![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Good Things
Feb. 23rd, 2007 06:44 pmI feel like I've been complaining a lot lately. I don't like myself when I'm like that. But rather than complain about complaining, I thought I should document some good things. Occasionally when I've had really bad days, I've written entries consisting of just lists of the good things that happened on those days, and when I've read back over them months later, I've found I can't actually remember whatever it was I was so upset about at the time.
Today was not a bad day. It was a pretty average day, in terms of the balance of good/bad things. I'm still ill, but I'm getting better, and Kirsty (angel!) took my short loan back to the library for me this morning. But for the most part it's the little things that make a day good or bad, and they're the ones that so often go undocumented.
Like this evening, walking home just a bit after sunset, the sky all purple and still hazy over the sea, a cresent moon in brilliant counterpoint. I was listening to Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan as I walked (or just Dylan, if you like, since the Hendrix song was 'All Along the Watchtower'), and I was eating olives.
I love olives. I don't eat them often, mostly because they are so expensive, but this only makes them more special. I think I probably have the same attitude towards green olives as many girls have towards fine chocolates. They are delicious, rich, savory luxury. From the first pungeant whiff of them until long after you've finished eating, olives are pure pleasure. The blissful bite into their firm and supple flesh, ever so slightly different on each fruit, releases rich and pervasive juices, tasted on all parts of the mouth and continuing until swallowed. The strong, soft and oddly delicate oil is pervasive, too, coating fingertips and refusing to be fully licked away. I can still taste and feel it, warm, on my lips.
Thoreau said that all the sensual desires are essentially the same; that the lust for food is no different from the lust for sex. Given the inherent strangeness of that claim--and the fact that Thoreau himself lived a mostly celibate lifestyle--I found it more than a little dubious. But when you think about it, the exact same senses are involved in both, albeit in different proportions. Smell, touch, taste: good food or good sex needs all three.
Today was not a bad day. It was a pretty average day, in terms of the balance of good/bad things. I'm still ill, but I'm getting better, and Kirsty (angel!) took my short loan back to the library for me this morning. But for the most part it's the little things that make a day good or bad, and they're the ones that so often go undocumented.
Like this evening, walking home just a bit after sunset, the sky all purple and still hazy over the sea, a cresent moon in brilliant counterpoint. I was listening to Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan as I walked (or just Dylan, if you like, since the Hendrix song was 'All Along the Watchtower'), and I was eating olives.
I love olives. I don't eat them often, mostly because they are so expensive, but this only makes them more special. I think I probably have the same attitude towards green olives as many girls have towards fine chocolates. They are delicious, rich, savory luxury. From the first pungeant whiff of them until long after you've finished eating, olives are pure pleasure. The blissful bite into their firm and supple flesh, ever so slightly different on each fruit, releases rich and pervasive juices, tasted on all parts of the mouth and continuing until swallowed. The strong, soft and oddly delicate oil is pervasive, too, coating fingertips and refusing to be fully licked away. I can still taste and feel it, warm, on my lips.
Thoreau said that all the sensual desires are essentially the same; that the lust for food is no different from the lust for sex. Given the inherent strangeness of that claim--and the fact that Thoreau himself lived a mostly celibate lifestyle--I found it more than a little dubious. But when you think about it, the exact same senses are involved in both, albeit in different proportions. Smell, touch, taste: good food or good sex needs all three.
