. Rock the boat, don’t tip the boat over.
I had my Wish in my mind like a jukebox, playing all the songs I loved and none of the songs I didn’t love, all in one place, in the palm of my hand. Even as I got older, I couldn’t afford to buy albums and then, once I got a “boom box,” couldn’t afford to buy cassettes, either. I taped random songs off the radio and tried my best to come up with as clean a version as a K-Tel compilation cassette as I could. It didn’t work and my wish became a longing so intense sometimes I couldn’t bear it. Then I got a Walkman, which was a step up, but my ADD/OCD could not be happy. Why, oh why, was there no way to buy a song at a time? What would that look like? How could it be done?
My Wish: a jukebox in my hand, with all the songs I loved and none of the songs I hated, with the ability to purchase one song at a time.
Remembery #2.
Dark house post family bedtime. Flashlight. Book. Covers. You all know this routine. For my mother, it was hiding in the back of a closet. With a flashlight. And a book. Why didn’t my book come with a light? You know, something handy, that I could clip onto it? That way I didn’t have to give my flashlight a blow job every time I had to turn the page.
Remembery #3.
Jean-Luc Picard sitting in his cabin reading a hardback book. To me, this was nothing until a crew member questioned him. Wesley, maybe? I can’t remember. Too young to know what a hardback book with paper pages was. To Picard, it was an antique. To Wesley, it was a novelty.
DISCLAIMER: I didn’t watch Star Trek much. Not the original, not the Next Generation, not Voyager, or many of the spinoffs (although I actually enjoyed Deep Space 9 because everybody on that show had serious faults and weren’t a bunch of Mary Sues and Gary Stus running around knowing how to deal with every situation). This is why my remembering an STNG episode is so…exceptional. And it had to do with a book and what must have happened to books to evoke the reaction Picard’s hardback paper book evoked.
Something that could store a library in one spot? Like my dream of a jukebox in my hand. Could it be? A library in my hand?
Don’t get me wrong. At that point, I was old enough to know it could be done, but I wasn’t getting my hopes up because the jukebox in my hand hadn’t materialized yet or if it had, I didn’t know about it.
You have to know something about me that makes my need for such things a compulsion (you know, besides my mental disorders): I am an anti-packrat. I hate Stuff. I have Stuff I don’t hate, really, but if it can be condensed, packed, and stored out of sight until I need it, so I can have SPACE, I am more kindly disposed toward Stuff. (Oh, Space Bags, how I would love thee if every blanket we own weren’t in use because it’s as cold as a witch’s tit outside.) I don’t like knickknacks, either. And as I get older, the Mies van der Rohe school of architecture (mid-century modern) gets more and more attractive to me.
The only things I collect and store without driving my OCD/ADD batty is data. And mp3s. And now, ebooks.
(I like lots of art, though, so as soon as the Tax Deductions stop coloring on the walls, I’ll paint and put up my art. It’s difficult to deal with the child who writes her name on the wall and then blames her little brother, who doesn’t know how to read, much less write.)
I haven’t quite figured out how to go completely minimalist, given the life of a family and its needs for Stuff.
But the jukebox-and-library in hand is a good start.
The springtime song
Tax Deduction #1 is 5 and can’t read much yet. Bad Mommy! Bad Mommy! Call social services.
Okay, well, I keep a CD player in her room so she can have music (“lullabies”) and we’ve been doing this for about 7 months, I guess, givvertake.
CD #1 was Kenny Loggins’s Return to Pooh Corner
CD #2 was Tina Malia’s Lullaby Favorites
She wanted the Nutcracker
So we’ve been on CD #3 now for about a week and a half. It’s just one of those compilation samplers of baroque
She says to me, she says, “Mama, there’s a springtime song!”
Oh, really? I mean, I know which one she’s probably talking about, but where/how does she know it’s the “springtime song”? Did she learn that at school? (Cause, wow, great school!) Or does it just magically say “Hey, I’m a springtime song” to a kindergartner?
So she’s on me about this, right? Tonight I turn on her “lullabies” (she had a meltdown when I told her it was really called “baroque,” so we’re back to “lullabies”) and she says to me, she says, “Number 9 is the springtime song.” So I look and why, yes, it is, right there, #9. I asked her a bunch of questions about how she knew this (well, I guess interrogated would be a better word), but she didn’t cough anything up.
I decided to go on the theory that a 5-year-old, when listening to Vivaldi’s Concerto No. 1, automatically knows that that’s the springtime song.
Because to think otherwise would take away the magic.
Speaking of politics…
My husband and I went to see Rush last night. We had AWESOME seats.
There were two age demographics: late 30s and up and…their kids. The youngest I saw was sevenish, but if there was anybody there between the ages of mom-and-dad-forced-me-to-come and 30, I didn’t see them.
It was the most sedate audience of a hard-rockin’ concert I’ve ever been to, but then, most all of us were old and fat. No matter. By halfway through the second half I was ready to get laid.