food, park, poetry

Yesterday I made cabbage soup for the first time. It has green onions, garlic, half a huge head of cabbage, a large can of ground tomatoes, four bullion cubes, and some basil. I don't like it, but Erik thinks it's the best, so he gets to eat it all.

Also yesterday I made some egg salad using vegan mayo. I am a true lover of egg salad, but I think with regular mayo it's not good for me. Using vegan mayo cuts a lot of the fat. Anyway, I tried it for lunch today, and it's definitely different but tastes okay.

This morning we went for a walk at McKinley park. We saw moms doing strange aerobics that I can't even begin to explain. I would need to use terms that I don't know. What's a squat? Maybe they were doing squats. I remember once the instructor, who kind of yelled and kept addressing them as "ladies," had them skip back and forth down a court. They kept checking in with their babies, who were all in a line of strollers. It was very odd. We also saw a runner with a very hairy shoulder. I mean the rest of his back and his other shoulder were smooth. Also, he had an unusual gait, as if he was limping. We also saw crows, and I noticed a sign that said no smoking in all city parks. That just about shocked me. As an ex-smoker who hates cigarette smoke, I feel pleased but then I feel kind of guilty for feeling pleased.

Then I went to Trader Joe's by myself and bought the usual. The only thing I bought that's out of the ordinary is some strawberry Greek yogurt. I'm looking forward to trying that. I always get the nonfat honey flavor, but the strawberry flavor is full fat. I will not eat it all at once.

Now I need to score SAT, and I don't feel like it at all. I would rather get together poems to send to G. I promised him my two favorite poems: "The Man on the Dump" by Wallace Stevens and "Like This," a version of a Rumi poem done by Coleman Barks. As a bonus I plan to include "Of Modern Poetry" by Wallace Stevens. I've had that taped to the kitchen wall for about a year. That and something by Dylan Thomas.

Here's "Of Modern Poetry."

The poem of the mind in the act of finding
What will suffice. It has not always had
To find: the scene was set; it repeated what
Was in the script.
Then the theatre was changed

To something else. Its past was a souvenir.
It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.
It has to face the men of the time and to meet
The women of the time. It has to think about war
And it has to find what will suffice. It has
To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage,
And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and
With meditation, speak words that in the ear,
In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,
Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound
Of which, an invisible audience listens,
Not to the play, but to itself, expressed
In an emotion as of two people, as of two
Emotions becoming one. The actor is
A metaphysician in the dark, twanging
An instrument, twanging a wiry string that gives
Sounds passing through sudden rightnesses, wholly
Containing the mind, below which it cannot descend,
Beyond which it has no will to rise.
It must
Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may
Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman
Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.


(Well, for some reason Blogger is screwing up the formatting, but you get the idea.)