renewing our vow(el)s

after five months of careful setting aside, we finally replaced my lost wedding band. on sunday night we sat down to look through the wedding photos & imagine the day over. & when we were filled up by, brimming over with, on the edges of all that light all over again, we went to the rooftop of our new place & performed a small ritual for the ring renewal. we exchanged vows & made new promises to each other; we blessed our first year & the years to come. while it kills me a little that at the end of our lives Z's ring will have the wear of a full marriage & i will be minus a year--really, it's the kick ass marriage that matters.

the vows we exchanged & exchanged again:

I am committed to this joining together of two as two—to the complex connection of tissue and light, which comes with a marriage. I am committed to maintaining the intense, vast, & sometimes-secret universes that we found in each other when we met. I am committed to protecting your solitude in order for our passions to be fulfilled & particularly to protecting the ambition that sparked us into ignition. I am committed to you in moments of disrepair & sorrow, stress & sickness, but especially to making sure there is even more laughter and light in these moments. I am committed to the delicacy & lacing of your heart and its many-leveled chambers. I am committed to loving you through these bright cells of our beginning & into the brighter cells of our growing old together. I am committed to you as memory, as now, & as an unfolding lifetime. I am committed to your more than yesterday and less than tomorrow.

bullfighter jacket

can't get enough of this poppy tune. seriously. how can you not dig these lines: "you've got your bullfighter's jacket on, with nothing beneath. i had to take my mask off to kiss you in the street"? for me, there's nothing like bizarre love songs.

(every semester i assign my students the task of writing a bizzare/odd love poem. it's a great way to get them using more interesting metaphors. as in, no you cannot describe someone's eyes as being like the sky. unless it's another planet's sky? then maybe.)

teen angst

occasionally i feel a bit sad that i didn't meet Z sooner (my parents met at 19 & 21 and my sister & her husband met at 19& 20). i wonder if we would have hit it off as more immature versions of ourselves? here were are, both around 17 or 18. keep in mind, i actually have sort of strawberry dirty blonde curly hair (oh 90s straightening fads). whereas Z's hair is naturally that jet black. (lucky guy--he never had a bad-goth-dye moment). the photo of me was taken just before prom. my friend gloria made the dress & i'm wearing elbow-length white gloves. over my shoulder you can see my high school boyfriend's little brother. the photo of Z was taken while he was recovering from a wild mugging where he was punched while holding a sheet pizza (long story). he ducked under the first swing and was hit by the second. the doctors had to put two metal plates in his face. (his girlfriend at the time didn't visit him in the hospital. which crushes me. obviously, my louis brooks self would have brought him silent films & cookies). on the positive side--while recovering those long hours in bed, Z taught himself sleight of hand magic tricks. like how to pull an egg from his future wife's ear.

not quite back into my computer yet. thought it's becoming long sleeve weather. as soon as i'm done syllabusting, i may have time for normal people things--like phone calls & blogging.

patio games

backyard scrabble = genius. also, did you know tonight there is this? get to your rooftops. watch.

(via designcrush}

bench marks

i have a real thing for brightly painted old wood. & vintage buoys. i mean, who doesn't love a word which simultaneously means a warning or navigational mark & to keep things afloat, a mood lifted. i don't know why, but outside of niece/sister/husband/general people-related goodness, the last couple of days sucked. seriously. stress + heat + unpacking books + having no place to unpack books has meant a lot of crankiness. so we bit the bullet & purchased a blue vintage bench we spotted a few weeks ago. it's not only rocktastic but 100 inches of book-holding (on & under) goodness. i'd buy a buoy to buoy, but that is just not in the budget. (maybe as future book ends?!).

soon there will be pictures of the new apartment & our wedding & some more regular postings. but for now--it's summer. & summer is not for computers on your off time when yourwork time is also for the computers. computers are not for the birds.

oh august

the perfect hot august-afternoon tune. (& can you believe it's august? yow.)