2008/3/30
curiouser and curiouser...
…and not necessarily in a good way. Spring is definitely springing; everything is happening all at once. Some of it is very, very good (more on that soon). Some is… not. My heart aches for its attendant body-and-mind, and – in a different way – for a loved one. My mind reels. My body is a bit shell-shocked by all the house-painting and weight lifting and weather changes, but this part is good, it reminds me I’m still alive and not suspended in some alternate universe, flailing a bit and effecting change whose ramifications won’t become clear for months to years hence. And so we walk on. (0)
2008/2/29
inch by inch...
Life proceeds apace. The last week has been filled with good people, and a much lovelier living space than it’s been of late, and baby therapy (I got to hang out with a visiting friend’s 14-week-old boy wonder). My cats are lovin’ on me, my friends continue to amaze me with their magnificence, a few important connections are quietly blossoming, I have a job interview on Monday for an as-yet unnamed but very exciting position. Yet there continues to be an undercurrent of sadness and various other negative emotions. At times I feel like I’m walking upstream, knee-deep in fast-running water. The exercise is good for me, but its inescapability is still no fun at all. Good thing the bad stuff is background to so much love around me, and – for once – not the other way around. (2)
Abbie Hofmann’s dead. At the age of 102, in good health almost right up until the heart attack at the end. As someone on a mailing list said, he had a good run.
Thank you, Dr. Hoffman, for the wonder and perspective you’ve brought into the world.
If you’ve used ticketing systems, do you have a favorite? And/or one you particularly dislike? It would live on a unix server with mysql or postgresql, or it could be a java app. (Edit: Of course, open-source and free is best. Way best.)
Why, yes, the new job is going well. My time management skillz as regards sleep, however, leave something to be desired. On the other hand, fine people and good food and spring. Today I had lunch on a lawn, in the sunshine. All the students are out playing frisbee and juggling and squinting through their sunglasses.
In an hour and a half or so I leave for the T (public transport!! don’t have to drive!) to start my new JOB.
Why, yes, I’m pretty thrilled at the prospect. The title keeps changing in the various documents they’ve sent, but the most recent one is Digital Librarian / Computer Support Manager at the Boston U School of Theology Library. The potential range of what my work days will involve is too large in my head right now, which means life will totally fail to be boring, and I’m likely to get flooded by information overload for the first few weeks, and I am so looking forward to that. I’ll tell y’all more when I get oriented. But… it’s an exciting job in my field. Holy cats.
Thus ends eleven months of unemployment.
On another note: praised be the sun and the moon and cycles, and spring. Did you know they’re saying 71 degree high today in Somerville?! And – just looked this up: there may or may not be a 5-degree difference between my house and my workplace at any given time. Well, of course: Commonwealth Ave is a wind tunnel, and work is also closer to the big water. Good to know.
I have other thoughts to post, perhaps later. But just look at this for 40 seconds:
Molly rightly says, “I have never seen a more bad-ass pink cardigan.” Gods, I’d love to see this woman as our first lady.
Penultimate drum-and-dance of the year in South Amherst yesterday. I brought my drum, even though I don’t have a bag for it yet and it was raining a little – but Molly and I threw garbage bags over the drums, and I’m very happy we did. By the end of the evening my hands were somehow hurting and a little numb at the same time, and I could still feel the just-played drumbeat in my ribcage.
I did better than had seemed possible, given how out of practice I’ve been with things that require sustaining a regular rhythm with my hands (drumming, juggling, playing the guitar which I haven’t done in any sort of sustained way since my first year in grad school). Concentrating on picking out, playing and sustaining relatively simple rhythms for several minutes at a time was great practice.
Molly and Natalie and I stayed over at our friends’ place in Hadley (Inspirit Common), and had breakfast at Cafe Esselon there. Natalie kept feeding us pretend food. The more ridiculously we reacted, the more giggles scattered, sparkling, across the table.
Today my father would’ve been 71 years old. But he’s seven years gone, buried on a gorgeous hill in Lost Angels. I miss him a lot.
I’ve inherited a lot of him. I have his eyes, and his love of driving, and his dislike of being in financial debt to anyone, and his temper – though, I like to think, version 2.0. And also I have his indomitable will, and his analytical skills, and his sense of commitment (with some additional flexibility thrown in; I tend to tinker with recipes).
Thanks, dad. Happy birthday. And to the rest of you, have a fitting instrumental by Daniel Lanois; it’s called “JJ Leaves LA.” I left LA in 1994 with no regrets, having hated it there, and now mom doesn’t live there anymore either – but I’ll go back to visit dad.
Thing I learned today: Equality Now was founded in large part thanks to (by a student of) Joss Whedon’s mother. No wonder he’s such a brilliant feminist. I just ran across this video of Joss’s acceptance speech when EN gave him an award in 2006.
I love this eloquent, witty, heartbreakingly stunningly kind and passionate man.
Excellent feature of seeing housemates’ music libraries through the local wireless network: listening to Erasure for the first time in, like, seven years. And dancing like a madwoman.
It almost looks like coffee, but it’s tea – Twinings Lady Grey with citrus added, which is inexplicably unavailable in the States but was so kindly supplied by a wee goddess. Over-brewed because I forgot, with whole milk added, it turned out to be the perfect strength – the kind that needs dairy to cut it.
Today I am catching up on overdue work. Everything, sight and sound, is muted by a thick invisible blanket of gray. It looks miserable outside. But inside, the cats are sleeping on the bed, there’s a book on performance in medieval France at my side, and I’m thinking of digital text scholarship in both its senses. This is good.
Life’s not turning out to be anything like I’d imagined, but I can feel personal growth in my bones. Despite the various goodnesses below, I’ve been hiding from the world lately. Take this post as a periodic hello. Hello, the world!
I tend to remember dreams more vividly when it’s a short night’s sleep. This past night I was on my way to see my mother by public transport. In reality this means commuter rail, and it was in the dream as well, but the lines were all wrong, un-Boston-like. Plus, for whatever reason I didn’t really know where I was going; it wasn’t clear that I was meeting her at her house.
Quite far from the hub station in the city center, I realize I’m on the wrong line. Still going east (never mind the ocean in the real eastward direction), but way too southerly. I don’t even know which line it is, so ask people, who don’t know. Hop out at the next stop, ask someone else, and that someone else turns out to be Allison Janney, who tells me to get back on the train because I sure can’t get there from here.
Just before the alarm chirps, it turns out that there’s a “bridge line” that’s coming up, that can take me northwards to more or less exactly where I want to be. Convenient!
This fits into my week perfectly; it’s been a strange one so far. On Monday I went through the entire gamut of emotions; surprisingly (or maybe not), they were overwhelmingly on the positive end of the spectrum. I also discovered that if there’s red wine with a penguin on it, it’s probably well worth a try.
On Tuesday I went to see a concert with mom and a few others. Veronika Dolina was playing in Natick; she’s a singer-songwriter, chick with guitar, except now she’s a 60-year-old lady with guitar. I grew up with her quiet, unassuming songs being both played and sung in my house. She takes the quotidian to new levels of lyrical sensitivity and doesn’t philosophize heavily (both good things). The concert itself was… a disappointment. She played mostly newer stuff I don’t know, saving the few older songs for the end – but that would’ve been fine, had she not seemed a bit out of it. Talking in fragments, not really holding melodies, she was tired and not connecting with her audience, and I was glad that I have old recordings of hers still.
Then Wednesday, yesterday, I got good news – the first piece of a puzzle that will hopefully come together soon. And throughout the week-so-far, I’ve been painting for my rent and hanging out with friends (two years of age and up) and thinking about my life on a longer-term scale, which feels unusual, and that in itself is strange. I tended to live in the future before, see. Whatever I was doing, my mind was on the next thing – this is why the Buddhists have been so appealing and helpful lately, with their in-the-present-moment-ness. But this past winter I found myself holding on to every day, being unable (unwilling) to make plans more than a day or two (or sometimes several hours) in advance, feeling the present moment all around me.
Thus, the process of reacquiring a longer-term perspective snuck up on me. It is only because I am surrounded by such excellent, supportive, understanding people that this doesn’t scare me witless. In fact, it’s about time.
And it’s almost time to go feel mighty by picking up heavy things and putting them back down. Have I mentioned lately how good weightlifting has been making me feel? Very, very good.
What has been making you feel good lately?
…when you’re feeling restless? How do you release that energy? What do you usually do? What would you prefer to do? How often do those coincide?
(Obligatory periodic note to LJ feed readers: I don’t see comments made on the feed. Please to be clicking on the URL up top.)
…is today. An anniversary, a day that returns yearly.
Rain patters on the skylight. Melancholy of a fatalistic sort hangs in the air. I won’t be alone for long – it’s weightlifting morning – but for now I listen to the world wake up and wish things I can’t affect were different. Waste of time, as activities go, but sometimes I just have to sit there and listen to the rain and let pre-dawn darkness wash over me.
Days will be longer than nights after today, though, and the sun is a-comin’. At least, the forecast says as much.
Neil Gaiman writes: “Probably nobody except me thinks Moby and Lou Reed playing Walk on The Wild Side together is as cool as I do…”
You’re not alone, Neil. American Gods, indeed.
…
I came home today and promptly crashed for something like five hours. Guess, life resumes tomorrow.
Days are filling up with small things of consequence.
This morning Molly and I punted on weightlifting in favor of coffee and quiet, sleepy conversation. You can’t photograph these moments of quotidian perfection, so the vignette is put into inadequate words here at words’ end.
This morning I noticed that my singing voice is getting stronger again. Must be springtime.
This morning I am thinking of late-night driving through city streets, and then on a perfectly picturesque winding highway, straight into the heart of Saturday night. Boston’s smaller highways are magic. If I could drive all the way out to the Nevada desert on them, awake and thinking and singing and arriving into the wide expanse of nowhere, I would. And I would channel Kerouac.
This morning I was fed pretend chamomile tea juice for breakfast by small children. Also, chocolate almond delight pizza.
This morning I fantasize about buying food with money from a reliable income source. Bonus: this would mean a job with a regular schedule, which in turn prooobably means I’d be making coffee or tea every morning. That’s a nice ritual I miss.
This morning I am restless and thinky and observing the undercurrent of sadness that runs through my days with a detachment I rarely achieve. All of this is illuminated by a flowy light somewhere in the middle of my ribcage, right under the skin.
Thirty was certainly all-encompassing, the best and the worst. My birthday, however, was almost unreservedly fabulous. In fact, the entire weekend was so. It was filled with giggling toddlers, loving friends, conversation that kept dissolving into laughter, high hopes for employment, dance-y drumbeat, blue-green hair, family blood and chosen, and the best that the moon has to offer.
And the food. Oh gods, the food. Homemade pizza with so many different toppings for a second birthday party. Strawberries with whipped cream made with vanilla extract and nutmeg. Duck breasts made in some delicious way at which I could only marvel. Mahon cheese ice cream. Not to mention coppa (like prosciutto, but different), skyr (Icelandic yogurt-like thing) and freshly roasted coffee.
Best present is a tie between massage that made me at once floopy and energized, and my nephew Tesher getting his orange belt in Tae Kwon Do.
Twelve more minutes of birthday left, or none if you count from where I was born. Make that eleven. Here’s to tectonic shifts.
A week or so ago. I touched the tender fuzzy buds with one finger for several minutes before snapping out of my reverie and snapping this shot.
“You know what I would do if I were in your place? I’d drink from the milk basin of the Milky Way; I’d swallow comets; I’d lunch on dawn; I’d dine on day and I’d sup on night; I’d invite myself, splendid table-companion that I am, to the banquet of all the glories, and I’d salute God as my host! I’d work up a magnificent hunger, an enormous thirst, and I’d race through the drunken spaces between the spheres singing the fearsome drinking song of eternity.”
This is what Galileo’s spirit told Victor Hugo at a séance, per Hugo himself (source). I suspect we bow to different deities, but this grabbed me by the heartstrings, flinging me out into the blue.
Next project: learn eternity’s drinking song all by myself.
(Really, this is just a post to test Flickr’s blogging feature. Not much of interest here.)
Came home from a four-hour job interview yesterday and didn’t know what to do with myself. No problem! My body did. I ate dinner – first real meal of the day – and promptly fell asleep, from sometime before 8pm (!) until after midnight.
Then I stayed up until 5am. Around 2:30 I glanced around the kitchen cupboard, saw the mac-and-cheese box and realized I was ravenously hungry. So I made some, tip-toeing through the quiet house full of sleeping foik behind closed doors. Pietro the canary seemed amused and perplexed at my timing, insofar as a canary can seem to have any moods at all.
Interview itself went… well enough, I think. I’m too close to it to tell. Now I wait, and maybe finally de-lame and paint some walls in my landlady’s other house like I’ve been promising for something like a month and a half. And have comfort food at 3am.
Neil Gaiman’s blog readership has spoken, and Harper Collins has put the entire American Gods online for free for a month, starting yesterday. If you have not yet read it, I highly recommend it; but then, I’ve never failed to like anything Gaiman has written. Some of his wor[k|d]s leave more of an impression on me than others, of course; American Gods is right up there at the top.
Of course, the publisher didn’t go so far as to allow you to download the thing; as far as I can see, you can only read it on the web. So it goes, step by step… at least they’re making it free in the first place!
The Moon is my mistress; has been for just about ten years now, ever since I noticed the reliable upward mood swings during full moon evenings.
So tonight’s full eclipse, spent alone and then with housemates and then alone and the entire time chatting with people online, was a salve for a hard February. I would have photos, too, but can’t find the camera cable – phooey.
She was red and pink and blackish and gorgeous, and always changeable. Saturn and Regulus hung out nearby (well, sorta). She was a clown nose, a koala, a cinnamoon (thanks for that last image, Molly). She’s almost out of penumbra again, bright white and always a reminder that the world is big and full of new things to discover.
Spring is coming.
