Disgust

I rolled my eyes a lot today. Sighed a lot. That kind of sigh that has a wet gurgle at the back of the mouth. My tongue may have melodramatically stuck out from my mouth in annoyance or disgust. My eyes may have bugged out of my head just a little.

I once read that there are nine distinctions of disgust in the western world: death, dying, food, sex, corpses, emissions and fluids leaving the body, animals, unnatural entrances into the flesh, and contact with contamination (physically or morally).

Not that it was a particularly annoying or disgusting day. It wasn't at all. But I felt more sensitive to being uncomfortable today.

Woke up from dreams where I met awesome strangers I liked and saw birds I never thought I'd see in my lifetime.

My dog Cosmo wouldn't poop for me because he only poops for his dad.

Sat in a long training that went on and on and...

Putzing around my work office, looking for things that needed to be found, I grew hot. I'm never hot.

A tech guy did some maintenance on my work computer and I couldn't get into my e-mail. Sigh. Groan. Melt in my chair a little.

Realized that it wasn't the tech guy's maintenance to fault, but my own stupidity. Shoot me.

Having too much that I wanted to do after work and knowing that I wouldn't get to it all.

Lately I've been getting irritable around lunch time, maybe due to low blood-sugar. I'm reduced to acting like a three-year-old in my office (Sorry, Carol) until I get something to eat.

Eating a Caesar salad for lunch and remembering that Caesar dressing consists of a smelly fish, but which one? I continued eating (it's anchovies).

Finally seeing how much salt coated my car under the glaringly bright, annoying sun (Sorry, sun).

The long wait at the car wash.

People just always have to exist where I want to exist.

Cosmo still wouldn't poop for me.

And he smelled like low-tide.

The chili my mother made me wouldn't get hot enough until after three attempts to heat it in the microwave.

Brian came home and Cosmo pooped for him.

Went for a stupid run in the snow.

While running in the snow, I asked Silas "why do I do this to myself?" I was trudging along, my uncooperative foot going in all the wrong, painful directions. It soon became too dark to completely distinguish and judge the snow's various layers and depths ahead of me. One step into snow wouldn't go above my running shoes but the next step would go up to my calf. Silas was a hard body of glee running ahead of me, turning around, encouraging me with his hot breath steaming out his mouth. And I smiled at him.

And everything was actually quite gorgeous. Despite the tightness in my calves, the snot coming from my nose, and my unsteady gait, the act of slowing down or even stopping put everything into perspective. This evening, I began reading Mary Oliver's book of poetry West Wind. In one of the poems, she also stopped beneath a dark sky to look at the stars. Here, you can read it:

Stars

Here in my head, language

keeps making its tiny noises.

How can I hope to be friends

with the hard white stars

whose flaring and hissing are not speech

but a pure radiance?

How can I hope to be friends

with the yawning spaces between them

where nothing, ever, is spoken?

Tonight, at the edge of the field,

I stood very still, and looked up,

and tried to be empty of words.

What joy was it, that almost found me? What amiable peace?

Then it was over, the wind

rouse dup in the oak trees behind me

and I fell back, easily.

Earth was a hundred thousand pure contraltos--

even the distant night bird

as it talks threat, as it talks love

over the cold, black fields.

Once, deep in the woods,

I found the white skull of a bear

and it was utterly silent--

and once a river otter, in a steel trap,

and it too was utterly silent.

What can we do

but keep on breathing in and out,

modest and willing, and in our places? Listen, listen, I'm forever saying,

Listen to the river, to the hawk, to the hoof,

to the mockingbird, to the jack-in-the-pulpit--

then I come up with a few words, like a gift.

Even as now.

Even as the darkness has remained the pure, deep darkness.

Even as the stars have twirled a little, while I stood here,

looking up,

one hot sentence after another.

-Mary Oliver

There isn't any language beyond math between the stars. And because there isn't any language up there between the hot, and cold, and dust, there is no disgust, there is no annoyance. It's kind of relaxing to look up at the massive, dime-sized space between them. As much as I may be annoyed or disgusted by so many things ambling and lazing around on this giant rock, it gives me a reason to look up and acknowledge the emptiness and how existing exists without me, without us, without our gaze.