Calming Stones or the Satisfaction of AcquisitionWhat properties does the stone iolite supposedly have? I was all restless and discontented yesterday for no good reason. I took the bus from Dot Org to DU to have dinner with HAO before meeting RDC to hear John Perry Barlow speak. Cookies, peanut butter toast, a walk, finding way cool bathbeads in sun and moon and star shapes at the market, and having survived the two bus routes (the freak magnet routes, unlike my regular commute), and at least two occasions of raucous laughter in complicated situations did not calm me. Walking from HAO's place to the lecture hall, we passed a jeweler whose work I admired around the neck of another friend back in May. CGK wore a goddess pendant, similar to my favorite pair of earrings, which I loved. Finally the jeweler and I were face to face.
The ring that called to me, and you know sometimes things do, has three oval capuchons of iolite. The center and largest one is the clearest, bluest iolite I've ever seen. It is bigger than I usually wear, and ideally I would have it resized for my middle finger so I can wear my moonstone on my ring finger, but right now I draw a lot of contentment from the new weight and appearance.
Anyway, finding this ring calmed me last night, and while I'm fairly sure it did because it's the new ring I've wanted for so long and because it was a surprise, I'm also willing to allow that the iolite had something to do with it.
The rest of the afternoonI think most people discriminate somewhat based on physical characteristics or clothing or income level assumed from one or both, and I know I'm not free of that (I don't understand how anyone can allow him or herself to grow fat or to believe it healthy once so) myself but what I notice is odor. The Broadway bus was filled with smokers. Wearing stale garb. Crowded. I should shut up, because a coworker of mine was groped on a sardine-tight bus on the day of the parade. I merely couldn't breathe. The air was fresher on the Evans bus and then I was on campus, a free woman, pleased to be free of that claustrophobic situation but restless and dissatisfied anyway.
HAO fed me peanut butter toast, which calmed me somewhat. Overall I still wanted to pitch myself under a truck. A Matchbox truck. Maybe a Tonka. I thumbed a Newsweek or two. I needed more sustenance, though, and accordingly we set out. HAO ran back upstairs for a canvas shopping bag and I hid behind a tree, the junior Denver sort of tree (only cottonwood growing near creeks get big here), so I figured the Peanuts line applied to me: Snoopy hides behind Charlie Brown, thinking, "It's hard to hide behind someone vertical when you're horizontal." I heard the door open but she said nothing; I peered carefully out and saw HAO take a few steps, looking around. I peered uncarefully out and called her name. She told me I shouldn't run away after just discussing trucks. I was hiding, not running.
In Safeway, looking for Bioré strips, I found bathbeads in neato shapes including suns and moons and stars. I took a handful and searched along the back of the aisles to find HAO, who was traversing the front of the aisles for me. She was pleased with the beads, particularly with penguin-shaped, ones white on one side and black on the other. She found Ponds strips, the first step to a CVS brand of Bioré. Except she'd never heard of CVS. Okay, another bit of elitism is how tenaciously I adhere to my New England-isms. Walgreen's, if I must.
HAO also bought a box of tissues printed with suns and moons and stars in pattern nowhere near as appealing as her current, empty box (of a different brand). So I made her give me the old one when we got home. If I didn't already have something to keep my colored pencils in, I'd use that.
We gagged at a Broncos wedding cake. White frosting, three tiers, pretty harmless, think you? Decorated with blue and orange flowers and tiny little Broncos helmets. Yikes. Then we struck off for home with milk and oranges and cookies and a stop at Chipotle for HAO.
Sitting at her table gazing out her second-storey window into the evening, I turned to HAO and asked, "Do you have binoculars?" Whereupon she immediately responded, "Do you think it's the Indigo Girls?" which elicited whooping laughter from your humble narrator. I love being so immediately understood. Which is why I write so garbledly.
Being understoodIn the third-floor apartment in the other wing, two figures appear on the wall. A yarn drawing, a poster, a mural? We don't know. But they look like they could be the Indigo Girls, with the darker haired one (Emily?) behind and to the left of the blonde one (if Emily is brunette, Amy is blonde). However, though the right figure is certainly not Garth, the left one might be Wayne if that's the right sort of cap. I think someone is more likely to enthuse to that degree about the Indigo Girls than "Wayne's World" though.
So anyway, when I asked for binoculars HAO knew there was only one thing I could want them for, to peer at the mysterious figures. Thus the mindreading. She says the view's no better from Jeff's apartment, even though his is on the right floor. To find out who the figures are is my new mission.
Amusing as that was, I was still fairly bouncy. I wanted her to escort me to the lecture hall, and she was agreeable, so we set off. In Driscoll bridge the jewelry merchant I've remembered since seeing CGK's pendant once, last May, was there, and I bought my ring.
I felt bad removing the moonstone I've worn for almost seven years, but I really like my new ring. I bought the moonstone to replace a lapis lazuli, both rings in the same Tolkien-esque design; I wanted to replace it partly because the lapis was cracked and partly because SSP had worn the ring: I found the moonstone a month after I broke up with him. I was in Cambridge anyway, visiting PLT, but I sought out the particular store on purpose. Now I have a ring that reminds me of no man, not even JRRT. HAO, because she was with me; CGK, because she told me about the jeweler; CLH, because her jewelry-making friend Mimi told me about iolite; HEBD, because she got email today (I'm writing this the 30th of January) and I told her about the ring.
(I sense my first email to her is one of those letters I'll remember for a while. I remember what I wrote my first email to DEDBG about--it was when PLT and I sparred--and I know I string words together differently for one person than for another. Besides, writing that I'll remember just about guarantees that yes, this ring will always remind me of the day HEBD got email.)
With the ring and my pleasure in it, I could ready myself to sit quietly in the audience.
John Perry BarlowJohn Perry Barlow was great. I took notes in my journal, which I won't reproduce here. Anyone can find his personal site or his writings in Wired; he writes more clearly than I could reproduce him. He believes in human community. He lives in a small Wyoming town and in cyberspace and he travels: perfect. He's a Macintosh man, of course. Among all the intelligent questions about information preservation, copyright, profit, expression, and freedom, he was even polite to the one stupidest questioner in the audience: "Which Grateful Dead songs did you write?" Had he not just spent two hours talking about the freedom of information on the internet?
RDC missed that one, but I muttered, "Look it up!" loudly enough for the Deadhead in the row ahead of me to hear, look back, and grin in agreement. Chowderhead.
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