showboat

(song)

it may seem cliche
but i think i'm great
i climb trees well into my twenties
i have a healthy obsession with bees
i aspire to be grand in a meaningful way
to build a vocabulary with words like anathema and vitiate
i eat cereal out of cups
i read dawkins and millay
i may prefer to go dancing
but i understand when you say
not tonight, my love, not tonight
i can almost hold a handstand, i can almost do the splits
i can list a hundred hot keys
and don't care if you watch pornography

so when you say you don't love me, why isn't it harder to understand?
why do i feel like it doesn't matter i'm a great girlfriend?

because i can be pensive and brood
my expositions can come out crude
because i can forget how to relax
and i make you scratch my back

but mostly i won't try to breach your heart's moat
to knock on your door and beg and showboat
because you can't choose who you love and who you don't

yams

they say a person can get all their required nutrition from just one plant: the yam. quite a romantic notion, but the simplicity of it is unavoidably attractive. you don't have to worry about what vitamins your broccoli is lacking, what minerals your black beans are missing. It's all right there in the pure, picaresque yam. but of course, after a long stretch of such routine, you will have to admit that eating only one root vegetable for every meal is boring. eventually you'll come to resent the yam for the very same simplicity that initially appealed to you. its sweetness becomes saccharine, its limited range of textures a disappointment. it's not that you want more, you just want different. you become upset that the yam doesn't taste like broccoli every once in awhile. why can't it be more like a blueberry sometimes? It's really not fair to the yam, which has so much to offer. It's not the yam's fault you put so much pressure on it to provide everything you need. in fact, the yam would probably appreciate a break from being eaten all the time! Sometimes it just wants to be left alone in the cool underground! the pleasure and appreciation inherent in some of the time is an idiomatic expression lost to the monotony of all of the time.