bye

So I don't think I'm going to continue this blog. I just don't have a lot to say publicly, I guess. I've moved back to a personal journal, something I kept almost religiously from age 10 until 19, then sporadically in college. Since then I've been too busy to slow myself down to write on paper with a pen, organizing my thoughts as I go. A blog made more sense. I could vomit up a day. But the messiness has been bothering me for a while. Time to go back to a new (or rather, old) format.

Writing has always served multiple purposes for me. It is a way to express my "artistic vision" (or something), a way to earn money and keep myself and the kittens fed, a way to keep track of things and a way to find out what I actually think. My brain tends to operate in overdrive, slowing down and feeling at peace only around very specific people and in equally specific situations -- I realized this with a start yesterday when M. and I settled down to watch a documentary about Europe's "Dark Ages" (do not....I repeat, do not!.... look up "the bloody eagle" unless you want to be completely horrified. How anyone made it out of the middle ages alive is beyond me. If it wasn't plague, it was pillaging tribes and rape-happy knights). I don't know why a history documentary would bring this home to me, especially since the narrator was in the middle of detailing Clovis's more loathsome personality traits. I've learned not to question my brain too closely sometimes. It just shuts up like a tupperware or starts muttering gibberish.

Anyway. I think you're all up on the important things:

1. New job, new town. All going spectacular so far. I think there have been two murders, a suicide threat standoff, several major car accidents, a handful of asaults and a body in the marina. All within the last two weeks. And this is the slow season, according to a police lieutenant I talked to.

2. I have two cats. Yes, two. I'm not a crazy cat lady and have no plans of ever becoming one. It's stressful enough to have two animals relying on me. I don't want any more. They are pretty adorable though and like to push each other off the couch and then the aggressor will go up and lick the fallen kitten's face like "Oh, whoops, I didn't even see you were sitting up there. Sorry to bump into you like that. Clumsy me." At which point the kitten boxes the other kitten in the face and they tear around the apartment screaming obscenities for about five minutes before deciding to find me and turn me into their personal nap pillow.

3. I'm still in love with Astoria and will probably move back in about twenty years to retire and die. I miss the river being in my front yard. I miss the ocean being a short car ride away. I even miss that stupid stupid wind.

4. However, I don't miss the howling lack of purpose I felt after I quit the paper but continued to live in Astoria. I'm realizing now what a big identity crisis that was. It was a good thing for me to go through but I'm grateful it only lasted nine months. And really those nine months were pretty fantastic and I had a lot of fun and got some short story writing off my chest and spent a lot of time outdoors and with friends especially Marta and M.

5. That's all.

Maybe I'll see you around on the internet world. If not, give me a call and I'll lock the cats in the bedroom so you can come over and drink tea with me in peace and quiet.

 

new town

Oh not much happened this week except I moved to a new town and will be starting a new newspaper job tomorrow. That's all. M and I moved the bulk of my junk down on Saturday and then I moved with the cats and sundry other stuffs yesterday evening after multiple goodbye coffee dates with Astoria friends. Within the first five minutes of arriving at my new home, I'd locked myself out of the apartment. One cat was yowling from the kitchen, the other cat was yowling out in the car and I had to ask my downstairs neighbor's eldest son to call the landlord for me. Meanwhile, two great danes across the street casually started humping each other.

My landlord arrived 15 minutes later and unlocked the apartment. Half an hour later, one of the cats had squirmed through an impossibly small space of open window and was prowling the roof, meowing and carrying on.

What next? Oh yes and then spiders appeared everywhere and I committed a terrifying number of murders.  Then the cats started fighting while I was trying to fall asleep on my mattress on the floor and I was so overheated from pre-summer weird weather, stressed from the moving and packing and strange smells of strange new places, and ever oh so homesick that I stayed up until midnight unpacking and organizing my books because that always makes me feel better.

Then this morning I woke up and I was till in this new town and I don't think I get to go back to Astoria yet and that was vaguely depressing but I'll deal.

Meanwhile, I'm going to spend this evening unpacking my clothes and psyching myself up about the job.

2 gatos

Marta's sister and niece and nephew slept in the living room. So I had to closet the cats with me lest they prowl and fight all night and keep everyone awake. I wasn't expecting to sleep at all, but the instant I laid myself down, I had two passed out cats with me: Oscar curled up like a gentleman next to my face (as opposed to ON my face... a typical Bruno move) and Bruno, twisted into a pretzel in the cubbyhole made by my bent knees.

Of course, they were yowling and leaping and scrapping at 4:30, but I got more sleep than expected. And then, after breakfast at 5 (when I'd given up on sleeping any longer into the morning), Oscar crashed next to my legs and Bruno kind of collapsed into a disheveled cat pile on top of my back. Must be something in the water.

I'm pretty proud of both of them. They haven't destroyed the apartment yet and Oscar even let himself be manhandled for hours by a four-year-old girl who just wanted to hug him and squeeeeeeeze him forever. 

beat goes on

The problem with house-hunting is that you see all these beautiful houses with spacious green yards and gazebos and ponies and you start to wonder why the people who live there are so selfish. Why haven't they built a mother-in-law cottage and why aren't they renting it out for... say... $300 a month with access to all the ponies ALL THE TIME? And then you go to the places that are advertised and within your price range and not only are the neighbors probably cooking meth but there isn't a door to the bathroom... in fact, there isn't even a wall separating the bathroom from the bedroom. Maybe you can hang up a curtain between them? Meanwhile, the heaters will likely explode in the winter and the landlord is hassling you about owning a cat. Because one little 9 lb kitten will bring this whole place down, decrease the property value and probably destroy every carpet everywhere, even carpets that have not yet been born. Evil kitten.

(While typing that paragraph I got a call back from a guy about an apartment. Yayz)

House hunting is a soul-less activity

8:15 a.m. - Left Astoria

9:30 a.m. - Reached St. Helens. Drove through "Old Towne." Didn't look that old. Lots of Klassy Korner type shops, or Olde Tyme Antiques. Aren't there enough yet? Are the gods still not satisfied? "BUILD US ANTIQUE STORES, UNWORTHY MORTAL."

9:50 a.m. - Ill-advised turn onto country road.

10:00 a.m. - Lots of driving.

 10:45 a.m. - Lots more driving. Logging lands? Vernonia? OK, not quite yet.

10:46 a.m. - The road lost its center line, dropping all pretense of being a legitimate highway that could possibly lead to the house I was supposed to look at at 10 a.m. "No Trespassing" signs abound. Clearly everyone is cooking meth. One yard has a million year stash of discarded/stolen traffic control signs including a fully operational, though moss-covered, stoplight.

11 a.m. - Back in civilization. Futile, prolonged search for apartment.

11:10 a.m. - Drawn by huge orange and yellow banners proclaiming "APARTMENTS FOR RENT!" and "YOU'RE ALREADY HOME!", I pulled into one complex to inquire. Turned out there's nothing to rent. Deception hurts.

 11:54 a.m. - Now. In a Starbucks drinking rather low grade coffee served to me by a woman who called me "honey" -- usually wins me over right away. Didn't in this case.

11:55 a.m. - People really need to stop pretending that spandex leggings are pants.

 11:57 a.m. - Striving for a more positive attitude.

  (image courtesy of the National Archive or something)

monday morning is a restless feeling

I slept 12 hours last night and feel... not so great actually. My hip gave an almighty POP when I got up to feed the cat (he'd been sobbing like an abandoned child outside the bedroom door for 20 minutes or so. He probably thought I'd died and believed that now no one would feed him since Marta works so much and then he too would die, alone, in his cat-climby-structure while the crows mocked him from the telephone wires). Michal said he slept 5 hours last night and feels fantastic (albeit, at work for the next millions of hours for the next millions of days until he gets to lounge around in San Diego for a brewers convention... which I think sounds like work but really means he gets to lay around in the sun, drinking beer and talking shop with other brewers who are also lying in the sun and drinking beer and using words like "hoppy" and "aroma" and "craft beer". Snobs.) It's a busy week this week. I have a couple of job interviews (one, for a job I've already been offered but ever since my last newspaper stint -- a job I accepted outright and never had an interview for -- I've been nervous about blithely accepting job offers. So I'm being troublesome and insisting we all sit down in person and discuss the job first.) and a lot of work at the current jobs. Probably my 12 hours of sleep will be put to good use in the next couple of days. I'll keep everyone (by which I mean the two ((possibly 3)) readers of this blog: my mom and Amy) posted. I might be moving. (I hate moving). Today's fun fact: I was re-reading the diary I kept when I was 9 and apparently I couldn't spell. There were a lot of "Write now we are eating supper" entries and at least one where, in a fit of sisterly hate, I wrote "I have had onoff of Laura!"

2 in 1 day?

This is just to tell the world that I'm going to the grocery store to buy chocolate chips so I can make cookies and that I might go to the movie store and rent "Amelie" although it would be better to just cowboy up and watch "The Business of Being Born" because I already have that one rented out. I'm just really scared that some of the opening sequences will be of a live birth and that doesn't feel like something I want to include in my evening.

I also plan to listen to the dirty rap music mated with Tom Waits that I started listening to this morning. It is fantastic. It is wonderful. It is the only reason I get out of bed most mornings (and because Bruno usually lands with a thud on my chest and peers intently and creepily at my face until I can't ignore him any longer. Also, sometimes my alarm goes off at the right time and I wake up because of noise... from the alarm.)

Anyway, that's all.

against childhood

When established older writers get all cranky about kids who are self-publishing novels (a new trend, I hear), I remember when my younger brothers were allowed to see movies that, up until then, only L. and I had been able to watch because we were older (not because, as we assumed and argued, we alone deserved to watch them). I felt disinherited and debated like a member of Parliament arguing for continued colonial presence in angry foreign countries. So, in a similar pattern, the adult writers go on and on about how true publishing (through a publishing house, with agents and editors and titles you don't like or want slapped on your book) is a trial by fire, a study in adversity and perseverance, and you come out refined and burnished like gold. Which is why these traditionally published authors are such noble wonderful people. Self-publishing, especially by dewy and innocent children (has no one read "Lord of the Flies" recently or visited a school playground?), misses the point and is only for the lazy, the passive aggressive and the unsuccessful. Or something. I think the traditionally published authors are just jealous and don't want these upstarts mucking around "where they don't belong" so they do the older sibling thing and try to invalidate whatever the younger sibling is doing and hold tight to what they see as their exclusive domain.

You could argue (and the established authors do) that a kid hasn't done the sort of living you need to do to write a truly good book. Therefore what they write shouldn't be published. The characters and stories will likely be one-dimensional spin-offs with lots of cliches. Good thing that never happens in books written by adults and published through publishing houses. Only quality is allowed there.

Age-discrimination is making me angry apparently today.

And related: The lady who wrote "Tuck Everlasting" argues against talking down to children and writing insipid books for children. Children become people early in life, she said in an interview on NPR. We're always asking children what they want to be when they grow up, she said. We should ask them who they are right now.

I was reading a satirical article about writing the great American novel and the writer was begging future authors to stop writing children's books if they themselves are no longer children.

"You can follow them around and put their clothes on and roll around with their Transformers and I’m still pretty sure there’s just no way you’ll even begin to comprehend what it’s like to be a kid," he writes.

baybee owls

It's my day off! Both my jobs have started hiring people to help us cope with the uptick in business spring and summer always bring and this means fewer shifts for Katie. Good thing? Sort of. Once I recoop from taxes, it will be. Meanwhile I'm trying to stay positive and stay close to home and not spend money for a while. I completed a massive grocery trip yesterday (necessary money spenditure) and have organized my pantry to be more "cook-at-home" friendly. The decision to live a mostly vegan/vegetarian life has been fantastic for my cooking... "my cooking" not really being a phrase I ever used until recently since "my cooking" usually meant sauteed vegetables and rice or scrambled eggs & toast (if I was feeling fancy). Now, though, all the restrictions of a V diet have had the bizarre effect of catapulting me full into culinary domesticity after years of resistance to and dislike of.

One day at a time, I'm banishing my crippling fear of potlucks. Hooray!

Today I made two vegan ice creams, a chocolate and a vanilla banana, and they're going to be fantastic. I hope. In about 45 minutes, I will start on a vegan Indian feast of creamy curry & assorted other spices soup and traditional flat bread for M. because this is what we do: cook stuff and make each other (and other people) partake. It's a very satisfying activity and as long as I do most of it in the late afternoon Bruno doesn't bother me. His prime cat-nap times are between noon and 5 and he curls up in the bowl chair and glares at me sleepily if I disturb him. If I try to make anything in the morning, he's all over the kitchen, gnawing on my ankles and trying to jump up on the stove top.

But that's not why I'm online right now. I really am writing to share THIS with you. Read it. Love it. I stole it from Tiffany's blog and have already made one of the pictures my desktop background.

lost and found (or bought)

The hard drive in my old computer gasped its last wheezing breath and collapsed in the hallway (actually it was a coffee shop) and died. It took all my writing and photography with it. After a couple days of mourning ("It's not like someone died," M said and I kind of wanted to punch him in the nose) and a lot of self-abuse (what WOULD have been so difficult about backing up my files? REALLY?), I borrowed time on a friend's computer and ordered a MacBook Pro. It arrived today while I was sitting at my dining room table and using my fork to keep the cat away from my Thai food.

So yay.

Meanwhile, there's a girl sitting across the room from me who looks just like the mom in "Mary Poppins"... you know, votes for women! Sister suffragette! Shoulder and shoulder into the fray! JUST LIKE HER. It's all in the nose, I think, and the large but closely set together eyes.

---

I'm ready for winter to be over. Really really ready. I get so sad at night because I'm cold and it's dark and it feels like it will never end and then it starts to hail and I feel like elk turds, talentless, stinky (but I'm taking a shower tonight, so I'll only feel talentless).

---

Dum de dum de dum. Oh! If you haven't listened to the Carolina Chocolate Drops yet, you should, because they are fantastic.

---

Joel and Mom visited me yesterday and the weather was terrible but the afternoon spent with them was wonderful. Then I went over to M.'s house for Spencer's famous lasagna and was the last man (or woman, I guess) standing, watching a movie while the rest of them collapsed into snoring baby angel lasagana-fed heaps on various couches. Food and the male constitution... naps are always imminent.

---

Work tonight. Meh. Work tomorrow. Eh.

a semi-comprehensive update with bolded text

At Toby's wedding in January, Adam A. pointed out to me that I am no longer a journalist and (despite how obvious this should have been seeing as *I* quit the newspaper job over four months ago and haven't been living in amnesiac confusion in the woods since September) I felt an electric shock shoot through... my liver? Not a journalist? How could I not be a journalist? The answer, of course, being that one stops being a journalist when one is no longer doing any sort of journalistic work. "Journalist" is not a personality type or a hair color or an ethnic identity. Huh.

---

Listening to: a lot of "Barton Hollow" by The Civil Wars. Exquisite harmonies make me cry in public. It gets very awkward. Last night, listening to NPR on the drive to M's house, they played a segment from a female composer's voice project and it made me gasp. What I learned in the CCC music program was that we respond so strongly to stringed instruments because they remind us of the human voice. The segment NPR played had a woman's voice falling almost dissonant over very low male voices and then bleeding effortlessly into a violin solo. It was lovely.

Reading: "Beasts of No Nation" by Uzodinma Iweala. About a boy in a West African nation who is pressed into child soldiery. I don't even know how to describe it yet. I had to fall asleep for a while after reading the first couple of chapters. It's like my mind and soul couldn't handle it. It's too terrifying and rending. It probably didn't help that I was going over my old domestic violence newspaper stories to include in the writer residency application. All I could think of was pain and how right in the moment I'm reading about it, there are child soldiers out there sleeping or dying or eating or peeing or being born.

Thinking: About how the Bible says to do all things for the glory of God. I kind of wonder if God says that because he knows it's going to be consuming enough and wearying enough to find out just how to live a decent life in the short time we're given. We're not all going to be Bible scholars and most of the time we're going to be desperately trying to survive. However, if we give everything to God in the first place it kind of takes care of setting aside extra extra time to God. All time is God's, or something. We don't have to tack it on in addition to all the other stuff we need to get around to doing. Is that heretical? It made better sense in my mind.

Writing: Still working on the residency application. It needs to be finished soon. I'm sending the bulk of it off to Tiffany today for editing (THANK YOU, MY DEAR) and hopefully M. will take a look at it tonight and maybe you, Dad/Mumsy? Except, as my parents your job is to tell me it's perfect so that I can stretch like a cat and take a nap.

Oh Yeah and I Also Read: "Harriet the Spy" which I think might be my favorite book of all time (or close to it). I identify with Harriet in many ways. The constant note-taking. The story-telling. The sacredness of privacy: NOBODY BETTER TRY TO READ MY NOTEBOOKS. The sneaking around into people's lives... although I never went into houses. Clarke told me once it was cold and scientific how I would fall suddenly silent and watch people. I think I believe I'm invisible and I do love to observe.

Eating: Mostly vegan and vegetarian and feeling fantastic about it. I prepared a fully vegan dinner last week and it came out so good and now my cooking confidence has been boosted about a million points. I'm making a vegan butternut squash & tomato soup tomorrow.

Planning: A trip out of town with M. to visit friends up and down Oregon next week and hopefully seeing the fam-fam at some point. We're going to Coos Bay and then Eugene. Oh man oh man, Eugene! I haven't been back in almost a year. I can't believe it. I'm way overdue for some Kari Spohn and Diana Glasser time plus the other dozen or so people I miss so much who still live there. Plus I need to wander through the university and feel nostalgic about ye old collegiate days of scholarship and camaraderie. Or something.

musing

A coffee shop regular was telling me about how humans are the only animals that (conceivably) sit around wondering about things. He said the word "wonder" comes from a Latin word that means something like "mirror" or "reflection." I didn't check any of this but I like the idea. We wonder and that sounds kind of aimless but really wondering is an action: a self reflecting self. Self reflection is an odd concept. We use props to self-reflect: experiences, memories, other people, places. People use the ocean. They sit on rocks and stare and reflect. Music helps. Things recall other things and we aren't necessarily moving but our brain is leaping and whatever it is that is our soul is also doing something.

Anyway. I'm working on my application for the writer residency in Nevada and reflecting on how events come in threes: A cop was shot last night at a motel just down from M's house and, this morning, a man was hit by a car downtown and died. Across the river, several days ago, M. was saying, a man picked up a hatchet and slaughtered his sons.

Tiffany and I talked last night about how discouraging a writing career can be. Most of the time we sit around wondering if we're crazy. Turns out writing means you just have to keep writing no matter how much time it feels like you're wasting. Stephen King said you write and write and sometimes you accomplish something but you don't always realize it and if you do realize it, you probably have no idea how you did it. So every day is starting over anew, maybe.

Now I'm going to work.

grumpy bad mood face plant

When I'm in a bad mood my first thought is always about how much I don't want to go to work.

Followed quickly by a snap judgment of someone I don't know. For example: a woman who clomped by me a minute ago wearing high heels. She is walking like she's wearing high heels (spine at a balancing angle, sending bottom skyward and arms forward to dangle like vines without a wall to climb). No chin and her face looks like it hurts... kind of like how portraits of George Washington's face make it seem like his face should hurt just because it's his face.

So I'm sitting behind my computer thinking: Women should practice wearing shoes at home before they try to hike around town in them. Yeah, that's right, boo and etc.

Completely pointless to sit and think this. Who cares? Why do I care? Why all the sudden hostility (which I just tried to spell as "histility" which just goes to show you... something or other). I also have suddenly realized my earbuds are in my ears and I'm not listening to anything. Probably I should be judging myself.

So anywayzzzz.

I'm tempted to take up Nina on her offer to cover my Friday shift. I feel brainless and behind. There are about a million people I need to call back but haven't because of my bizarre work schedule this week and I've forgotten to recharge my phone. There's so much writing I've been holding back and the Alcohol Server test I need to take sometime before the end of tomorrow and an apartment to clean and an application for GREAT BASIN NATIONAL PARK to fill out.

Yesterday, on my coffeehouse shift, I poured coffee into a cup for Stephen-from-the-County and I told him about Great Basin National Park (now: GBNP, for convenience and laziness) and he was like, "Oh yeah, Lehman Caves, bam, this mountain that's there, bam, off that highway, bam, BAM!" So yeah, he knows of it apparently. First person so far.

It's in Nevada. In the wilderness. I'm trying to live there for a month this year. I looked at the past recipients of this arts residency I'm applying for and they were all people in their latter days who paint mountains in garish colors and do things with stained glass so I think I'll be a novelty: young, writer, female. Also, I want to make my time there really work for the park, bring in the journalism a bit, give them all sorts of free marketing labor. I'm crafting an IDEA and I think it's awesome. Hopefully they do too otherwise I need a new plan.

One of my favorite songs is playing: "Down in the Valley" by... wait it'll come to me... The Head and The Heart. It makes me think of last spring/summer... mostly of a trip Spencer, M., Sasha and I took down to Newport and I discovered the Good Parts of Newport, about two streets worth: the Irish public house (at which real Irish people work) and the progressive bakery with amazing breakfast sandwiches and people who look like they spend a lot of time thinking about moving to places like Portland.

Ok. I have to go to work soon. Some quick thoughts to jolt me into positive thinking so I don't age prematurely (I've been worried about this recently. Ridiculous. Or is it?):

- baking tomorrow morning! (I love my bake shifts with all my heart heart heart)
- maybe going to Portland on Saturday (brothers! parents! friends! SOPHIE!!!!)
- maybe staying here on Saturday but going hiking with M (exercise! outdoors! vistas! beer!)
- Sunday (God! piano playing! naps!)
- Martha comes home tomorrow (home-making! Marta hugs! Marta kisses!)
- tonight (movie night with Spencer! "Fivel Goes West"! We've already watched "The Prince of Egypt" and "Milo & Otis" and we usually sip on whiskey and relive our childhoods and it's amazing)

in brief

It's hard to figure out right now where my recent encounter with food poisoning begins and where an even more recent move to vegetarianism coupled with not enough sleep begins in terms of how my tummy and head have been feeling the past couple weeks. At least I haven't gone full vegan, like M., and can still eat yogurt. That usually sorts me out. Or maybe I'm fighting a bug. I don't know. It's all very irritating. Anyway, I want it to go away because the weather is beautiful and I want to be out in it. All weekend I was out in it with a friend's dog and M.'s backpacking pack. Glorious. For a minute there, on the beach, after a climb up a sand dune, I was sweating. Sweat! I can't even remember the last time that happened outside of a sauna. I can't remember the last time that happened OUTSIDE.

#255: there's many a man has more hair than wit

I was a banged child and I hated it. Childhood is only nice and pleasant and tender for a brief time and then it tends to turn oily, pimpled and full of despair. One minute you're a raging, jubilant five year old tearing around the yard and pretending you're God, or something, then you hit 12 and if you're a girl life starts to go horribly wrong. It doesn't always begin with the monthly cycle. At least not for me. There was a point where I became aware of myself as inhabiting a distinct body and instead of this realization carrying wonder and joy (as it should have), it brought only confusion, discontent and fear. Bangs -- and a weird cow-lick that flipped these bangs up and out at an awkward angle -- didn't help.

I very distinctly remember an afternoon at church camp, my dad looking down at me and my face likely a picture of anguish. It was a scene straight from "A Christmas Story" when the boy comes downstairs wearing pink rabbit pajamas his aunt made for him and which his mother has commanded him to try on.

"Do you like having bangs?" my dad asked slowly.

I shook my head.

"Do you want to pull your bangs back and grow them out?"

I nodded emphatically, not daring to look my mom in the eyes. She was the one who cut the bangs after all and I didn't know where her loyalties might fall.

I don't remember any other details of that day or why my dad even noticed my bangs, but I do know that not until I cut them myself several years later did I ever have to have bangs again.

This is all to say that two days ago, I cut some bangs. Mistake. My hair is curlier now and if bangs didn't work when I was a child, why should they work now? I look like Cher from "Moonstruck" but without the cheekbones and the big eyes -- squinty Wilson/Blake eyes forever! Fortunately, I'm mature now and don't care about my looks or compare myself with other, better-looking women. Right? Right.

coffee, that evil desert berry

Oh coffee coffee, you good friend to me. I'm going to make resolutions for the year this week. Giving up coffee or lessening my intake of coffee will not be on that list and reading an NPR article about coffee which was reposted by the lovely Tiffany S. has bolstered me up in my decision. After all, coffee makes me happy, makes me write, makes me sit still then spring into action (rubber-band style). Coffee quickens my senses and shortens the amount of breathing I need to do between talking. Coffee makes me think about all the good things about Communism.

That's right.

You can't deny it: Communism brought people together -- yes, a lot of bloodthirsty, over-thinking, hyperbole-dealing young geeks, but still, people. Doris Lessing!

So anyway. The coffee article quotes Stewart Allen, author of The Devil's Cup: Coffee, the Driving Force in History, and talks about how coffee has, historically, been trouble, been banned, and been at the center of political action. The dark little coffee shop seething with intellectuals? Not made up.

Saith the article:

"According to one story, an Ottoman Grand Vizier secretly visited a coffeehouse in Istanbul.

'He observed that the people drinking alcohol would just get drunk and sing and be jolly, whereas the people drinking coffee remained sober and plotted against the government,' says Allen."

Yay for thinkers and talkers and the young revolutionaries. Later we can boo them when they destroy countries and wipe out people groups. But, as I drink an Americano and observe a small child walking through the door wearing animal print feetie pajamas with brown cowboy boots, I will toast those who are not yet stagnant, who will not suffer corruption, injustice or stupidity to remain. So maybe not Communism, but you get what I'm saying, right? Maybe? Mostly, I just want more people to read the coffee article.

snow day

This happened today. It also happened last year. Kind of. There was less snow then. Same amount of cold, though. Actually this didn't happen at all last year. This is ridiculous and beautiful and unique to 2012.

day at the beach

A stranger has come
to share my room in the house not right in the head,
a girl as mad as birds

Bolting the night of the door with her arm her plume.
Strait in the mazed bed
she deludes the heaven-proof house with entering clouds

Yet she deludes with walking the nightmarish room,
at large as the dead,
or rides the imagined oceans of the male wards.

She has come possessed
who admits the delusive light through the bouncing walls,
possessed by the skies

She sleeps in the narrow trough yet she walks the dust
yet raves at her will
on the madhouse boards worn thin by my walking tears

And taken by the light in her arms at long and dear last
I may without fail
suffer the first vision that set fire to the stars

- Dylan Thomas

On a walk last night under an impossibly dark sky (the kind you would be tempted to call velvet) and with an impossibly bright moon, and a lacework of clouds, thin and flying on a high, fast wind, I thought how we are built on histories and poets that will disappear. Herodotus still means something to us, also Edna St. Vincent Millay, but give them another handful of hundred years, and who will read them? They'll be such ancient history, they'll be lucky for a one-line mention. Once a foundation, now so far below the earth. Everyday more people are writing books and telling stories based on a line of thinking whose beginning is dead even in academic memory.

home-hunting

So far so good:

Drove M. to work and thus was awake to see the sunrise -- scarlet, marbled with purple clouds. Those sailors better take warning. Then I bought newspapers (goat sacrifices may be making a comeback), stopped by the coffee shop, grabbed my paycheck and finally (FINALLY) got a copy of the shop key. Now a moment to read my brother's blog. He's amazing. Next up, house-hunting with Marta so we can be sisters forever (at least through the summer), pay less in rent and have Olivia The Dog and Bruno The Cat with us too. We have grand visions of making coffee together every morning and sending each other off to work with a kiss on the cheek and a "Have a good day, honey," then coming home at night and, I don't know, knitting.

In the meantime, no, Dad, I don't have Hodgkin's Lymphoma nor do I have, as M. suggested, an explosive cyst or as Mel wondered, heart disease. (Good to know everyone's staying positive, though). It was just a super sore throat and swollen lymph node and it's going away as of yesterday afternoon. I think my body was fighting something and it won.

Super easy week (I hope) ahead of me but probably not. I think this every week after all.