A debate which will rage for months.

I'm making y'all crazy with my prolific-ness, ain't I? You can't believe it. This is a microblog.

We have been talking about baby names, a lot, of course. For some reason we talk about girls' names more than boys' names... it's like we think we are having a girl although there is no kind of evidence to back that up. Also, we don't plan on finding out the sex of the baby before it is born, so we're liable to go through this entire pregnancy with the idea at the back of our minds that we're having a girl, only to have it come out a boy. I don't know why I feel like it's a girl so much; maybe I just can't imagine that a penis growing inside me? Now that I bring it up... it is kind of odd.

That is not the point. The point is that Mr. Dill and I have a major difference in tastes as far as girls' names go. I tend towards more old-fashioned names, or nature-y names. I like flower names; I really like the name "Wren," but he is less than enthusiastic (he says it has something to do with the way my country-ass pronounces it). He likes spunky, boyish names; he has wanted a daughter named "Charlie" for as long as I can remember.

So we'll be having conversations about baby names; I'll sit with the laptop and browse baby name websites, and throw ideas that I like at him, and he'll do the same. Our exchanges often sound like this:

A: "What about Pearl? I kind of like it."
B: (Looking at me aghast) "Pearl is an old woman's name, Amanda."

B: "Roxanna, that's a good name. Roxanna."
A: (Studying his profile intently, while he plays a flash game) "Are you being serious?"
B: "Yeah, Roxanna. What do you think?"
A: "Brandon... Roxanna is a whore's name. We cannot give our daughter a whore's name."

Sometimes a name is declared both old and whorish.

Think of giraffes cumming all over each others' faces...

I thought I'd post the poem that was the inspiration for the blog title as well as a reading during our wedding. Good ol' Peggy Noir (that's a really smart nickname, Dave; especially for those of us who have an issue with the pronunciation of the word "peignoir") was crying but still did a very nice job, as I knew her textual studies ass would.

Now, I've never really been a poetry fanatic, but one night, right after B & I started getting kind of seriously serious about one another, which was pretty much as soon as we met, I got tipsy and discovered this jewel in my original copy of Our Bodies Ourselves, and left a voicemail reading of it for him. Then he thought I was really bitchin'.

Love Song of a Species

think of

long tall animals

making love

into themselves

breaking themselves

together

swallowing

each other's air

each other's songs

think of these

animals
not knowing

their species

their strangeness

think of them

trying to tell each other

all day long

with words

think then

of the most

natural

way of

saying

I love you

eyes
mouth

a place

there is a place

that has no thoughts

think of something

of a thing that cannot think

inside a place

that cannot contain thoughts

think of these things together not thinking

think of the most natural way to think of this

then unthink everything that follows from that

then sleep

a sleep

in which all dreams

and these words

are stolen from the dream

you are having

-- Cora Brooks

When we rehash this reading, B always says that he had forgotten how dirty this poem is, and goes onto parody it with lines like "Think of great hippoes fucking each other, ropes of jism ejaculating from their swollen members." And I think that's funny.

Josie's on a vacation far away...

In my house, we have a new deep obsession with The Outfield's "Your Love" [The assholes have disabled embedding, so I can't put the cheesey video on here for your viewing pleasure. You will not be sorry if you go to the link above and listen to this song, especially if you like 80s songs that seem to have been written to provide you with a platform to screech lyrics such as "I DON'T WANT TO LOSE YOUR LOVE TONIGHT!!! I JUST WANT TO USE YOUR LOVE, TOOOOONIIIIIGHT!! (YEAH!!!)" in your best eardrum-splitting falsetto.]

What's up with this heat haze in Memphis? It's humidity, I am thinking? I think I've been told it is humidity. They put it on the forecast, along with warnings about not leaving your house. This time of year I start developing elaborate fantasies about living in a part of the world where the peak temperature in the summer is 80 degrees. Our apartment has 3 window unit air conditioners, 2 of which work pretty well (especially if you are sitting directly in front of them, which I am known to do), but considering we live on the second floor of a house built in 1925, with piss poor air-conditioning... well, yeah, it is Hot as Hell. I have tried to tell B that he is going to have to run the AC when he's at home by himself, but he refuses. I imagine that I'll come home one day to find him passed out cold (hot?) from the intensity of the heat. August is coming, be afraid, be very afraid. These are the dog days and senior citizens will start kicking off any minute now.

We are supposed to go to a BBQ this evening and last night I made bettedavislies' Church Lady Creamy Lemon cake to take, and I'll put some presliced & seasoned eggplant slices in a baggie too, for the hosts to throw on the grill. I don't know about you, but I get very impatient when waiting for a cake to cool down enough to spread on the old icing. The afforementioned Mrs. Lies gave me the most handsome, thoughtful handmade cookbook for the wedding, and as of late I have been trying to cook a recipe a week from it. My mother and I recently had a conversation questioning how young Bette maintains her lovely figure with her well-known penchant for sweets, and came up stumped. I suppose her allegiance to exercise could be the answer but the lazy American in me refuses to believe that moving could be good for you.