nervous.
my suitcase on the floor, containing camera, passport, and two wineglasses.
shopping list for tomorrow:
unpopped popcorn
rodent
nervous, can't sleep.
the skateboarders are practicing on the street again. it's still closed for paving.
finish the book, then go to bed.

hummmmm. thomas gave me a datebook ages ago and it went right into my purse because it was pleasing to me, all slim and black and understated. i just began using it as a diary of sorts. each day has just enough space for a few sentences, and i have just enough time in the mornings to sum up the previous day while waiting for my train. i lose so much of what i do because of carelessness and poor memory. it is good to see the days marching back, and it is interesting to see what i pick out of each day as most memorable...
9/10
watched terrible russian vampire movie
9/12
j and s fighting about $. broccoli and tomato omlette. flirting with the subway surfer.
9/15
GIRLTALK sweaty crowded pushing people. enjoyed myself immensely. toenail coming off?

and then i opened it and saw five empty days. spending lots of time with people that you love and hardly ever see is exhausting and all the little necessities fall aside. when i came home tonight after lisa's reading i threw out loads of disgusting rotted veggies and made a dinner of a small head of red lettuce with ginger carrot dressing. work goes by in a daze of heat and stuffle-headedness, i go out, i stumble home, i give sam's cat food and snuggles. clothing piles up on my floor and my perishables melt away in the kitchen. my roommates, when i am around to observe, are entranced by their simms games, watching the little lives of their fictional families, herding them through daily duties or allowing them to be visited by calamities.
at the tediously thorough (but yes, joyful and beautiful) catholic wedding i attended on saturday i was reminded of my favorite part of the lord's prayer. the forgive us our trespasses part creeps me out, but i am always moved and shaken by "and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil." it's the plea of the powerless, a clearly futile hope. it's asking if life could be a little bit easier, even though we know there's no reason to expect it.

who's got health insurance?
that's right, bitches. yours truly.
they stalled and strung me along for months, but now i have those plastic cards with my name ons.
not that i entirely know what it means. they sent the cards, and a short list of covered medications (birth control, bitches!) and notices of privacy practices, but no information about whether i can use them at the dentist's (let's assume no) or if there are only certain doctors i can go to. i've never had my very own health insurance before.
now that i have it, what next? who knows how to find a doctor? i don't terribly want to find one in bed-stuy, but is it worth trekking to manhattan every time i get sick? do i stick with the clinic where i've been going? there's a certain convenience factor there in that they have doctors, ob-gyn, dentist, optician, and radiology all rolled into one building, but there's an inconvenience factor in that they're located in alphabet city and when i went for my physical i was stuck there for four hours. that was four hours of sitting in a waiting room listening to babies crying.
well, the most important thing is that if i slip on the stairs or my appendix bursts i won't be in debt for the rest of my life. we'll sort out the little details okay.

an anthology of new (american) poets
edited by lisa jarnot, leonard schwartz, and chris stroffolino

the book of illusions
paul auster

memoria de mis putas tristes
gabriel garcia marquez

i am a strange loop
douglas hofstadter

whoa. if we established one thing in our house discussion on i am a strange loop last night, it was that book club is run on beer. we must've had four or five apiece.
so last night i had another work nightmare. i showed up on opening day with a book in which i was stupidly engrossed, probably one of those george r.r. martin fantasy novels i've been borrowing from sam. anyway, i felt that things were under control, so i could read my book for a bit. when i looked up again i realized none of my staff knew they had to come in, because openings are held on sundays and they're all used to working on saturdays. and the registers had been set up in the wrong place, but the public was already coming in so it was too late to change them. so i set the intern at one of the registers while i went into the computer to start calling people and begging them to come in and work at the last minute. at that time, i realized a few things: i don't have the contact information for the people who have worked for me most recently entered into the computer, i can't find the document on the computer anyway, and the beer guys never came in to hook up the bars. time kept changing in a weird way, as well. i looked at the clock and it was 8, the day nearly over. then i looked and it was 3 again.
whew! que disastre! my brain is flipping out because the last saturday event is this week and after that i won't have constant stress to live off of.

the whole room looks different now that i've discarded my box of papers to be filed. the papers to be filed are now jammed haphazardly into their respective file folders and the envelopes in which they arrived are in a trash bag on the landing. i fed the rest into the shredder. now i need more file folders.
the snake is satiated, temporarily, and no longer noses at the glass.
tomorrow i go back to work and into my daily disasters.
the rain on my days off was endlessly satisfying. tuesday morning when we were almost fighting i curled up on the bed and watched the rain drip off the grapevines and the sour green bunches of grapes and the leaves of the apricot tree that the grapevines are attempting to choke. he came into the room with a handrolled cigarette and shared it with me and we watched the rain, blowing smoke out through the screen.
all the struggling and fussing that i do, all i want are moments like that, when i'm sleepy and scared and a little angry, but if i stop to look out the window i can see that the rain is beautiful on the leaves and i can hear this harmonious dripping sound everywhere and someone that i don't really want to fight with who doesn't really want to fight with me will come and share a cigarette and enjoy the view before we have coffee and eggs.
can't it always be raining?
can't i forever be coming or going?
the time one spends somewhere is so much sweeter when one has to leave sooner... or later...
anyway, when i left it was a little sunnier. i went to pick up the organic veggies. we had lovely beets, little squiggly pink and purple potatoes, wax beans, pattypan squashes, basil, cucumber, half-ripe tomatoes, broccoli, cauliflower, a perfect cabbage, and the last few stalks of kale and colored swiss chard.
i'm listening to the offenbach opera that thomas let me dump onto the shuffle. he describes it as being cabaret-like; the music is more sudden and uptempo, none of this fussing and beating around the bush you normally get with opera. it pleases me immensely. looking up the plot on wikipedia, it turns out to be about a man who falls in love with and loses three women in quick succession. he keeps getting tricked, there is someone who is determined that no one else shall have him. ach, but it's beautiful.

paul auster: the book of illusions

beautiful and sad

my last dream last night was very vivid. stephanie and i climbed a cliff made of cork and grown all over with moss. the waves washed up over us and i dug in with my hands and feet. we were very high up, but we laughed and held on tightly.

we cleared all the furniture off of the roof last night so the roofers could get at it. later i brought out a single chair and an ashtray and installed myself by the door to read the book of illusions. tonight i continued, glancing up to watch the heat lightning flicker. downstairs the boys argued over a boardgame, stephanie crocheted and uri and rebecca watched anime. even when all the noise and fuss irritates me, i enjoy the presence of my friends. i've been withdrawing more, not answering my mother's calls, my aunt's e-mails, i'm failing to feed the snake, who presses his nose against the glass every night, searching. when galen came over to make music with rebecca i bought cigarettes and went up to the roof. it'll pass, but what will have changed?

why do the most inane passages from a terribly-written webcomic make me go all hopelessly squishy?
i am le squish fest today.
i felt like i was on the point of bawling all day at work, like every minuscule decision i made was: log into computer account or bawl on the floor. ask intern to fetch supplies from closet or bawl on the floor. answer visitor's question or begin bawling. i told emn i was going to cry if she hugged me the other night and i haven't yet.
it is cozy here in my corner of the world and i shall go to sleep in a downy nest and in the morning i will go through the motions and i will keep going through them until the things i do make sense again and i know why i do them.

here i am, on the verge of something i don't feel like i can post on a public forum. on the verge of changing something. i'm thinking about the things i can control and the things i can't. i'm thinking of the person that i want to be and the places i want to go. this morning i walked out into the muggy sunlight and i saw businesspeople taking their children off to daycare. will i ever be able to support children of my own? will i have to leave for work in a suit to make that happen? my lifestyle is possible when i am the only person i worry about, and that is me as a healthy twentysomething. i never thought much about the amount of money i would need to be comfortable growing up. i was too worried about not getting stuck in pennsylvania and/or some constricting formal environment. the reason i chose bard in the end was because i wanted something more unconventional, but i've also always wanted to be able to take care of myself. at the least, to be independent. that drive to independence has made me a less giving person, less willing to be vulnerable, and i haven't even been able to achieve true independence. i can't have everything, but that's no reason to settle for nothing. which parts of my foolish dreams are worth holding onto, and which do i need to let go? my parents sacrificed so much to stability. they became these small town jobs, they accepted so much mundanity, but they knew why. my brother and i were so lucky and so loved by them. we had everything we needed and quite a bit more. when does that choice become easy? was it easy for my parents? i see parents playing with toddlers on the subway and i think, yeah, that would be nice. it seems much more likely that i'll spend the rest of my life chasing after wisps of dreams that i don't fully understand. you pick a path and you follow it, or maybe you get lost following dancing lights. do i wait for certainty? will the arrow in my heart tell me which way to go?
since i started working after school i've told myself i have to fake it to survive. that was when i started going by my full name, to generate this air of confidence. and i don't believe that it fools anyone for a second, but i try to lie to myself that it does. if i can't convince myself that i'm capable of certain things, then i won't be able to make anyone else believe.

and my brain won't go back to sleep. stephanie decided to start a book club, so here i am reading "i am a strange loop" on the subway, and getting overanalytical about everything. he (hofstadter) seems like a kindred spirit, a vegetarian and pragmatist. he has a gift for putting his thoughts down in such a way that i keep thinking, but that's what i think! i should have written this book! when clearly that is not the case. he makes it seem easy, which is a good way to get philosophy into the people. it seems so easy that barely into the third chapter i begin to question his assumptions. am i being snowed by his easy confidence? the use of silly jargon makes me think of specious self-help books, with his "soul shards" and "simmbolism." will this turn out to be some corny "chicken soup for the atheist?" this book club was a good idea. i am waiting for people who understand and care about these arguments more than i to trounce me in debate so i don't just write the whole thing off. but first i shall finish it.
thinking critically with a goal in mind is energizing.