the whistle knows my name

I've got a fever, and the only prescription is more cowbell:

I've made movies I haven't even seen. I've done some that are straight to video, which is what most actors fear. I've also made movies that haven't even gone straight to video. They've gone straight to oblivion.
-- Christopher Walken in the San Francisco Chronicle

While I write this, I'm also involved in a crazy IM with my cousin, who is all of 21. I'm basically writing responses like and then? while she writes me paragraphs of soap operatic senior year/ first serious break-up angst. There is an appreciable age difference between us, so I read these accounts of hers with an odd mixture of acute and distant sympathy. I am so happy to not be her age anymore, and yet I remember those times with a bit of nostalgia. I miss that feeling of urgency, which for some reason this morning reminds me of:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

Some people make resolutions at the start of the New Year. I like to make resolutions by birthdays. Of course, this causes birthdays to be an even more reflective time than usual. But this year, I will just be contemplating how life can be like the ocean, resting on plates one may not see. One shift here, one shift there, and California falls into the sea. Life is so delicate that way, and is at its best that way. The very thing that makes life so heartbreaking- the impermanence of it, that is- is the very same thing that makes life worth living.

The perfect complement to my mood of late has been The Magnetic Fields- their songs have the exact same quality of being a paradox... heartbreaking and hilarious at once.