Sunday, February 7, 2010

pistachio green. knots.

on a particularly grey day,
I'm sitting at IFC drinking a cappuccino with a cream heart and an over-expensive slice of opera cake.
I'm scraping off all the pistachio filling - I have to admit the only reason I bought the cake was for the pistachio.
It looked so green and mint-like and foreign. I had to have it.
The waitress is looking at me reproachfully, while the done-up taitais aren't wondering why I'm only eating the lining of a cake, but why I would ever drink a beverage with cream in it. And I'm wondering why they're wearing 4 inch platforms when it's raining outside.

knots. When we were little, every couple weeks my father would let my brother and I "destroy" our minds with television. Which meant, we were allowed to watch a videocassette about the mathematical properties of knots. A man's voice came on, and it would portray a couple of hands making different knots, which would then be analyzed through computer animation with the same man's narration. (It says something about the power of the screen that my brother and I used to look forward to that 30 minute video.)

I don't know why I suddenly remembered this but I think it was because I felt out of sync, sitting in between a long row of carefully done up women in high heeled shoes.
And whenever I feel out of sync I think of A Wrinkle in Time - and the boy on the other planet, who couldn't keep the ball in time with the other children and ends up being tortured by IT. And in that novel, there was the concept of traveling in space and time, I think it was called tesseract-ing, and it was described through a series of knots.
And in the brief couple minutes of opera cake and pistachio green, I remembered the excitement of watching that knot video, and tried to remember what happened to Meg and Calvin and the happy medium who once loved a star.