One Day

The other night, I was high and reading about Sinead O'Connor, doing so because I have been really into her lately and listening to a couple of songs on repeat over and over again, have been trying to find a copy of the "Gospel Oak" EP online, which for some reason is not on iTunes, and playing more specifically "Curly Locks" over and over and over again, and so I was looking up info about her, seeing if she was playing any shows in the near future. Her only scheduled dates, where she is supposedly going to play some of the new material she is working on, are a few dates at the Manchester International Festival. I went to the festival's website to read more info about it and then on that site also saw details of Bjork's series of planned concerts at this festival. I saw that tickets were on sale.

I needed to see this show. I needed to see Bjork. Had to. She was one of the first concerts I ever went to. Okay, so the first might have been a Billy Joel/Elton John concert with my mom when I was thirteen, but I don't count that as the first. I do and I don't. The first in some sense. But in the sense of going to a band or a performer because you wanted to, because you saved up some money and bought tickets to go, because you knew when tickets were going on sale, and made sure you bought them that same day from the Ticketmaster at the JCPenny at the mall on that exact same day (this all in those lovely pre-everything-on-the-Internet days), it was not in that sense. That is reserved for a few years later, the age of 16, in possession of a car and some burgeoning taste in music, an ability to become totally overwhelmed by an album, to play it again and again, the CD in my discman as I lay awake in bed thinking about all that life was and all it might be. Bjork's albums were often those albums. She, probably more than any other musician, played such a tremendous role in my adolescence, really giving summoning up in sounds a life that I dreamed of as possible and she confirmed. She has survived with me through my adolescence, through my twenties. Very few of those musicians from that time period are still here with me; many fell along the way. I am still listening to Bjork and still being blown away by her music. I have not outgrown her. I do not appreciate her in some ironic oh-this-is-what-I-listened-to-when-I-was-a-teenager sense. It's still beautiful stuff to pump through your headphones on dreamy days as you wander around the streets of whatever town you live in and think about your life. And when I was sixteen, oh man, this singer totally made me so emotional, did something magical to me.

So that is why when I think about my first concert, it is Bjork I often think to and not Elton and Billy (despite how much I sincerely love both of their bodies of work). This was also in the smallish venue of Capital Ballroom, not huge RFK Stadium. It was my first time really entering such a venue. It all seemed so adult, so cool. I remember being wowed by the fog coming off the stage, by how dark the venue was, how moody it all felt, part of a nightworld that when you first experience it really seems cinematic, intriguing, but with years of going to see shows and going to dark bars and dance clubs, it holds less and less magic. This night, it held all of that shine though still. I was out in the bad part of DC with my friend Elaine and we were seeing this person that I was absolutely obsessed with at the time, she touring in support of Homogenic. The show was spectacular, though I only saw the first half of it, saw only the first half for those reasons of being sixteen. My friend, Elaine, was in trouble with her mom about something or other and had to be home at x time. I can't even remember what it was. Ten, maybe eleven, and Bjork had really just started to play, had just played a few songs when Elaine started really insisting about how we had to leave. I begged and got her to stay for another song. I was ready to cry. This singer meant the world to me at that point in my life. It was that time in one's life when singers so easily have that capacity to. I did not want to go, but I did. Holding those moments with me forever, that feeling of ecstatic giddiness always what I hold as the bar for what an amazing concert is, that you need to really take me to that state.

And so I read about a thirty-foot pendulum that created rhythms out of the earth's energy or some such thing and read about how these shows were in a venue that fit only 1,800 people. I had to buy them. No question. Had to. I purchased tickets to the only show that seemed to still have tickets, sure this a sign that I was meant to go, that this show was not sold out yet, that I had gotten to this site in such a roundabout fashion, by originally looking at Sinead's dates (which, sadly, were not near the date I ended up purchasing tickets to), that I clearly needed to buy these.

And so I am going to see Bjork play again. I am going to see her in a foreign city I have never been to. It is going to be just as magical and this time I am going to get to see her finish her set. I am so excited about this and I am already having nightmares that I won't receive my tickets in the mail or some such other calamity.

Jacob and I are now in the midst of planning a European vacation spurred by the purchase of these concert tickets. We have still yet to even buy our tickets to Europe, probably won't do that until Friday (aka payday), but are already buying these other tickets. Today, we committed ourselves further to Europe and bought Eurostar tickets from London to Paris that are nonrefundable. Tomorrow, I am probably going to buy tickets to an opera about Marina Abromovic with songs by Antony. Um! The plan as of now is to fly IcelandAir because of their free stopover program and fly into London, head up to Manchester for a couple days, back to London for five days, five days in Paris, back to London, and two days in Reykjavik before flying home. I am so excited!

I am using exclamation marks! I am that excited!

I have been to London before but none of these other places and I am so excited about seeing new places and new things and old things I have only seen in pictures and videos. So now it is time to start saving money, start making money. Thoughts of all these things, other thoughts, bowels that feel all types of crazy.

Hungers We Have

Bears in magazines, bears in dreams

Last night, I was reading in bed, reading the Haurki Murakami story, "U.F.O. in Kushiro," in this week's New Yorker. I was stoned and I was tired, having spent the past couple hours watching a documentary on Richard Nixon. At some point, I paused the thing, getting too tired, or at least too tired of a historical documentary about Nixon. So I lay in bed reading this story. I read the first couple of pages, fading more and more, soon throwing it to the floor, turning off my bedside lamp and falling asleep. The story is about this man whose wife has just mysteriously left him after watching news coverage of the Kobe earthquake for five days straight. The man has an offer from one of his co-workers to go on a trip out of  town to deliver a package to his sister, offers this as a way to get away for a while.

I woke up this morning, the magazine at my side. I showered, got dressed, put the magazine in my bag, and headed off to work. On the subway, I read more from this story, intending to finish it. I came across this section and paused, memories of my dreams from the night before coming back to me.

"Do you get bears around here?" Komura asked.

Keiko giggled and turned to Shimao. "Bears!"

Shimao gave the same kind of giggle.

"I don't know much about Hokkaido," Komura said by way of excuse.

"I know a good story about bears," Keiko said. "Right, Shimao?"

"A great story!" Shimao said.

But their talk broke off at that point, and neither of them told the bear story. Komura didn't ask to hear it. Soon they reached their destination, a big noodle shop on the highway. They parked in the lot and went inside.

Reading this section, I suddenly remembered that I had a dream involving bears last night. The dream suddenly took on a lot more import to me now. I had been reading this story, went to bed before this section involving bears, dreamt about bears, and then read this bear section and recalled the bear dream, pieces fitting together, life and dreams intersecting, meaning seemingly present, something trying to be said, told.

The dream was already vague by this point but what I remembered very strikingly was that a large part of the dream was set inside a big commercial airplane. This plane, for some reason, was flying really low, and by really low I mean an altitude of about thirty feet or so. Absolutely insane and dangerous, but it seemed normal, a nice way to make things scenic - dream logic. We ciircled right above this marsh and there were all these brown bears in the marsh, hunting for fish in the water. I watched one of the bears catch a fish. My face was pressed against the window. I remember being incredibly wowed by being able to witness these bears so up close.

I have done some research into this and have learned that bears can symbolize cycles due to their hibernation, that there is an awakening motif present. Airplanes, I have learned, symbolize change or a search for freedom or adventure.

Murakami stories often evoke something mystical, mysterious; there is always something noirish and mysterious about the workings of life. I felt like this dream last night really brought me into this story, brought my life in the realm of this Murakami version of reality. I think something's about to happen. I hope so.

Me and Christian Down By the Schoolyard

[Louboutin] is an exponent of what might be thought of as a Slow Foot movement, asserting that a sort of virtue is forged in the discipline of wearing exquisite, handmade shoes, even if they cramp the metatarsals. Clogs are a particular bugbear. "I hate the whole concept of the clog!" Louboutin said. "It's fake, it's ugly, and it's not even comfortable!" He continued, "And I hate the whole concept of comfort! It's like when people say, 'Well, we're not really in love, but we're in a comfortable relationship.' You're abandoning a lot of ideas when you are too into comfort. 'Comfy' - that's one of the worst words! I just picture a woman feeling bad, with a big bottle of alcohol, really puffy. It's really depressing, but she likes her life because she has comfortable clogs."

I read this beautiful gem in a profile of Christian Louboutin by Laruen Collins in this week's New Yorker while I was riding the train home from work this evening. It was a depressing, dreary day, and not just weather-wise. The weather certainly has a great deal of influence on our moods and waking up this morning, I was none too eager to get out there and live my life given the steady rain coming down outside my window. I went to work though, because that is what we do. We go through these motions necessary to continue our survival, our existence as we have become used to, and (dare I even say it given that Louboutin quote) as we have become comfortable with. My job seemed more annoying today than usual. I couldn't wait to get out of there. The string of exasperating and stupid phone calls seemed endless today. Six-thirty could not come fast enough.

What made the day more depressing was that I had no plans after work. There was the intention of perhaps going to the gym, but the nasty weather outside when I got off of work made me want to get straight on the train and not walk the ten more blocks past the train entrance to my gym. Also my feet were wet.

My shoes, one of my favorite pairs, this black pair of Stacy Adams Madison shoes, have been worn into the ground. The soles are paper-thin in parts and my socks were sopping up all the water on the sidewalk, making even the short walk unpleasant, making me sad that my feet were wet and cold, but also that this pair of shoes I have such an affection for are nearly at the end of their lifecycle. I originally found a brown pair of these shoes at a vintage shop in the East Village and was totally wowed by them. They were the dress shoe that I am always looking for and never find. They have a perfectly curved toe that I want in dress shoes - not square-toed (God, no) and not too pointy either. They also have a heel that is a normal size, not the booster heels that so many men's dress shoes have to compensate whatever insecurity men who buy dress shoes are nursing. I was in love with this brown pair and have basically worn these into the ground as well. It was after I had fairly wrecked those ones that I found a black pair in my size at the same vintage shop.

So I sat there on the train, reading Louboutin talking about comfort and shoes and style and really dreaming that I was perhaps more fashionable than I am, agreeing with him, the two of us joking about such things, such as the man standing in front of me in his awful square-toed dress shoes, me confessing to Christian (the two of us on a first name basis at this point in our train ride together) that that was a deal-breaker, that I just can't take someone seriously, can't find them attractive if they wear such shoes. Neither of us could wrap our heads around why these shoes were made, let alone purchased, what exactly it meant about the male ego that these shoes were in such abundance at times, trying to parse out what symbolism there was in this square-toed business, that ill-fitting and hard edges, a lack of concern with shapeliness, is what separates masculine from feminine, or some such similar logic.

I finished the article just as I got to my stop, put it in my ratty tote bag and walked home in my dilapidated shoes, socks soaking up water, one of my umbrella's ribs broken, the thing tilting in on one side.

"He was a taxi driver, unemployed, or in some other profession."

This last paragraph in a NY Times article about the latest news from Libya is beautiful. Yes, the news it describes is sad, a death, and actually, yes, most of the world news to be read these recent days is incredibly depressing, however the amount of ambiguity is striking in this news account. It's almost to the level of absurdity. It's a Bolono-esque narrative here where the details are unclear and continually revised within even the same sentence, bringing about a sense of disorientation, that the stability with which a narrative is supposed to give events is totally absent, instead a continual presentation of "or"s, various options for how to present the narrative. There is the ring of poetry to this paragraph:

People around the other fresh grave also said they were relatives, but people gave conflicting descriptions of the deceased — he was 25 or 29; he was killed in his home, driving by a military base, or walking in a neighborhood near the Qaddafi compound; he was a taxi driver, unemployed, or in some other profession.

Supermoon

I was riding the subway home from work early this afternoon, my head bent over into the book I'm reading, Open City still. The door opened at the end of the car right next to where I was seated and a man walked through. I glanced at the person out of the corner of my eye as he walked past me, not looking up from my book. I saw him holding a sign and I recognized him and cringed and kept my head focused in my book, not wanting to see. I knew what he looked like. I knew what his sign looked like. The sign was dog-eared and had old newspaper clippings attached to it concerning what had happened to him. The man was attacked with acid on his face and his face looked like it was melting, most of his features blurred, burned, away. Every several months I will be on a train where this man is panhandling and he really scares me.

I am aware that this a horrible thing to say and immediately I felt guilty that I wouldn't look at him, that I kept my head in my book, pretending I was so absorbed by this text that I failed to notice this man's burned face. And then I thought I should give him money for thinking these thoughts. And then I got mad because that is what he does, why he is able to collect money from people, that he makes people uncomfortable and guilts them with the horrors committed on him so that they end up giving him money quickly, whatever they can quickly pull out of their wallet, something to make him keep walking through the car. I have never actually read what happened to this man, the circumstances, too busy am I trying to not make any eye contact. But it must be a rough life and I can't fault him for his method of making money. I wondered about his personal life, imagined that finding work was probably difficult, that most employers were probably reluctant to hire this man.

At the Bedford stop, he got out and walked to the next car. As he stepped out, a three-piece Mariachi band stepped on to the train, played a song, and then walked around with hats to collect money. The juxtaposition was jarring, almost comically so, this endless parade of people attempting to make money on subway cars.

I ate some food at home, rested a while, and then went back into the city, back on to the train, to attempt for the second day in a row to win lottery tickets to "The Book of Mormon." I fell asleep on the train ride there. The ease with which I can fall asleep on trains really intrigues me. The more crowded the train is, the easier it is for me to fall asleep. And yet, I sometimes have trouble falling asleep in my bed. My body loves these short naps of subway rides, loves the motion, rocking me to sleep, the crowd somehow comforting me as well, the feeling of being surrounded, not alone. So at some point, I woke up when I felt my head falling over into my neighbor's space. I awoke to see Sandy above me waving hello. We talked about my sleeping tendencies and also about where he was headed. He was on his way to film a Purim event uptown. He explained the story of Purim to me. Everything is upside down he said, the carnivalesque. I have already forgotten all of the names of this historical drama but I remember being really intrigued by the story of its origins. I was a bit sleepy at the time.

I said bye to him at Union Square to transfer trains and while walking through the labyrinth of tunnels to get to the NRW trains, I walked past this line of young Asians, most likely Japanese twentysomethings. They were holding signs saying "Pray for Japan," and were also shouting this slogan that was printed on their placards, shouting it quite aggressively for a call for prayer. They seemed distraught, anguished, and I couldn't imagine and yet could also, the events there insanely horrific and reminding me what a fragile thing life and this planet is, how easily we could make it all go to shit with a disruption in our nuclear technology. A couple of them were holding boxes, asking for money for Japan.

Tonight is also a full moon. Tomorrow is also the first day of Spring. Something is going on. I did not win tickets to see "Book of Mormon." Again there were several hundred other people trying to win lottery tickets. I will try again on Monday and again and again until I can see this musical.

Everything is upside down. You drink and you celebrate, not necessarily to celebrate everything being upside down, but in recognition of it, of life in whatever crazy forms it presents, and of our presence among this chaos.

this must be the place

Yesterday, I came across a post on Facebook that upset me a great deal. An acquaintance that I'm not sure how I ever befriended on Facebook, one of those people, someone who moves in a similar queer Brooklyn circle, but whom I don't think I've actually ever talked to and yet somehow am Facebook friends with - that type of Facebook friend - well, this person, nothing against them because I am sure they are really lovely, but they posted an artist proposal for a project documenting sites of queer public sex, calling for drawings of people's memories to make an atlas. The reason that this disturbed me and still does is because there is this long-running project I have been brainstorming in the back of my mind now for a good three years that is really similar to this. I have been wanting to make a NY travel guide, though all of the locations are to be sites of erotic/romantic memories for me, many of the places no longer even existent. These things are in the ether and people often have similar ideas it seems, but I have to really get moving on this long-delayed project even more so now. There had been the intention to finish it before Beltane two years ago to bring copies of it there. That clearly did not happen. And I have been thinking of it more and more lately especially as I think about all these things I intend to accomplish in the next few months, things I want to do in my twenties, before I turn thirty in June, long-delayed projects and plans that I want to finish before I hit this mark of thirty for some reason.

And so yesterday when I stumbled across this proposal, my mouth literally dropped open and I mouthed shitshitshit. I am a little worried that it will appear to some people that I was influenced by this person's project and that is upsetting, but I have to do this. I have been thinking about this for years, have already written a couple entries. I just need to swing for the fences and kill this thing. I am also less interested in specifically situating my travel guide in these terms of queer space, and more so interested in situating it in a Sebaldian mourning for places that no longer exist and acknowledgment of ghostly memories, the way presences and moments can reoccur long after at the same site. So that is project #1 for this week, to spend all of my free time making this happen and making it even more amazing now that there is this similar thing being worked on. But that also scares me a great deal, but also maybe that's a good thing.

Other things: I wrote cover letters and emailed resumes for about eight jobs that I really want today. I hadn't actually hit Send in so long. It felt great to send out email after email. I felt a huge sense of accomplishment in even this little act that I had been postponing for so long. I have been tinkering with my resume forever, but today I finally finished tinkering, quit making excuses, and did this thing I have been trying to do for months. A new job will hopefully be mine sometime this summer or sooner. Prior to doing that, I spent hours editing a porn that Jacob and I taped last night. I taped some additional footage this morning and spliced all of these into a sexy, hot narrative that I like. I want to make more videos, not necessarily porn, am amazed by how easy it is to edit videos on a Mac. I have had a couple cups of coffee today and I feel positively wired. Also, how come I never realized how insanely fucking amazing Earth, Wind, and Fire are?

spank

I was walking to this party last night, the Spank party, not too far from my house, a five minute walk, down some desolate blocks surrounded by warehouses. The only people walking on the block, all white twentysomethings surrounded by emptiness, were headed in the same direction. I came upon this pack of drunk girls in their early twenties, five or six of them, all dolled up, looking like your quintessential fag hags. I was walking behind them and could hear their loud conversation about the cost of this party, about how they should go to Sugarland instead, wondering to themselves if it was going to be fun or not. They were walking slow, stumbling in that direction and I was determined to pass them. I was too stoned to try to walk at a slower pace than them. As I came past them, they seemed a bit startled. One girl asked me if I was going to this Spank party. We exchanged a few sentences back and forth about wanting to dance. She tried to get me to confirm her expressed thought that it was such a sketchy walk there, and while that would have been easy to do, that the statement had truth to it, something about these girls unnerved me, bothered me, and I said that I lived five minutes away. An awkward, "Oh...," followed by her explaining that they live in Manhattan. No shit.

I passed these girls, smoked my cigarette, and looked at the night sky, at this industrial scenery surrounding me. I enjoyed this walk there so much. It actually made me really romantic toward my neighborhood. There was this narrow courtyard entrance to the party. The doorguy out front told me to go into the courtyard and not smoke on the street, that they didn't want to draw any notice from the police. I went through and queued up at the bottom of a set of rickety metal stairs leading up to the space. The space was huge, the sound was amazing, and it really reinforced to me that warehouse parties usually blow other venues out of the water. I was really high, too high really for the purpose of being in this large crowd of people I didn't really know. Diego was somewhere in the midst of these people, the person I came to meet up with. I found him at some point and he hugged me, fell on to me, I could feel how drunk he was in his hug, how much of his weight fell on to me, how little resistance his body had to gravity. He did his thing that he does and flitted from boy to boy, taking the attention of anyone that would offer it. I remembered why I was continually frustrated when we were dating, that I could never hold his attention, that there would always be boy after boy for him to get lost in conversation with. I was stoned and awkward and despite wanting the safety blanket of a friend in this party, I always knew that the good friend thing to do would be to give him space and let him get his game on.

I danced to the music and really got into it so much once I got over my awkwardness of dancing by myself. I weaved my way through the crowd to the front, danced against the speakers, near some other freaks voguing it out. I had a ball and soaked my shirt with sweat. After an hour or so, the music became too repetitive. I needed more variation in these beats, wanted some crazy female vocals to kick in and take me there. Not spotting Diego or anyone else I knew, which was weird in such an insanely huge crowd - or maybe not considering the strobe lights and the generally drugged out vibe of half the crowd - I left the space, walked down those same metal stairs, through that same long courtyard, and out on to the empty street. That transition was beautiful in its abruptness- the huge crowd, the loud music, and a minute later it all gone, an empty street and silent warehouses on both sides of it, the occasional person either walking to or back from this party. It hinted at a lot, the magic contained everywhere, that all these quiet, nondescript places may hold treasure. The buildings I passed on the way home all had a majestic quality that old buildings often will have and I pondered their history and their intersection with my own as I walked home, beautiful splotches of gray clouds passing swiftly beneath the dark and clear night sky above them, stars bright and vivid.

"Me and Those Dreamin' Eyes of Mine"

The good news: Maxwell is playing on this D'Angelo station I've decided to listen to on Pandora this evening. Also good news is that really, given an Internet connection, I could be listening to this beautiful music at any time. A question to myself that will go unanswered for now: Why, oh why, did I ever stop listening to this type of music?

Other good news is that despite the lack of mixers in our house and the excess of hard alcohol, I was able to craft myself this really lovely cocktail that I am sipping right now of peach iced tea and whiskey. My new drink, I think.

And really the best news of today may be that my bank account for the first time in nearly two weeks is finally out of the red. There was a debacle with my rent check, in that I sent the whole amount of our rent plus half the month's rent that Jacob paid for, rather than sending just a check of my part of the half month's rent. The landlord went ahead and deposited this excess of money anyways and this sent my bank account into severe negative territory. I got hit with quite a few overdraft fees for really small transactions that occurred around the same time as the Great Rent Check Debacle of 2011 and that sent it further into the red.

Erykah Badu is now playing. Oh shit.

But there was a paycheck deposited into my account on Friday that brought me so, so close to the positive territory and today I sent a text to the dude on 96th Street I sometimes see, told him I was horny, that we should meet up soon. He took the bait and told me to come by after work. I pissed in his mouth, got a blowjob, and left with some cash. I deposited a little into the ATM machine and left the rest in my wallet to get me through this week, another week of being frugal and not buying all of these things I want to purchase, mainly theater tickets to about ten different shows that I am dying to see before everyone in the world sees them so I can participate in this cultural conversation that occurs around the openings of plays and dies out a month or two into their run. Not a real problem, I know, but if one more person tells me how awesome "Book of Mormon" is without my having seen it, I am going to get real upset. I am dying to see this musical. Friday, payday, I am buying tickets.

Things are good. I am becoming more and more happy with my life. I mean there are certainly many things that I would like to see change, things I would wish to be different about my life, but I am not focusing on those, am instead just taking it day by day, trying to, enjoying the many lovely things I do have, this great relationship, this cute home, this beautiful city, and even my job. I need to write and send out my resume this weekend, and I will. I am going out tonight because I don't have to work tomorrow. I am going to dance and probably get a little messy and am going to live my motherfucking life like I am going to die one day and have some fun.

Rita Rudner's amazingly insightful advice to Carmen Carerra

"So did you always feel out of place?"

"Never."

"Well, you should, because that's going to be funny. There's nothing funny about a good-looking person who's doing well, who's confident. So think of something you're insecure and share it with us."

Open City

There is this new book out, Open City by Teju Cole, and it's been getting some wonderful reviews. There is a reason for that. The book is actually fantastic. I say that only some seventy pages into it and so I might be proven otherwise, but right now this book is a beautiful little object. James Wood heard the voice of W.G. Sebald in these pages, his tone, a similar style of writing. That was all I needed to hear to go out and purchase this book, Sebald one of my favorite writers, one who I need to return back to soon, it being years now since I tore through his books, utterly enchanted.

This novel has a similar tone, but not one that mimics Sebald, something its own. The narrator, a Nigerian immigrant doing his medical residency in New York City, wanders the streets of New York, going on long walks, much like Sebald, and thinking about the course of history, both the long-view historical record of centuries and also that of one's personal history, the two intertwining, and the book a beautiful meditation on a slew of subjects, writers and artists names bandied about as they relate to thoughts that pop into and out of the narrator's head.

It has a beautiful pacing to it, the writing, that slows you down when reading it, puts you in a meditative state as well. There are beautiful pages that stretch and stretch. The last several pages of Chapter 4 absolutely blew me away when I read them today as I rode the train into the city and back home. These pages detail a walk through Battery Park City and a walk that passes near the site of Ground Zero, a construction site. I would like to just type out these pages and show you how amazing this stuff is, the echoes of not only Sebald here and his fascination with historical memory and amnesia, but also very strong echoes of Fitzgerald's writing about the Dutch sailors laying eyes on the New World at the end of The Great Gatsby. Instead, I'll type a paragraph and encourage you to read this as well. This is really great literature and it is thrilling to read:

"And, as thought leads to thought, standing there looking at the river, I felt an unexpected pang of my own, a sudden urgency and sorrow, but the image of the one I was thinking of flitted past quickly. It had been only a few weeks, but time had begun to dull even that wound. It was getting cold, but I stood awhile longer. How easy it would be, I thought, to slip gently into the water here, and go down to the depths. I knelt, and trailed my hand in the Hudson. It was frigid. Here we all were, ignoring that water, paying as little attention to the pair of black entities between which our little light intervened. Our debt, though, to that light: what of it? We owe ourselves our lives. This, about which we physicians say so much to our patients, about which so little can reasonably be said, folds back and also asks us questions. I wiped my hand on my jacket, and breathed on my fingers to warm them up." (56)

I think the air's been more humid lately. My hair had been getting poofier and poofier. It was looking worse and worse. Look good, feel good. I cut just about all of it off today, shaving the sides and back of my head with a #1 setting on my clippers, the hair falling into my kitchen sink, on to the white and black checkered floor of my kitchen. I scissored the top of my hair down into something I felt looked cute. I showered off all this hair, all this weight of winter and laziness and things not accomplished. It went down the drain. I swept up the hair afterwards in the kitchen, dropped it into the trash can, then mopped the floor down. I feel freer, happier. See you later you last few months. Feeling fresh and ready to start with these things I keep talking about.

drip drop

I wish there could continually be the sound of rain outside my windows. This is a different thing than wishing it was always raining. The sound of it hitting my windows and dripping off the sides of my building is what I want. Sitting inside my apartment today and doing not much of anything felt so right with that sound. I looked at jobs and tinkered with my resume. I thought about things and drank tea. I did not feel the urge to go here or there, was comfortable in my place for a change.

Face, Face, Face of Cakes

"The princess cake is the prettiest. So, it's mine."
-Carmen Carerra