Betty Leigh Verbeke

To start, mid-May I started dating this wonderful person named Luke!  He lives in Dallas & I live in Austin, but we’re awesome together, so spatial distance doesn’t matter.  <3  More to come on our ridiculous cuteness later.  (:

This summer I am taking an Import Principles class online & it is going well, so that’s good.  Haha.

Memorial Day weekend I went up to Dallas to spend 4 superb days with Luke!  While there, I had the privilege to meet some of his friends from his improv theater, Pocket Sandwich!  They were all very kind & very witty, and the shows were hilarious, of course.  After the shows, we hung out at Trinity Hall & drank Chimay, which I recommend to everyone.  Most of the rest of my trip in Dallas we spent in his apartment where we cooked yummy vegan meals for each other & drank good wine, or he would play classical music on his guitar or piano while I read.  <3  Also, we hung out with his roommate, Tom, and watched a few movies, including Fantastic Mr. Fox, Due Date, and Men Who Stare at Goats.  It was a very relaxing time.  (:

Before I met up with Luke, I was able to see my friend Chris!  Oh, I miss him dearly!  <3  We went to a phe-NOM-inal Greek restaurant called Fadi’s Mediterranean Grill.  Seriously, it was some of the best Greek food I have ever put in my mouth.  We also went to FOE, a sweet little local hang out place with a bar and pool.. it kind of reminded me of a YMCA, but with drunk people.  Haha.

The first weekend of June was an event!  A bunch of us from work hung out at Barton Springs, where I learned to play chess, for the second time.  Then my friend/coworker, Sawyer, and I ate at G’Raj Mahal before going to Queer Bomb!  Queer Bomb is a huge gay festival that took place on the East side of Austin & it was fabulous!  So much dancing & drinking!  Crazy story: that night I lost my wallet (by leaving it on some steps), so I posted an ad on craigslist.com for a lost wallet.. 2 days later a very nice girl emailed me saying she found it & returned it to me with everything in it!

The following weekend Luke came into Austin to visit me!  He hitchhiked with a dude who had a pet pig.  Haha.  Apparently the best way to hitchhike is to stand on the shoulder of a long open road so people can see you from a distance & only get in a car with weird people because it’s the normal people who are the murderers..  Haha, what?  Makes sense, I guess.  So anyway, Luke stayed for 5 amazing days & he met my Mom, my roommate, Jen, and my friends Jessica & Kelly.  While he was here we also cooked delicious vegan meals for each other & drank good wine, spent some time in music stores & I took him to some of my favorite places in Austin, like Mayfield Park & the Austin Poetry Slam!

Work is going swimmingly, as usual.  I am now officially a Field Manager for TCE!  Woot!  Last weekend the Austin, Dallas, & Houston offices met up for a Staff Retreat in Colorado Bend State Park!  We set up camp Friday and basically drank beer & ate camp food until Sunday when we had to leave.  Haha.  That’s not all we did though.. we went on a beautiful 5 mile hike to see stunning 50ft waterfalls!  You can see some of the trip here:

June was fun-tastic & went by really quickly, so now I am stoked for July & all it has to offer!  Plus, we are going to have fireworks this year because there isn’t a fire ban & Luke will be spending the 4th with me in Austin!  Hooray!

Oh goodness, I love my life.  <3  And you too.  (:

Sunbathing by Betty Leigh Verbeke

I feel your stare crawl up the length of my body

Like ants in a single file line on the kitchen counter

Leading to my mouth of a sugar bowl

Astronomer’s studies heavily freckle my arms

Depthless galaxies settle on my shoulders

The Milky Way sweeps across the bridge of my nose and cheek bones

Faintly twinkling under the bright ice gaze of my Neptune-blue eyes

Tan lines mark the edges of the wrapping paper to my body’s gifts

Soft cream cashmere cuddled with buds of pink rose

Thoughts of your tongue tracing my petal’s edges roll around in your mouth like a delicious hard candy

Sucking slowly, not swallowing the daydream before extracting every drop of flavor

Beads of fresh sweat rise on my skin

Following trails leading to shallow pools collecting in my crevices

You want to dive in

Have my private ocean’s salt water sting your eyes

Desire burns in you hotter than the sun under which I am bathing

The rays you are emitting penetrate deep beneath my skin

Your flaming gaze catches my exposed flesh on fire

You inhale deep as you extinguish the igniting look

Unseen smoke fills up your lungs with my scent

An aroma of melted stars and crisp roses escapes as you exhale slowly

Meal One:  Sandwich on rye bread with a vegan oat & sesame burger patty from Central Market, Sabra hummus, baby spinach leaves, carrots, and avocado, seasoned with sea salt, black pepper, & garlic powder.

Meal Two:  Quinoa with yellow onion, garlic, celery, jalapeno, spinach, sunflower seeds, and flax seeds, seasoned with Louisiana Hot Sauce, sea salt, black pepper, & cayenne pepper, cooked in light olive oil.

Meal Three:  Vegan left-overs pizza with a home-made wheat flour & flax seed crust and veggie fajitas (onion, mushrooms, zucchini, carrots, poblano peppers, & a jalapeno) from Jardin Carona, with their salsa as the sauce, garlic, and mozarella-style vegan cheese, seasoned with sea salt & black pepper.

Meal Four:  Sandwich on pumpernickel bread with Sabra hummus, cucumber, roma tomato, and baby spinach leaves, seasoned with sea salt & black pepper.

Meal Five:  Japanese chuka soba noodles, yellow onion, garlic, crimini mushrooms, red pepper flakes, and baby spinach leaves, seasoned with sea salt, black pepper, & curry powder, cooked in light olive oil.

Meal Six:  Vegan oat & sesame burger patties from Central Market paired with carrots & garlic, seasoned with soy sauce, sea salt, & black pepper, cooked in light olive oil.

Meal Seven:  Organic baby kale, brussel sprouts, celery, yellow onion, garlic, crimini mushrooms, flax seeds, and sunflower seeds, seasoned with sea salt & black pepper, sauteed in light olive oil & Cardini’s Roasted Asian Sesame Dressing.

Meal Eight:  Luke cooked us vegan Sheppard’s Pie layered with vegan meat crumbles, mushroom gravy, mixed organic frozen veggies (carrots, peas, corn, & green beans), and new potatoes with margarine, all seasoned with black pepper, sea salt, & various seasonings.

Happy Father’s Day! <3

“The Unbearable Lightness Of Being” by Milan Kundera

This novel is a short and fun read with sexual & imaginative story lines, intriguing & eccentric characters, and is seasoned with thought-provoking ideas on life.  The timing of reading this book was perfect.  Quite a few of my favorite quotes mirrored the moment in which I was reading them; t’was beautiful.  Here are tons of great quotes for you:

“Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love.”

“We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.  [...]  There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no bases for comparison.  We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold.”

“Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous.  Metaphors are not to be trifled with.  A single metaphor can give birth to love.”

“He would tell his mistresses: the only relationship that can make both partners happy is one in which sentimentality has no place and neither partner makes any claim on the life and freedom of the other.”

“But as he ran through the previous few hours in his mind, he began to sense an aura of hitherto unknown happiness emanating from them.”

“Tomas came to this conclusion:  Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite.  Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman).”

“On Saturday and Sunday, he felt the sweet lightness of being rise up to him out of the depths of the future.”

“But when we ignore the body, we are more easily victimized by it.”

“This is why she insisted her daughter remain with her in the world of immodesty, where youth and beauty mean nothing, where the world is nothing but a vast concentration camp of bodies, one like the next, with souls invisible.”

“Chance and chance alone has a message for us.  Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute.  Only chance can speak to us.  We read its message much as gypsies read the images made by coffee ground at the bottom of a cup.”

“(The crew of her soul rushed up to the deck of her body.)”

“Her life was split.  Both day and night were competing for her.”

“While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in the opening bars, they can go about writing it together and exchange motifs [...], but if they meet when they are older, like Franz and Sabina, their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them.”

“He considered music a liberating force: it liberated him from loneliness, introversion, the dust of the library; it opened the door of his body and allowed his soul to step out into the world to make friends.”

“[...], when music was like a rose blooming on a boundless snow-covered plain of silence.”

“That darkness was pure, perfect, thoughtless, visionless; that darkness was without end, without borders; that darkness was the infinite we each carry within us.  (Yes, if you’re looking for infinity, just close your eyes!)”

“Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness.  What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being.”

“But what a monstrous soul it would have to be if it reflected that body, that rack of four pouches.”

“([...]  Indeed, the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate.  Only the most naive of questions are the truly serious.  They are the questions with no answers.  A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached.  In other words, it is questions with no answers that set the limits of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence.)”

“What is flirtation?  One might say that it is behavior leading another to believe that sexual intimacy is possible, while preventing that possibility from becoming a certainty. In other words, flirting is a promise of sexual intercourse without a guarantee.”

“Nothing could be more miserable than her naked body perched on the enlarged end of a sewer pipe.”

“She longed to see it again and again in that implausibly proximity to an alien penis.”

“People usually escape from their troubles into the future; they draw an imaginary line across the path of time, a line beyond which their current troubles will cease to exist.”

“But isn’t it true that an author can write only about himself.”

“Holding his hand, she would forget the chasm (the chasm of daylight) that divided them.”

“He suddenly recalled the famous myth from Plato’s Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split them in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another.  Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.”

“[...] claiming that Jesus ‘ate and drank, but did not defecate.’”

“When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.”

“And therein lies the whole of man’s plight.  Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line.  That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.”

“There was a pale moon in the sky, a forgotten lamp in the room of the dead.”

“The light of horror thus lost its harshness, and the world was bathed in a gentle, bluish light that actually beautified it.”

“So it was gratitude that decided the issue, most likely.  Human decisions are terribly simple.”