Porcellanopagurus is one of the many attempts of Nature to evolve a crab.
—Lancelot Alexander Borradaile
CRUSTACEA. PART II.–PORCELLANOPAGURUS: AN INSTANCE OF CARCINIZATION. 1916
Category: buttercream
Flirty and Thriving
Little by little, and also by great leaps
life happened to me, and how insignificant this business is.
These veins carried my blood, which I scarcely ever saw,
I breathed the air of so many places without keeping a sample of any.
In the end, everyone is aware of this:
nobody keeps any of what he has, and life is only a borrowing of bones.
—Pablo Neruda, October Fullness
It’s my 30th birthday today! Now begins my journey to thirty, flirty, and thriving.
Treizième
And what is it to work with love?
It is to weave the cloth with threads drawn from your heart, even as if your beloved were to wear that cloth.
It is to build a house with affection, even as if your beloved were to dwell in that house.
It is to sow seeds with tenderness and reap the harvest with joy, even as if your beloved were to eat the fruit.
It is to charge all things you fashion with a breath of your own spirit,
And to know that all the blessed dead are standing about you and watching.
—Khalil Gibran
Happy 13th birthday to La Pêche Fraîche. Lucky lucky.
Untold Mischief
“What a wonderful thing the skin is! It is the largest and most important integument of the whole human organism!
What millions of pores it contains! The minutest aperture might absorb the deadliest poison.
Once in contact with the surface of the body, whether the particle be held in a miasma, or dissolved in the water of ablution, the pore, like a fatal canal, conveys it into the system, whence its eradication may be impossible, and where it may generate untold mischief.”
— “Skin, Baths, Bathing, and Soap,” Francis Pears for Pears Soap, 1859
Silver as the Rainbow Scales
“I’m afraid of getting older”, that’s what I learned to say
‘Cause society has given me the words to think that way.
The message spins and spirals, “Don’t get saggy, don’t get grey”
But the soft and lovely silvers are now falling on my shoulders.
My mother and my grandma, my great-grandmother too
They wrinkle like the river, they sweeten like the dew
And as silver as the rainbow scales that shimmer purple blue.
How can beauty that is living be anything but true?
So let gravity be my sculptor, let the wind do my hair,
Let me dance in front of people without a care.
—Incomprehensible, Big Thief
Happy birthday to me (from me).
Escape From Your Heart
You will never be able to escape from your heart.
So it’s better to listen to what it has to say.
—Paul Coelho, The Alchemist
Happy Valentine’s Day!…
Pockets of My Childhood
Each year is like putting a new coat over all the old ones.
Sometimes I reach into the pockets of my childhood and pull things out.
—Simon Van Booy, “Little Birds”
Happy birthday (to me, from me).
Onzième
Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion.
Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.
—Anne Rice
Happy eleventh birthday, La Pêche Fraîche!
To Myself
“… Sometimes I have kept my feelings to myself, because I could find no language to describe them in …”
Jane Austen
