i am sneezing all day, so tomorrow i will probably be sick. it's worth it. and you get to see who really cares. that girl on the subway platform? "bless you!" yeah, she cares. my roommates? fuck them. they don't really love me.

looking at lisa's pictures from europe and i am teh jealz. jealz, i say!

my shadow in the olafur eliasson piece at the modern art museum of paris. a good day.

it just doesn't do to read too much perry bible fellowship at once. he's hit right on the disturbing vein using familiar comforting childhood images with dark scary adult humor. way more subtle than something like meet the feebles, where you can brace yourself a bit. charming and horrifying in a creeping-in sort of way.
procrastinating. it's easy to see what i have to do, but i hesitate in completing it because when i write the thing and send it in all the potential ways i could have written it narrow down to one, which will prove to be the right one or one of a thousand possible wrong ones. so i fuss and make myself ill with anxiety and cigarettes.
the air has gone through crispness into downright cold. the next time i go to mike's i will be able to see his neighbor's forest of paper lanterns through the naked apricot tree.

yesterday i had an unexpectedly free afternoon because the state liquor authority closes at 4:30. the sla is way up in harlem, so it was scarcely worth the trouble of going back down to work. i thought about going to one of the neglected museums up there, el museo or the hispanic society, but instead i took the train down to 72nd street and got lost in the park. found myself walking down a deserted avenue in the purpling dusk, elms winding up to the sky. just by was the white white skating rink and smaller pools all filled up with wet leaves. tired carriage horses went by in a line, dragging their horsey smell, and then i burst back out into manhattan with rush hour traffic and all the shop windows done up for christmas.

the cold is here in earnest. i can smell the frost. we were holed up earlier in rebecca's room with all the golden light and i was knitting warm things with wool. there are sunflowers on the kitchen table.
did i mention earlier? for book club this time around we're all reading survival manuals. they come in all shapes and sizes, appealing to all different demographics. the one i'm reading is by a tracker who was taught in his youth by an american indian in the pine barrens. he comes across very sane and sensible, advising you to learn about electrical and plumbing systems in your house. it's a holistic sort of view, that if you're more aware of the systems that surround you you'll live better in general. he recommends keeping six months to a year's worth of food in the house, not only because then you'll have it when you need it, but because you'll save money anyway buying in bulk. it reminds me of the mennonite cookbook i grew up on, which is all about eating simple foods and not wasting anything. why buy bread when it's enjoyable to make it yourself and cheaper anyway? cook with simple ingredients that you can use in many different recipes. share meals with friends and family.
oh, anyway, tom brown, the author of my non-paranoidal survival manual, gives funny comforting metaphors. if you're trapped in your car in a blizzard and feeling claustrophobic, think of the snowshoe rabbit who bundles down in the snow to wait out the storm.
it's good to know how to take care of yourself, and it's good to understand the systems that support us and that they are more fragile than they seem, but this obsession with survival in catastrophic conditions disturbs me. there are sepia-toned ads in the subway, paid for by the city, which advise us to have "go bags," or to be prepared to rescue ourselves, so we don't need to be rescued. vague and alarming, these low-grade warnings have replaced that silly color system. my roommates were discussing what grade of gas mask they should purchase for their go bags. if i were in new york and needed a gas mask, how far could i get even with one? wouldn't we all be fucked, anyway? would i want to live in a place where gas masks are essential to survival? keeping some bags of rice and gallons of water in the kitchen makes sense to me, at least.
and now i'm going to go read about art until i fall asleep.

rain is falling very softly on the window. it's a light bubbling, crackly sound. i'm cleaning up my papers and piling all the europe ephemera in preparation to file it away in the box under my knitting bag. the house feels very cozy and right tonight, with all of us wandering back and forth on our business, intersecting and moving apart. a conversation with ryn online felt more normal than any i can bring to recent memory. we are all mentally battening down for winter. my first thought when i heard the ticking of the rain on the window was that it was sleet. i'm itching to knit again: fingerless gloves and long thick scarves and socks for padding around the house in. the snake bobs his head. even in his artificial environment, the heating pad on for weeks now, i'm sure he notices a dryness in the air.
i want there to be snow, but i don't want it here. every change of season brings new reasons to wish i was back upstate. kevin from work tells me the trees are in full autumn blast up at bard. i miss it. i miss the way the leaves smell wet and plastered to the pavement.

this is the cat wearing the "little italy" bib and bells that is so mortified to be seen in such a getup that it will not acknowledge all the tourists walking by. when someone stops to scratch its head it turns away.
"fuck you"
it is saying
"how dare you"
i love cats.

count to ten
count to ten
count to ten
count to ten
count to ten

count to ten
count to ten
count to ten
count to ten
count to ten

coming home to new york was like slipping back into my skin. as soon as i stepped on to the subway at howard beach. back where i belong, but with this cloud of sweet memories. the two glass marbles that i made and j made clicking together in my pocket and the little glass jars with raspberry preserves and thyme-scented honey and chestnut paste and ginger cream packed in among my clothes. i rubbed the 50 pence piece to give to m with my thumb and listened to the rude noises of new yorkers. it felt like they were staring at me because no one who lives here would be so glowing and patient on the stifling subway platform, but it felt good to be deliriously tired and look at familiar subway lines that would march me home to bed-stuy. i watched the clock and thought about j settling back into his home with me flown away and no longer taking up space there, and s tying things up at work so she can cross that now unreachable distance to be close to me again but on a different continent where neither us will be foreigners. everything here looks freshly scrubbed, even though the kitchen has been taken over by fruit flies and everyone at the museum is wan and underslept.

the eiffel tower actually is cooler than i thought. and larger. i saw it all lit up and sparking while the france/new zealand rugby game was on. we watched the game from my aunt's place later. i wanted to go out and join the fun once they won, but jet lag shut me off like a light till the next morning. worlds collided when i brought my aunt to my friend sarah's for brunch the next day. she's the same as always. lots of friends, lots of stories, sharing food. a friend of hers who wandered in offered to take me on a motercycle trip around paris later this week. why not? so we had wonderful vegan brunch and heard about sarah and her roommate's adventures getting their work permits and sarah's crazy job as a pastry maker in a big parisian department store. my aunt said it was the best vegan meal she'd ever had. on our way over we walked by a fruit market and i selected fresh figs. i've never even touched fresh figs before. they were ripe to bursting, some already had crystallized syrup oozing out. those were for sarah and i'm dying to get my own. oh, and so far my french has proven sufficient to:
get minutes on my borrowed cell phone
ask where the bathrooms are
order drinks and dinner
ask for (and receive) directions
woohoo!

oh, and we went to the centre pompidou, a modern and contemporary art museum. it's a real monstrosity: 6 floors, boxy, with esclators on the outside and all the ductwork and framework exposed, like a borg cube. even in the galleries you look up and see all the ducts and pipes and electrical wiring. i find it spectacularly ugly, although riding in the escalators was fun. they are in big plastic tubes, like they have in hampster cages, and you look down on an enormous plaza where people gather to watch street musicians.