smart.

My friend DC once wisely said (er, wrote in an insightful blog post) that being smart is sometimes like having a piece of plexiglass between yourself and everyone else around you who is having fun.

I definitely feel that way, way more than I would like to. I've met many others who glory in that invisible barrier protecting their ideals and intellect from an increasingly distant Them. And I've met others still who seem so desperate to do anything to break it down; who will go out of their way to even try to swallow it.

Dude...can't nobody swallow walls.

But you can put windows in them. Maybe step around them from time to time long enough to take a few deep breaths of the smooth Fun Air everyone's always going on about. At the very least, you can decorate your see-through wall with conversation-starting stickers.

I think everyone's got their own wall. Call it intelligence, call it beauty, even Great Personality. We all have a strength we hide behind. We blame. We cling to.

Human behavior, yo. It's a tricky bitch.

dose of folk wisdom for the day

I've been thinking, and seems like everything a person could want to do either takes longer than anyone could have ever predicted to come to fruition, or it happens so fast you don't have time to think or feel anything about it until you're left spinning in its dust.

I don't know which is better, or if it's even about one kind of fruition-ing being better. Both seem to happen all of the time to me and the people around me.

I call this folk wisdom cause I'm a folk, just like you. Eh. Here's a picture of Woody Guthrie for good measure.

Words Can Never Make Up for What You Do

When I was a kid I was good with words like others were good with basketball or trombone or getting people to kiss them. I had a way with words, and words had a way with me. We still have our way with each other, on a regular and mostly satisfactory basis. While I don’t think language is the province of the fancy and the few, I believe there is something to be said for being good with words (and it takes words to say that something.) Still, sometimes there really just are no words.

Certain emotions and sensations end up expressing themselves as best they can: through a series of shrugs or mix tapes, longing looks, little laughs tucked into the corner of your mouth, crying jags, the flex of a hand, the tap of a foot, the way you shake your hair out of a ponytail or smooth your shirt or inexplicably touch a wall, how you touch someone’s back or arm at the precise moment and pressure they need you to, the measure of your laugh, the intensity with which you look something up for someone on the internet, do a favor, keep your mouth shut, come out fighting, reach or someone, pour a drink, steal a kiss, sneer, sigh, shudder, hold your breath, a door, a thought.

Not to get all grad school phenomenology class on you, but all that’s language. Each smile we burn, pain we show, tremor we swallow: all words in their way.

And we all have some sort of way with them.