No, I’m not pondering right angles.
I’m thinking about the difference in temperature between today and tomorrow.
Today… 20 below zero. Tomorrow… 70 above zero.
90 degrees difference between today and tomorrow. How often does that happen? It happens when one flies from Minneapolis to Tucson in January.
As I was driving in this morning, I was focused. I mean, with black ice everywhere you have to be focused… and even with the focus I still had one giant OH SHIT moment where there was a red light in front of me and even though I was only going 25 mph, the car wasn’t stopping. THE CAR WASN’T STOPPING. IT WASN’T STOPPING EVEN THOUGH I WAS PUMPING THE BREAKS AND SCREAM/CHANTING, “NOT STOPPING! NOT STOPPING! NOT STOPPING!” as I watched the cars whizzing by in front of me… and just as a raised my hand to begin the vicious honking that tells everyone driving perpendicular to me that I’m NOT STOPPING and am about to t-bone them or be t-boned, I feel the tires grip… and the cars slows…
I start to relax when I realize that if I couldn’t stop, then probably all those people behind me aren’t going to be able to stop and they’ll probably smash into me and force me into the intersection that I just narrowly avoided! But no… they are stopping… they are stopping….
And then the bucket-load of adrenaline hits my body and I can no longer feel my hands, arms, legs or feet. I can feel my hammering heart, of course – but limbs are out. This is particularly problematic when attempting to drive. I hope this is a long red light as I whisper to my little guy in my belly…
“I’m sorry honey… but you are about to get a wallop of adrenaline that is going to knock your socks off. Mommy didn’t mean to release that into her bloodstream, but shit, these things happen and the car WASN’T STOPPING. Brace yourself.”
As I continued on my drive to work, I finally noticed how beautiful it is when it’s this cold. The molecules are so cold, everything just sort of hangs in the air, unable to move. Every chimney, laundry vent, grate on the street has a large puffy white cloud that just hangs suspended and immobile in the air. The morning sun takes up an entire quadrant of the sky with it’s fuzzy, photo-filtered blear of yellow surrounded by rings and rings of yellow and white… as if even the light is frozen in place. A rainbow is frozen in place, as well… and I’m like wow… all this color… all this fuzzy diffused light… this is just like…
Well, it’s like being on acid, if you have to know.
I’m not sayin’. I’m just sayin’.
And then, as it will sometimes, the music on my satellite radio decided to be the perfect soundtrack for the moment as “Lights” by Coldplay came on and I cranked it up and just WAS in the moment.
[Side note: I love Coldplay’s “X&Y” so much I could listen to it every day.. but this new Coldplay is SO ANNOYINGLY WEIRD WITH THEIR STUPID MATCHING OUTFITS THAT LOOK LIKE A CROSS BETWEEN LES MISERABLES AND SESAME STREET!! Lame! Lame! And I’m already sick of the new songs and they aren’t cool and I hate Chris’ weird poodle hair and enough with the colored ribbons before I totally snap!!!!!!!!]
And then “Human” by the Killers came on… and there is this line in the song…
“Sometimes open doors make me nervous”
And I could totally relate because, you know… open doors make me kind of nervous, too. Probably partially from my upbringing that if one wanted to get yelled at in my house, a good avenue to that was leaving the goddamned door open… and partially that I have an almost irrational fear that someone will break into my house in the middle of the night and hurt my family… and if I’m being REAL, partially that open doors metaphorically freak me out a little because it always seems like you are supposed to go through them, you know? But what if you don’t want to? Or don’t feel like it? You are a jerk for not going through the door?
My best friend is the opposite. She hates closed doors. She wants endless possibilities and for all of them to remain possibilities for as long as they can and she mourns doors that close… and I’m more likely to go, “Well good. Now I can move on to other things”. I’m not saying I don’t like choice. But I am DECISIVE. When presented with choice, I decide things very quickly and I’m uncomfortable… nervous… the longer the door stays open.
Which has almost nothing to do with frozen air… except they are both things that are left in stasis – hanging in the air – literal and metaphorical representations of that which is both beautiful and an enormous pain in the ass.
