What do you love?

[mrissa]

Yesterday one of you asked a very simple question: "What do you love?" Not who but what. I was pretty certain I remembered which one of you, but I'm getting "Not Found" errors when I try to view it, so -- dunno. Livejournal is screwy. Anyway, it's a good question.

I love all the different kinds of fresh snow, the wet slushy kind and the fine sparkly powder and the giant flakes that stay in my hair and the driving kind that's almost as hard as rain and the flurries and all of it.

I love knowing that there are books and books and books available, that I will never run out of reading material for more than an hour or two as long as I deal adequately with the library system and my friends and bookstores and so on.

I love knowing that there are books and books and books in here, that I will never run out of writing material even when it's hard to write.

I love the base-of-my-skull feeling when words are tumbling onto the page and things I did 100 pages ago are making themselves felt and making my bones rattle.

I love the way the peppery-citrus smell of grapefruit clings to my hands for hours after I cut the grapefruit, so it follows me around the house, and every time I brush my hair back, it's almost as good as eating more grapefruit.

I love the soft place on a man's face right above where his beard starts if he has a beard.

I love seeing pictures of my loved ones enjoying themselves when I can't be there.

I love trying different kinds of pens, the look of wet ink on paper, the flash of it drying.

I love having plenty of time but not too much time on an airport layover, striding through the airport to your next gate, the feeling of purpose, the feeling that I am doing what I can towards moving forward.

I love the way my garage smells like my grandparents' garage used to smell, different in the different seasons but the same Minnesota garage smell.

I love the smell of dog paws, the smell of pads with the smell of fur and the smell of claws.

I love the sound of good strong magnets being pulled together.

I love it when the math works out, even when it's complicated math.

I love hearing the river through the trees as you approach it on foot.

I love cool clean sheets.

I love the step where the brown sugar and the butter are combined and the smell fills your mouth or maybe the taste fills your nose and you know it'll be good even before any of the other ingredients go into the bowl. But also I love adding spices to gingerbread and inhaling each smell before I see the splash of spice color in the mixing bowl.

I love the blank pages in my paper journals.

I love my tuned and repaired piano, feel and sound together under my hands.

I love it when I'm reading out loud and people laugh in the right spots and make involuntary noises of revelation in the right spots.

I love getting the skin off a good avocado without taking too much of the avocado with, and the smell of it, and the feel of smooshy avocado and smooth pit.

What do you love?

Comments

[pariyal.livejournal.com]

I love kneading bread dough and shaping it, and the smell of bread while baking, and tapping it when it's finished to hear the hollow sound. And eating fresh-baked bread, but the process is even more fun than the result.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I love that, too. Yes. I also love the smell of bread dough before it's baking.

Also I love jam. Blackberry spice or apricot or strawberry or raspberry or whatever, really. ("I'm a Citizens for Boysenberry Jam fan.")

[intrepida.livejournal.com]

I love seeing something unexpected that really matters to someone.

I went to a rodeo with some friends over the weekend, and it turns out that one of them grew up in central Kentucky. Cows and horses=home to him, and he watched them all with such adoration and longing, that I've had a happly little glow at the sight for days.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Ah. Yes.

My friend Daniel is fun in part because he clearly likes stuff. Like -- people, places. Things. Nouns, really, on the whole. Also verbs -- Daniel is good with verbs. You can take him to events and not worry about whether he will be Too Cool to get into it, because he never is.

[rosefox]

It was me. *)

I love that lots of people are asking this, and answering it.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I thought it was you! But whenever I tried to access the page, 404.

[rosefox]

http://rosefox.livejournal.com/1143354.html

Works for me. Try it now. (LJ is ass-slow today, could be part of the problem.)

[seagrit.livejournal.com]

I never would have picked myself as an auditory person, but the first two things I thought of were sounds:

A kitty purring insistently, demanding to be picked up or tummy rubbed.

The spontaneous Amber giggle (and wiggle, like her Dad) that occurs whenever she sees little kids, live animals, and sometimes even photos of animals. (She's a big fan of stuffonmycat.com and cuteoverload.com.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I am still betting on "kitty" as one of the early words if not the first -- but you'll keep us updated on that front, right? RIGHT?

[seagrit.livejournal.com]

Well, does "uh-oh" count? (Drops the cuppy then "uh oh ... uh oh ..." or some reasonable variation thereof) Or "na-na-na-Na-Na-Na-NANANANANA!" when she doesn't want to eat what we're offering? We're having a hard time defining what exactly counts as a "word" and whether or not the "ee-ee" sound she makes is an excited squeal, or "kitty".

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yeah, this is a problem I've heard about before. I'd lean towards counting "uh-oh," because it's a specific verbal communication. It's very different from a wail of dismay, to my way of thinking -- it isn't just tonal.

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

This has the makings of a great Valentines' Day meme. Unfortunately, it requires thought so I'll have to get to it later. :)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Darn that thought anyway! :)

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

It wouldn't be so bad if thinking didn't take so much time. I've got other stuff to do!

what a beautiful post

[reveritas.livejournal.com]

i love knitting on airplanes, watching batting practice, carrot juice, fresh chamomile, picking blackberries in the idaho mountains and then putting them into my stepdad's sidecar and riding home with him on his motorcycle. cooking things i've never made before and inventing recipes nobody's ever thought of. writing the most delicious phrases, writing in cafes while i wait for my friends to show up for lunch, writing in my notebook on the train and not noticing the stops going by. i love west portal, i love how most of the shopkeepers in west portal recognise me and ask about my husband, i love people assuming that he's my husband, i love that i can do everything i need to do in west portal and never have to leave it. i love the smell of apple blossoms and the phrase "rosy apple blossoms." i love the betsy-tacy books, the little house books and the anne of green gables books. i love writing a good headline, cleaning up someone's typos, and designing with a lot of white space. i love fonts that look like broken-down typewriters and leaky ink pens. i love my confidence in my own aesthetics. i love that i have a community here like i've never had anywhere else. i love hippies of all ages, yappy dogs of all types, and driving with the top down. i love calling someone on the phone while i walk and the miles pass by like seconds. i love baseball books, keeping score, purple pens, and minor chords. i love making eggnog. i love tea, the fact that my fiance and i have so many of the little things in common, and napping in the sun. i love san francisco.

Re: what a beautiful post

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Thanks. Lovely.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Fondling yarn. Also, feeling beads when they're in a big enough bin that you can just take handfuls and let them sift through your fingers. The feel of hair that's cut so short you can run your hands over it and it just swishes under them. But also hair that's long enough to be played with and put up. The feel of cat fur. The tang of sourdough - even better, sourdough and salt together (one thing I miss is sourdough pretzels). Also, the taste of butter and salt on pretty much anything. Tastes that work unexpectedly well together. The sound of wind, especially when it's howling and rainy and you don't have to go anywhere. The sound of someone who doesn't sing much, singing along to the radio even when he's nowhere near on key, because he knows you won't laugh. Rainbows (I saw one from the 12th floor the other day!). The color effects in dichroic glass (hence the nom). Outfits with subtle color combinations, like harmonizing shades of grays. The sheen of silver. Highlights in hair - the natural ones that only show up in bright sun.

[dryadjuna.livejournal.com]

Hi - I'm livej user Haddayr's little sister, and came across something I thought you'd appreciate, and this post seemed like a logical place to put it. I, too, and much more into smells than the average person, and I remember several of your posts about smells and thought you might like this article: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/13/health/13resp.html

It's not a particularly earth-shattering article, but it's nice to have some backup data that shows it's not all in our heads (I get a lot of grief for mentioning people's deodorants, for example) - smells really do have measurable, verifiable effects on people.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Oh, very cool, thanks for pointing me that way. I feel vindicated.

[brooksmoses]

I love having plenty of time but not too much time on an airport layover, striding through the airport to your next gate, the feeling of purpose, the feeling that I am doing what I can towards moving forward.

I wonder if I've told you my favorite airport layover story. I don't think I have, though I've been telling it often recently, so I might have.

This was probably five years ago or so; I had Suzi's laptop with me, so it was after we were married, but I was travelling alone and heading home, sometime in the middle of winter.

So I was on an overnight flight from San Francisco to Pittsburg, and from there an early morning flight to Roanoke on one of the little turboprop planes that USAir flies that route with these days. We got into Pittsburg at something like 6am, and the flight to Roanoke was at about 8:30, so it was a reasonably long layover. I got a pastry and some juice for breakfast, and walked out to the Pittsburg E concourse to wait for my flight. It was one of the crisp cold clear winter mornings that one gets, where the outside air has bite to it and there's a sparkle of frost on everything, and the air smells fresh and clean and new.

Now, the Pittsburg E concourse -- where the little planes go -- is barely a building at all; it has the sense of being a long strip of the tarmac that's been carpeted and had walls (which are about half window) and a roof put up over it, and has a sufficiency of heaters in so it's nice and warm and toasty, and so I walked all the way to the end of it and found a couch to sit on with an electrical outlet handy for the laptop.

And so I sat for a while, practically out on the airport rather than in the cocoon of the terminal, in a nice warm cozy corner close enough to the glass that I could feel how cold it was outside, and read the Usenet messages that I'd downloaded the night before (and wrote a couple of replies), and watched the sun come up and the light turn from the blue-black of twilight to the rose-pink of sunrise and orange and then proper sunlight, all glistening off the frost on the airplanes, and watched the airport wake up from quiet stillness, as the baggage trucks came out and occasionally people would potter about one of the planes, and then eventually one of them would start and taxi off, and everything was bustling and awake.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

No, you hadn't told me that. That's lovely.