I subscribe to a certain Lucy Van Pelt type of psychology, a belief that “carpe diem” is really more than enough to go on, in fact, it’s almost all you need to know about getting by in the world. It’s served me well enough, but at times, it falls just short. The day has been seized, tightly and by the throat, and perhaps throttled a little for good measure, but the heart is somehow left out of the process.<\/p>\n
When the day you are attempting to seize insists on skittering away across time zones, how can you ever grab hold of it? And even if you have it, if your feet are in, oh, Seattle, and the globe starts to spin away from you towards, let’s say Vienna, there is no way your arms are long enough to keep your feet where you want them to be. You will have to let go by the time you reach the Eastern seaboard or you will get very, very, sore. Your feet will be dragged across the peaks of the Rockies, your shins all marked up by the pointy Continental Divide, your belly scraped on the corrugated metal grain elevators of the plains. It really hurts when you hit your chin on the Eiffel Tower. Don’t even get me started on the Atlantic crossing. And anyway, who can reach that far?<\/p>\n
Carpe deim doesn’t make it possible for you to be in two places at once, either. It can’t magically make you able to browse the shelves the local public library while you are also off to some farm festival to find out what makes for a handsome sheep. You cannot eat Ethiopian food, seated on the outdoor patio surrounded by African accents, sopping up the curry with that odd spongy bread while also having kaffee und kuchen in a tiny jewel box bakery where the ladies are wearing fur hats. One of you can not have the cake while the other eats it. Carpe deim is all fine and well, but then you get to the point where there’s no cake.<\/p>\n
Maybe I’m looking for a sort of “seize the cake” ideology. I’m flustered because not only don’t I know the word for cake in Latin, but seizing cake makes a big mess all over the place, though I guess you could lick the whole sweet disaster off your fingers. It has a certain sexiness to it, seize the cake, but also the cake is ruined.<\/p>\n
It’s Independence Day. There is a surplus of independence, but very little cake.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I subscribe to a certain Lucy Van Pelt type of psychology, a belief that “carpe diem” is really more than enough to go on, in fact, it’s almost all you need to know about getting by in the world. It’s served me well enough, but at times, it falls just short. The day has been … <\/p>\n