small stories from another minor life. |  "Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight." - Tom Stoppard | This is where all my flotsam goes, |
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JULY. 6/30/00 - Anniversary of the Tunguska explosion. Mum's birthday. International personal crisis day (or maybe that's just me). i did not think it was humanly possible to be this busy. did i say i wasn't going to grad school? the hell with it--go ahead, get me out of here, cloister me with the books and my studies for the next eight years, make me a scholastic anchorite. is it possible to be a professional reader? a professional traveler? a professional dilettante? i will be all of the above. i will see every major city in the world. i will sleep late every morning, and stay out late every night. i will go back to working in bookstores. i will go someplace where i don't have to be a millionaire to afford rent and groceries both each month. i will go drinking and dancing. i will go insane. piglet is at CTY. O, happy envy. i hope you are having the best year ever, little pig. i miss that place. finally, one of my photos, available for public viewing here. it's my brother ducks and his car. what makes it interesting? why, my breathtakingly original visual sensibility, of course, and the black and white film. everything's art in black and white, right? i am a deeply mediocre photographer. i am deeply mediocre at a lot of things. but i'm persistent. 6/26/00 - "I usually dream about rats and death and suicide." - Alicia i am to-day full of strange insecurities and sadnesses at inexplicable intervals. i have a lot of work to do, a lot of projects, and i find it hard to focus. i'm spending too much time having unfriendly conversations with myself, and reading: Graham Joyce's Requiem, to-day. it adds to the feelings of strangeness. alicia and katie are in town, and we ran around all weekend. it's been six years since last i saw katie, or spoke to her, and it was unnatural how ordinary everything seemed: on seeing her, i only thought, yes, that's katie, and then it was like no time gone at all. we went to Pride 2000 yesterday morning, crowded against the Market Street barricades with all the rest of San Francisco in the morning cold. in the afternoon, back at my house, alicia fell asleep on the couch, and katie and i talked a long time in the kitchen, and it was good and pleasant and comfortable. alicia and katie are two of the very few people in this world who fully understand my neuroses. maybe it was something in the KLHT water. i have a new boss to-day. he is bluff and hearty and pink, and the sort of man who makes irritating sincere-listening noises when you're speaking to him. i have no real opinion yet. best song for singing along, loudly and with feeling, at 6 a.m. in the dark kitchen while making breakfast: "you sang to me," by marc anthony. (pop music is everybody's secret vice. in a shoe store with an anonymous friend, an n'sync song comes over the speakers. anonymous friend leans over to me and whispers, "you know, i like this song." then, defensively, "it's catchy!") 6/23/00 - wednesday was a dismal day, the kind of day when i just dissolve into a puddle of anger and self-pity and homesickness and strange psychoses at the drop of a . . . well, something really minor and frequently-dropped. but it's over, and yesterday was busy busy busy at the office and a long hard run in the fog in the evening and much better overall, and to-day got off to an auspicious start on two counts: first of all, i accidentally gave the cat a bowlful of gin instead of water this morning, and second of all, on the crowded subway ride to work, i told annie a long involved story about my underwear, before realizing (from the raised eyebrows of the people standing pressed around us) that we were of course being overheard. i can only hope they were all thoroughly entertained. it was not a terrifically interesting story, except that it involved my underwear. annie and i are underway with Newest Unlikely Project crankygirls.com, very exciting. we wheedled free graphic design services from beloved friend emma, and free web design services from beloved brother ducks, and now we just need to write some articles. soon . . . . songs for rotten days: anything by the smiths, but especially "there is a light that never goes out" or "girlfriend in a coma". to-day i am thinking about unrequited love. 6/21/00 - the summer solstice. the day i lose my temper. 6/20/00 - anniversary of the Tennis Court Oath. word of the day: schism. objects found last night at the bottom of my handbag: three pale blue marbles. a strange key. a handful of coins from countries i have never seen. 6/19/00 - please remember, pedestrians have the right of way. san francisco drivers are the worst in the world. annie and i talked friday night about John Cage and Sol LeWitt and conceptual art. it occurs to me that i sometimes lead a rather conceptual life. does this make me some kind of genius? an official marathon training session on saturday, with the rest of the team, and a real team doctor. goody. we heard many gruesome anecdotes about the miserable things that are going to happen to us between now and our respective races. my personal favorite was the part where our toenails fall off. mmmm. i am also now awfully sunburnt, but only on my shoulders, mysteriously. sometimes i wish it were possible to run forever and ever. the next person who tries to tell me how brilliant they thought the Harry Potter books are will be bitten. don't say i didn't warn you. theme song for to-day: "Superfreak" I don't recall having asked your opinion anyway. 6/16/00 - "The Americans, who are the most efficient people on the earth, have carried [cliche] to such a height of perfection and have invented so wide a range of pithy and hackneyed phrases that they can carry on an amusing and animated conversation without giving a moment's reflection to what they are saying and so leave their minds free to consider the more important matters of big business and fornication." - W. Somerset Maugham the game i played when i was little: lying in bed at night, pick a word--best are monosyllabic words, no diphthongs, words like "stop" and "gum" and "marsh"--and say it aloud over and over again very fast until it stops being a word and becomes just a sound. use a word too often and you empty it out. i seem to have misplaced another library book. that makes three. who said libraries were a cheap habit? my secret shame: i, too, am a dave eggers groupie. best recent book for a rainy day, such as is to-day: Seamus Heaney's new translation of Beowulf best authors for those of use who are not going to grad school, but are still obsessed by academia: A. S. Byatt, David Lodge, and Robertson Davies still the Holy Trinity, on rainy days and otherwise: Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald i don't tell you because i love you. i tell you because i'm bossy. 6/15/00 - mooning about. enough already. erika and stenny leave in a few days for alaska. i am itchy with envy, but i can't afford the time off now if i'm to go to ireland in august. which i am. i am trying to post some of my own photography on the site. the attempt has been complicated by my current lack of scanner or access thereto. efforts to upload photos telepathically have thus far proved fruitless. best writers for a misanthropic day: Saki and Dorothy Parker, kahnyeshna. i'm not officially Bookstore Girl anymore, but i still know what you should read. love is: raspberry jam, sleeping with the windows open, gregoire colin, red poppies, olives, tilda swinton, ice hockey, connie willis, making lists. my life is not nearly as fun as a soda commercial. 6/14/00 - Flag Day. St. Basil's Day. suffering from feelings of artistic inadequacy, and chapped lips. partly the fault of the imaginary boy. mostly my own fault. (the artistic inadequacy, not the chapped lips--those are nobody's fault.) inadequacy is a big theme lately: artistic, intellectual, and personal. best not to talk about it; it feeds itself when i do. the last time i was having trouble writing, i asked toto what to do. she said she didn't know anything about writing. i said, all i need is something to write about. she thought, and then she said, how about fish? so that is what i do now, when i am at a loss. how about fish? here is a story about fish: on our first real day here, our first full day in California, mum & i took BART across the Bay from our Oakland hotel to San Francisco. twelve hours later, sunburnt and burdened with packages, we took BART back. we got off at the Oakland Coliseum to catch the shuttle to our hotel; the Raiders-49ers game had been played that night, and aboard the hotel shuttle with us was a fat red-haired woman and her nine-year-old son, a tousle-headed kid in a 49ers sweatshirt. mum asked if they'd been at the game; they had. it was the boy's birthday. he was crazy for steve young; his mother had got the tickets and come up with him from Fresno as an extravagant birthday gift. we smiled and wished him many happy returns, etc. then the red-haired woman asked what we'd been up to. mum said we'd taken BART into the City for the day. "what's BART?" asked the boy. "it's the train that runs under the Bay from here to San Francisco," his mother explained. he digested this. it was quiet for a few moments in the dark, largely empty shuttlebus, and then the boy turned a big-eyed face to mum & me. "did you see the fish?" he whispered. it took a moment before we understood, and then mum explained about the tunnel and the waterless dark, and the boy grew awkward and aloof with embarrassment. i tried to explain about how fast the train goes, and how far underground, so that your ears pop with all the weight of the Bay above you, but it didn't make up for his disappointment. O, for a train that traveled under the Bay, trailing a furious wake of bubbles, and startling the bejesus out of the fish that tumble by. it is ninety degrees in the City to-day, and everything feels soft and dazey and unreal. [editor's later note: it is, in point of fact, 103 degrees in the city, if the newspaper is to be believed, and i just ran two miles along the waterfront. you should see me: i am red as a petunia.] 6/13/00 - the compulsion of a personal web page. i've stopped reading salon at the office, in favor of instead spending slavish hours making miniscule alterations to my web site--and as often as not, going back 15 minutes later to un-alter. (side note: william safire is now officially grouchy with those of us who use dashes--like these--instead of parentheses and things. i think william safire needs a nap.) i have seen two terrible movies lately. those of you who consider my opinion worth two figs will wish to avoid ridley scott's nauseating "gladiator" and catherine breillat's sullen and pretentious "romance." those of you who consider my opinion worth less even than one slightly moldy fig will certainly wish to run out and see both those films, i suppose. godspeed to you. i am in love with an imaginary boy again. how does this always happen to me? anyway it doesn't matter to-day, because to-day is a perfect san francisco day, and on my morning expedition to the post office, i walked along the embarcadero in the sun, in my new skirt and with my toenails painted red, and i watched the bay under the hazy bay bridge wrinkle and flex in the light, and it was a clean and good and warm day and everyone i saw was smiling, like in some crazy musical, and when i looked down at my red-painted toenails, i saw that the pavement i was walking on was the kind with little glittery bits in it, and that was all right and perfect, that even the sidewalk would be glittering on a day like to-day was. take that, imaginary boy! take that, dr. tessler and mononucleosis! take that, dumb office cubicle! days like to-day make me go all to happy mush. best snack to eat at your desk while reading salon and hiding from your work: apricots and bittersweet chocolate, bien sur! best song for being in love with imaginary people, or bad people, or for not being in love at all: "moses," by patty griffin, who is playing at slim's tomorrow night. best movie about making lists of best things: "high fidelity." a good movie for a number of reasons besides. now go play in the park. it's a beautiful day. 6/12/00 - to-day i am a hypochondriac. i'm convinced it's leukemia, but my doctor says it's still just mono. she was very mean and implied that i have taken less-than-adequate care of myself and will just never get better unless i get a lot less stupid. i opted not to tell her about the marathon. stupid is my middle name. also, despite all the fuss, the poems of billy collins are not all they're cracked up to be. go read instead one of graham joyce's creepy-sexy-funny-strange novels. or anything by louise gluck or seamus heaney. an unscientific study conducted this weekend proves that there really is no such thing as too many raisin scones. 6/10/00 - annie and i have registered a domain name! there's nothing there yet, but you can go there and bask in our pride of new ownership. and there WILL be something there soon, we promise. 6/05/00 - it has been pretty much exactly a year since i posted anything here. there are several very good reasons for this, which i can enumerate at length if you really give a damn, but frankly nobody likes a whiner so for now i'm keeping mum. i'm in san francisco, working for LVMH (where i spend entirely too much office time reading salon), rooming with clever annie, and writing horoscopes (!) freelance for a not-yet-launched teen science website. i'm not an astrologer, but i play one on the Web. in october, i will be running a marathon (!!) in D.C. to raise money for charity. feeling generous? drop me a line. or a sponsorship check. current whims: i am in love with w. somerset maugham, patty griffin, the films of claire denis, and this boy. and if you haven't yet already, go read the saskiad, for crying out loud. * * silence * * |
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