back from qualicum bay; vacation day 9

i have mosquito bites around my ankles but i try to pay them no mind. no mind 'tall. 'cept it can be fun to scratch them in the mornings. satisfying, but only for the moment of fervent, intense scratching. then all the itch comes back full force and you are forced to go back and pay it no mind.

i have hillbillyish, southren talk in my head because i've been reading As I Lay Dying by Faulkner. i finished it thursday morning closeted in and about my cabin. it turned out to be very powerful. i liked it a lot. such a facinating way of telling a story. faulkner has a poetic way of writing, which is a draw for me. andrea said he doesn't know how to punctuate, but i don't know what she's talking about because this book was punctuated in the regular way. maybe not in the book she had to read in school that turned her against faulkner for life. i was talking to dough and del about it last night at dinner. they have the same set that i got. del is reading the sound and the fury and she said it's hard to tell who's talking and that there's italics a lot and stuff like that. that's the next one i read.

at earls i had the hot chicken caesar, the chicken involved, being cajun chicken. it was a satisfying meal. tangy and sweet and spicy and crispy fresh. we bowled after. our team (mine and bethany's. she was my date) was with sarah and kyle. kyle was really tired and not as happy being stuck with all the girls as he should have been, because let's face it, we're the funnest combo that you could possibly get. he was lethargic and lackluster watching the football game between his bowls, until the last game. then he started playing with us for reals. my first game was respectable. i got 100. it had been a long long time since i bowled five pin, and it's not like i bowl 10 pin a lot either, just once in a blue moon. i didn't start the second game off well. i kept getting gutters. one per turn, it seemed. then sarah told us about her new strategy. "don't think," she encouraged, "just do it as hard as you can. that's what i decided to do." so we did it. this resulted in more gutter balls for me. sometimes 3 in a row and other times i would only knock down one pin. so i gave it up. but by then it was too late. ah well. them's the bowlin brakes innit.

after getting home from the reunion i felt sluggish and tired. i really wanted to sleep but i first gathered up a bunch of self-help books from mom's library that looked interesting to me. then i found the twins watching forever young, so i lay down and watched it with them. after it was over i retired to my cot on the covered balcony and started reading all the time really wanting to sleep, but not doing it. i first perused through kiss dating goodbye. i noted with interest that it was given to sarah by stephanie vickers whom i used to call pickle and whom i was reminding her of the other day. it was no good. tossed it aside and starting reading one about how to get over compulsive eating and bad body image. it is written from a really femminst perspective which you have to take with a grain of salt, but had some interesting ideas. like every time you have a bad body feeling/thought like, "i feel fat." or "i hate my thighs", that it's not about your body at all. it's about some other feeling that you're not facing and it's easier to focus on the body than feel the real feeling. i think that that's probably true. i am generally comfortable in my own skin as steve would say, but at times just out of the blue i have an overwhelming feeling out of the blue, like the one documented in this blog when i felt like a small head on a huge ham. it makes sense that these thoughts come from the way that we feel rather than the way we actually look, since there is so much fluctuation, when we always look about the same. it said that whenever you get the bady body thought you should stop and think about what is going on around you and in your life when you have that thought. like she gave an example that this dance teacher overheard two girls around 11 waiting to go on stage say to each other "i look really fat today." and the other say "you look fine but look how big my stomach is." she pointed out that they were really anxious and just about to perform. they expressed it by focusing on the body. innerstin to me. another interesting concept she talked about was to legalize all foods. all foods become equal. she said to legalize food you think about what foods you really want, it doesn't matter what they are, 'good' or 'bad' and then you buy three times the amount that you could eat in a week. their idea is the principle of abundance. that once forbidden foods are allowed and around in more than you can eat amounts, you realax and actually eat less of them. interesting again. of course when i think of a compulsive fruit eater that i know, i don't know if it's possible to stock up his house with three times the possible amount of fruit he could eat in a week. it would be interesting to see what would happen if he had like six big boxes of apples. there wouldn't be much space for living in... anyways if you get around the femminist parts, it was an interesting book. i didn't read all of it.

mom and dad and john and slavica and i stayed up late talking last night. well dad fell asleep pretty quickly once we moved to the living room, but the rest of us talked. it was nice.

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