“It’s Not Up to You” - Bjork.

Possibly my favorite song of hers. Every time I fall into a routine, and think I might be able to guess what I’ll be doing this time next year, I remember the lyric, “Unthinkable surprises are bound to happen.” (Technically, it’s “about to happen,” but I’ve always heard it the other way.)

…Cause the evening
I’ve always longed for
It could still happen

How do I master
the perfect day
Six glasses of water
Seven phonecalls

If you leave it alone
it might just happen
anyway

It’s not up to you
Oh, it never really was

…

If you wake up
and the day feels broken
just lean into the crack
and it will tremble
ever so nicely
Notice how it sparkles
down there

I can decide
What I give
But it’s not up to me
What I get given
Unthinkable surprises
about to happen
but what they are

It’s not up to you
Oh, it never really was… 

(Source: bjorkish)

Bjork performing “Immature” live at Cambridge

I was curious about a Bjork lyric earlier (her speech is wonderfully impossible to understand) and came upon this quote of hers regarding “Immature”:

“Isn’t the perfect relationship about filling in those holes in each other, so that two people become one? Yeah, that’s what I thought (sadly). But I don’t know, really. I used to have all these opinions about love because I’m fierce, a helpless romantic. What happened is my expectations about romance were there (motions to one side of the table, then the other), but what was really happening was here. The elastic stretched so much, it cracked. And now I’m more realistic about things.

I love so many people. Your mate doesn’t have to replace everything. I don’t know and I’m not going to pretend I do. It’s back to basics, being self-sufficient. Now I’m back to how I was as a kid when I used to spend most of my time alone. So I’m spending time by myself and enjoying it very much. It sounds sad, but when I was a kid I didn’t really have friends. The most magical moments I had in my life I had alone. Like climbing mountains or swimming or singing or listening to music.”

When in a relationship, I tend to do that: filling in the holes of each other, becoming some kind of superorganism. I eat and breathe as two, think as two. I enter as one strong, passionate creature and I lose myself somewhere. When I am alone I work and act for myself, and am productive. Even now, I am already more productive.

But I am still, like Bjork, and so many people, fiercely romantic. There is no greater high than sharing my best and biggest feelings with someone who then takes them, throws them back, repeatedly. I want time to run across the world and do for myself, to fall in love with the dirt on my hands and the time in my nights. If I want to see all the churches in Iceland, as Bjork did, and ask to play all the organs, I’d like the freedom to do that. I want to play alone.

Can’t I have both? It breaks me to think I had to learn this lesson with the most wonderful person I’ve ever had the pleasure of sharing a life and home with. I want to play alone, and then together. I want them both. Some of my most magical moments, I’ve had alone. I remember one from so long ago: At a reunion for travel camp, when I was 14, we stayed at a ranch for the weekend. I was at the top of the bunny slope at night and all the other kids were tubing down the mountain. I looked up and saw dozens of icicles hanging from the branches. I closed my eyes and listened to all my friends from summer laughing as they went down.

But in so many of those moments, I was not alone. There was the night Matt brought me to his friend’s dorm to watch Coffee and Cigarettes. His friend fell asleep and we left quietly. That was the first time we kissed, and that night was the most magical moment I can think of. Then there were all the nights and conversations that followed, and I realize I’m sort of giving an Ode to Matt right now, which is perhaps something I should have done when we were together. But Bjork does crazy things to me. Four years ago I read her biography under a tree in Vieques, and she is no less extraordinary now.

I am writing all day and I am playing unattended, and I am not thinking of sleeping alone as a loss. (At first I wrote “playing alone,” and then there were two “alone”s in one sentence, so I went to the thesaurus - according to which, I could have gone with “playing with myself.” I went back and forth, but chose “unattended” in the end.) Well now I’ve lost my train of thought. I want to say, over and over, I want them both. I want to be realistic, but not too much so. I want both kinds of magic. I want them both.

At the supermarket today I overheard a man explaining the importance of eating organic to the cashier: “Berries? Those are the most important to eat organic. Bananas, I don’t know, but corn and onions, those are the least. Melons are the mediumest.”

The cashier gave him the perfunctory smile reserved for customers who talk too much, and I gave him a real one (behind his back, though, because I hardly smile at strangers, at least not in New York where my smile is met by the unmistakable look of someone questioning my sanity).

The mediumest is the greatest made-up word I’ve heard in a long time. Several years ago, my friend Pete and I coined “ficality” - what a fickle person has. I also used the word “boundaried” in the Quilt Project’s grant proposal, which should be a word by now but somehow is not. “Bounded” or “limited” don’t have the same meaning as boundaried, and while I won’t remove the word from the proposal, I did remove it from my cover letter which I sent out this morning (wahoo!!!).

Mediumest sounds like a word Bjork would use; it’s not a far stretch from “warmthest” and “beautifulest.” It’s a wonderful word. A slight alteration in spelling - mediumist - and you’re a follower of the philosophical school of Mediumism.

As for the importance of buying your melons organic, some research reveals that melons are neither in the “dirty dozen” products you should buy organic, nor the list of the cleanest produce - so I guess that would, in fact, make it the mediumest important.

Got any made-up words of your own?