oh, for funny

At some point soon Sonya and I should introduce ourselves, provide a blurb or two about who we are and what this blog is about, maybe even be extra-formal and create different sections on this site as references, sort of. And yeah, some pics of us might be useful, just so you all can verify we are twins.

But hey, formality can bite me. Twin collective us, rather. This blog is a birthday gift to each other, to the world, actually...aaah! Inspiring! Then again, our birthday was back in March. And this started in June. So, once again: formality, you can talk to our amazing twin hands for all I care.

It's long-standing blog doctrine that we can cover anything and everything in this space, and it need not make sense or even be nice. We can write amazing bits of cruel banter like this: "Blessed be the next fruit of thy womb. I hope it turns out to be uterine cancer. And I mean that."* And we can call it wicked funny, even though cancer is not funny, and hoping someone gets it is even more not funny. We can also disclose choice bits of Twin Candidness, like so:

"They don't call me...Adivising...Sis...for nothing! Or for anything, for that matter. Actually, they don't call me Advising Sis at all." --Sonya, 6/13/09, phone convo

I love my twin sis for this reason: we can be indiscriminate together. If everyone around us is salsa dancing at Ryles in Boston and is wicked good at it, Sonya drags me out and we dance however the fuck we want, after all we still dance great and look hot doing it. If our dialogue turns ridiculous with bizarre accents or nonsensical language, well, we ride that wave way past its end. And way past everyone else getting tired of us. We do not get embarrassed for each other, we can mock others and feel fine about it, and if need be we exchange looks so that we know it's Serious Time, but mostly we run ramshackle. It's hard to find that in others.

We started this blog when I was visiting Sonya in Boston, and she made me promise to write on here what I had to eat on my plane flight back to the Twin Cities. It was clam chowder and a banana at the Logan Airport Au Bon Pain. I sat down in the crowded waiting area at the gate and slurped and slurped at the chowder, and an older man sitting next to me decided he'd had enough and got out of his seat to stand away from me. The chowder was okay, the banana was better. I don't know why chowder appealed to me for breakfast, but then again, anything for breakfast usually works.

Coming back into things is weird. But some quick hits:

--I developed this crazy pain in my right wrist this past weekend, bad enough that I couldn't do anything with my right hand--cooking, writing, brushing, flossing (ew). I was worried it was carpal tunnel, but wouldn't you know, wikipedia proved my assumption wrong. So I downed some ibuprofen and it seems to be healing, whatever it is. It's amazing what something like that can do to your psyche--you can't focus on anything else, and pretty soon, before you know it, three days have gone by. Wha? Even worse is when you get acute paronychia in your fingertip. Yep, you'll have to look that one up too. It happened to me when I was in New Orleans and it hurt so bad I would have given anything to chop off my finger just so I could sleep.

--Walking home from the Macalester library, I crossed the Grand Ave intersection and a pickup driver said to me, "Faggot." Now, I've been called any number of things in my little St. Paul alcove--faggot, fag, wop, jap, chink etc.--except it's usually screamed at me from a fast-moving vehicle. This dude was freaking conversational, i.e. "Beautiful day, isn't it, faggot?" "Hey, faggot, do you happen to have the time?" "Excuse me, faggot, but I believe you dropped your umbrella back there." For whatever reason this really unnerved me. And I envisioned all these witty comebacks and/or threats to smash their car windows, and of course I remembered, no, there's a precedent for this, and you're on the wrong side of history. And it's almost the end of June, which means we queers are slowly amassing for Pride. We've got ourselves all in a tizzy about gay marriage and yet this lingering threat of violence has not changed, not one bit. The love I have to offer is divisible by the terror that I feel.

--No Greater Joy Than: this week's entry--bringing a pile of groceries home to an empty refrigerator and pantry and looking at both of them later stocked to brimming. Can I get a holla? Isn't that shit gratifying?

More tomorrow. Night



*James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk. I found this at the library, and I mean found, I'm usually really purposeful at libraries, I know what books I want and I reserve what I can't find, but it's when I feel listless and just plunder through the shelves at whim, that's when I find tons of interesting shit. Sifting Aimlessly Through Library Shelves: has my vote.