i fell off the bike for the first time today. totally my fault. a refreshing rain started around the time i got over the hump on the bridge, while i was rubbernecking at the beautiful ginoromous eliasson waterfall over on the manhattan side of the east river. it's this perfect wide misty cascade falling over a tinkertoy metal scaffolding. it doesn't look anything like the natural fall we saw in north carolina with my father, the ones he used to play in as a child. that was mountainous and rumbling and ice-cold. this one was like a hothouse waterfall, groomed and airy. it flexed in the breeze, curling back behind the scaffolding. anyway, i enjoyed the sight of it and made a mental note that the pavement was getting slippery. not that i put that knowledge into practice while barreling down prince st, passing by the slowpokes, bold and confident. and when a big truck came across the intersection in front of me i pulled my classic screeching sideways stop on a dime. and slipped. corrected. slipped some more, till i finally spilled all over the street just in time for the slowpokes i'd passed to pull up and ask if i was okay. i was remarkably and undeservedly okay. couple scrapes, weak leg, but fine. so i took a quick breather and rode the rest of the way to work, where the sting from the scrapes wore off and my knee began to gradually but inexorably really fucking ache. i went to the reading in w-burg with my brother anyway and dulled the pain with belgian beer at spuyten dyvil, and now i sit on the futon with the bright pink little kid's icepack on my knee, over the pirate band-aid. bike's still at work. i'm hoping against hope to be able to ride it home tomorrow, but seeing as the most dramatic injury so far was to my pride, it's not worth doing real damage to myself. we'll see how it feels.

or, some things that are true

north carolina is still one of the finest places i have spent time in, on the short list with:
paris
lake george
barcelona
and brooklyn

but tennessee has synchronous fireflies. or lighting bugs. whatever, they're unrealistically beautiful.

r.e.m. puts on a good live show, worth dealing with the huddled yuppie masses at madison square gardens. michael stipe wore a suit, much of the audience wore suits. i danced like a foolish person along with my brother. delightful. good call, alex.

sleepy time now

whew! a couple of weeks and my self-image has transformed from incipiently-chubby-office-worker-person to buff biker chica. that's me in the mornings, pushing it stubbornly up the manhattan bridge, eating the dust of the n/r train till i can smell the fish markets in chinatown. that's me, slaloming between delivery trucks on canal street and nodding to the traffic cops. before my first cup of coffee, before getting any sugar in my blood. the first few trips i wasn't sure it was ever going to get easier, but this week it suddenly doesn't feel so futile. i'm putting the pieces together to learn where things are, to figure out the best route. i look out for other bikers and follow them to little shortcuts. i try not to be an asshole to pedestrians and bikers. it feels good. it falls into the no-longer-so-distant-goals list of healthy living along with bread baking, paper sorting, healthy cooking, and being a better correspondent. as yet to be started upon goals include blowing the dust off my lovely musical instruments and writing dead-tree letters. and practicing my french. and reading novels in spanish.
i like deciding what is important to me. i like deciding what kind of adult i want to be. certainly there are things i wish i was more invested in, but i want to stop wasting my time worrying about the world and spend more putting one foot in front of the other. little things. the more i ride up and down brooklyn on my bike the more people i see. watching people in front of their homes, playing and talking and fronting and flirting is nothing like seeing them zombied out on the subway trying to block out all external stimuli. and all the other bikers! there are the guys tricked out with biker shorts and special jerseys and rearview mirrors and then the hipster girls with sack skirts and pointed heels. one time with a skirt was enough for me. i change in the bathroom at work, wondering if it would be inappro if one of my coworkers walked in to see my taking off my sportsbra.

i did get my feet in the mud. my face is flushed with sunburn and i have the most terrocious haltertop tanline. i did the latushi dance (tooshie out!) among pagans, children, and salt-of-the-earth christian pennsylvanians out for the day with the family. and a bear. back in the city i have strange dreams.
i feel grateful for the farm, to rob and lucy for making the farm, and the company of friends, my extended family of brothers, sisters, and lovers, people with issues, who are beautiful, who have lives different from mine, who i adore and who adore me, who dance with me or watch me dance and make sure i have a place to sleep and make sure i get home safely. i'm glad these things are a part of my life. back in the city we all look away from the man screaming incoherently in spanish on the train. the coffee cart man remembers i take it with milk no sugar. my cubicle mates sing along when i put on the kinks. it's springtime and i'm not missing lost loves. someone on the first floor was mugged in our doorway the night before i came home exhausted at 2 am rolling my suitcase behind with $100 in my wallet and treasures from the festival in my purse. i started smoking again with jay up on the hill among lucy's grapevines and i bought my own after we broke down halfway home near rising sun, maryland, where the aaa lady suggested we find a hotel and hunker down till monday. my roommates play the new gta morning and night, filling the apartment with the sounds of screeching tires and screaming women. the gas station on the corner has closed, so i won't wake on saturdays any more to blasting soul music as the locals wash their cars. "lost lease," says the sign. they'll be putting up condos more'n likely, right across from the cascade laundry factory and the marcy projects' basketball courts. i talk more about leaving the city one day, but for what? this life suits me more than anything else has. no lilacs, no spring peepers, no smell of earth, but a larger concentration of people that i love than anywhere else. and no hiding from the misfortune of others. until you can afford to taxi it everywhere you are stuck on the train with the screaming incoherently. i don't mind so much the man who mumbles obscenities to me in the corner store, or the kids who shout "hey, white girl!" when i head back to the apartment with my six-pack. we all live here together, with the rats and the posturing pigeons. the chugging of the bus on the corner comforts me as i write this late at night on the roof. i love it here. i belong to it. does it belong to me?
my mother wants to buy a house to live in with her children. so i dream of someplace in the mountains of north carolina. the world gets smaller. i don't want to grow old breathing the exhaust of the city, and i'm growing older every day. but i like the way the city keeps me on my toes, forcing me to keep my shit together and be stronger than i think i am. it helps me remember that no one else will make sure i get what i need.

the sensation of excercise after weeks of lolling about and wheezing.
swinging a rope around my body, feeling the rise and fall of the momentum, waiting for the right moment and following its path with my feet, my wrists fluttering like bats, bated breath, waiting, waiting, swing...
in the darkened living room practicing tenkan with the bokken we found in rebecca's trunk, whirling around back and forth, letting the force take the sword up over my head and drop it down again. as i turn it protects my crown from a blow, when i rest it protects my front from a slash. don't work, do nothing, i make minute corrections to my stance, the steps rising out of distant memory: up on the balls of the feet, following the floor board back and forth.
it feels good to move, to possess my body again, and i'm reluctant to go to sleep.

the weekend was breathlessly fun.
for steph's bday party i rolled and rolled truffles. to remember, i made a list on the fridge:
pecan- cocoa/coffee
almond- sugar/ginger
strawberries/confec. sugar- cocoa/confec. sugar
black raspberries- cocoa
dried currants- sugar/cardamom
for an experiment i sprinkled a few of those with white pepper. galen approved.

stephanie ruined my bread by preheating the oven while it was thawing inside. oh well. i already know what i want to adjust in the next batch: mix whole wheat with the bread flour, less yeast, less sugar. if there's time to run to the grocery store i'll pick up some amaranth to roll the dough in, because my bread wants more texture and i love the sound of amaranth. it could be the name of a nation/state from one of the fantasy novels i read when i was little.

on sunday we played foursquare under the hobo bridge in prospect park. it's a better place than most to be terrible at something, and good company for it. i enjoyed watching the foursquare artisans and glowed with my little victories. it was a clear cold day. we all underdressed because we wanted winter to be over and done with already.

i wandered the library a touch:
bleak house- charles dickens
the collected poetry of dorothy parker
the brooklyn follies- paul auster

and did my taxes, though not without a great deal of talking to myself and cursing and one disconsolate phone call to sam regarding school district zones.

work is very dreary this week. a lingering cough and general unwellness make me feel clumsy and slow. i'm less inclined than usual to think the best of everyone, but shit passes and you muddle through. by the time i can smell again it will really feel like spring, and by the first of may i'll be in a place where i can get my feet in the mud. the honeymoon period of my love affair with the city is drawing to a close, to be replaced with either a more mature affection or a gradual dissatisfaction.

bone-tired at work all day after working all weekend at the armory show. the late night waiting for packing materials that never arrived was admittedly made considerably more bearable after ariane's brother (allegedly) tapped the keg in the abandoned vip lounge. hearing the rumors, ch and i hotfooted it to the lounge which had the appearance of a refugee camp, complete with scruffy dudes sitting over piles of hoarded food that had been pulled from garbage cans. we weren't picky. we grabbed salads from the pile and stuck them under our arms and brought back 3 beers apiece. no forks, so we used the bright-red conde nast pencils as chopsticks. not bad at all, with scrounged cookies for dessert.
the worst bit was not being able to find a cabbie willing to take me home to bed-stuy from the piers. the first guy wouldn't even let me in and sped off when he heard where i was going. i banged my fist on his window as ag shouted "what you're doing is illegal, you know!" the second cabbie took me as far as the L at 3rd ave before begging off to go home and see his family. i tipped him badly in resentment.
the night before the roomies (with special guest: 20-year-old-daughter-of-my-former-sunday-school-teacher) caravaned it out to williamsburg with me for the gallery walk. they took it in remarkably good humor that i made two wrong turns for every right, and we still managed to make it to 3 galleries before they shut down at 11. at the last stop, jack the pelican presents, we caught some surprising performance art.
we were looking over some unremarkable installations in the main front room when the crowd pushed a large figure out. there was a guy hidden somewhere under the framework, a sort of gory red horse-figure and massive headdress, the face covered with stocking like a bank robber. his horse-front was supported on a wheel, and as he rolled it before him, shaking it, a single bell rang. it was like something out of a low-budget avant-guarde horror film, and it was headed right at us, or for the door as it turned out. it has already been my experience that walking around barefoot in new york is one of the only ways to get a second glance. it helps if you're also strapped into a massive gory horse thing and jingling a creepy bell. we watched him wander down the sidewalk trailed by a small parade of observers and photographers. back inside the gallery we found his buddy, a guy in gigantic blue getup seated in a throne and turning slowly this way and that. horseman returned unexpectedly, surprising the bejeesus out of me. the two settled cross legged across the room from each other. they each had a microwave. they went through a production slamming open the microwave doors and pulling out little plastic dishes. i had a better view of the blue one. he groped into a large glass urn for a handful of cottonballs and dropped them in the dish, which he topped with a ladleful of red syrup and popped back into the microwave. slam! ... ding! he pulled it out again and grabbed the handful of red cottony goo, slapped it on the floor a few times to work up the consistency, and chucked it at the red guy. he had a terrible arm, but the red guy got him square with globs of blue goo. after all his red snowballs fell well short of target, he put together a double handful, finally making a direct hit. the audience applauded.
a binder informed me that the red figure was a personification of xipe totec, who i remember from latin american art history class as a precolumbian god of springtime. every year a handsome young lad would be chosen to play the part of the god and don the flayed skin of some less fortunate dude. the living one was only somewhat luckier: the ritual involved wearing the skin until it rotted off of its own accord, the old and ugly skin gradually revealing a fresh young visage. little sculptures of him survive: eyes and a grinning mouth show through holes, like a mask.
happy springtime.

sarah is unexpectedly visiting from paris. i apologised for not having a full meal in my larder, and then she went and created a potato, rice and lentil soup flavored with peanut coconut sauce and peas and spinach for color which we fed my whole apartment on. except stephanie, who only likes peanut butter in peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. clearly i am not trying hard enough to make the most of my ingredients.

as a prezzie she brought me the ginger and eucalyptus tea blend from la grande epicerie, otherwise known as the tea that smells of wonderful parisian vacation after the bag i brought back from kevin scented all my luggage with a bright and pungent herb-ey air.

and she brought some of the pictures she took with me in new york, including the best catching-the-clutter-of-chinatown shot and a monumental image of the bp donning his mirrored helm and gazing distractedly outwards.

now she's rolling over and breathing in the bed above me and i feel so moved to have her in my space, under my blankets and sleeping while i do this and that. when we met we had so many ideas and visions and passions. it seems something extraordinary that we are now adult-like and able to see how those imaginings changed and turned into real lives.

last night i dreamed i was barhopping with sam, and his friend from cally was with us, as we all walked down the sidewalk. i held my head high and lofty, stealing little sidelong glances. he was still fine, but i was too proud to start a conversation. we walked along, at an impasse.
it was a strange mirror to my actual evening with sam. dreams are so peculiar, the way they pull up the feelings you hide from yourself. i tell myself i'm so complex, but the mirror my dreams hold up is sadly clichéd. fears and hopes are built from the same material for everyone, and fears and hopes are what drive us all.
sunday afternoons are the time for idle reflection. i'm feeling angry and frustrated with my brother because i can't reach into his life and make him happier the same way i tie his scarf or smooth his collar. that anger makes me bad company for him. last night he came into the bar soaked to the skin after walking there from home. he bought an umbrella on the way which the wind tore to shreds. he showed it to me, all pathetic with its broken struts.

this afternoon i was sitting at my desk dropping into a pit of sadness. i sat up, took a deep breath, and shook myself. why am i so sad? i thought to myself. then the beethoven swelled again and i realized the sadness had an external source, after all. my parents gave me that cd in college and i used to play the same movement over and over again in my dorm room, indulging in dark thoughts. my moods these days are more temperate. a relief.
j sent me a mix and i put it on in the kitchen while i prepared the week's bread on sunday, making up moresque dances as the dough rose. it was a beautiful sunny day and the house was empty all afternoon. i took the tassajara bread book's advice to "wind up" the dough before putting it in the pan and wouldn't you know, it finally rose to a respectable height when i baked it. the boys who showed up to play video games divested me of slices. i consider it a success!