Archive for January, 2008

restaurant week and other matters of inconsequence

{ January 31, 2008 @ 12:12 am } · { Uncategorized }
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it’s restaurant week here in Metropolis. that’s the time that all waiters hate because their high-falutin’ restaurants welcome (the) hoi polloi (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoi_polloi for usage comments), which apparently means poor tips and crowds of customers who rank below these establishments’ usual standards. like me! (except i did tip up a bit.)

i picked the S A U T É E D  S K AT E  W I N G, with accompanying Blood Orange Grenobloise & Cauliflower from the prix fixe menu. i could not resist. really, the name was just pure poetry.

less so, the dish. said skate came breaded with slightly mushy interior, over an unidentifiable grainy mush studed with tiny florets. the mush was actually tasty – blood orange representing rather well, i must admit – though the texture little to my liking.

the experience was rescued by brown bread with a lot of good butter, a tasty chocolate concoction and a touch of very nice bleu chese on the dessert plate. and excellent company, which covers a multitude of evils.

in other news… anyone else think kylie minogue is underappreciated? maybe it’s the impending vacation, but i feel the world could use more mindlessly happy pop songs. or maybe i’m the only one with such a lack in my life. hm, maybe i should be going to ibiza or something instead. and whatever happened to george michael? in the days of yore (third grade or so) he was always good for light sentiments with peppy hooks… and even in the years of serious, soulful george there was still an aura of something comfortingly shallow and gratuitous. ahh, george.

soft edges

{ January 28, 2008 @ 11:43 pm } · { Uncategorized }
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work was heavy today. or the whole day was heavy.

it might have had something to do with the fact that my roommate & i started the day with the Wire’s 4th season final episode. a weird thing to do at 8am on a monday, but with my impending departure on the horizon, it was the only time we could both watch it. since we met and became friends in Bmore, and both experienced city life there, it’s become a fun and nostalgic netflix-enabled apartment tradition. don’t worry, i never spoil, but suffice it to say a few nails were bitten. the 4th season storyline arc didn’t seem to me to play out as smoothly as previous seasons – by that i mean it just didn’t seem like it was time for it to be over, and most of the many interweaving storylines seemed like they were only half-done. so it turned out to feel like a bit of a whirlwind wrap-up with all the requisite surprises. but it was in fine Wire form and did not disappoint.

then off to work…. it was strange, nothing unusual in terms of what i saw, or who, but it seemed to hit me harder than usual. being with people who are going slowly downhill in an infinite variety of ways is what i’ve been doing for the past three years.  i don’t usually find myself having trouble with work-life balance or basic coping with the vicissitudes of the job, but something about it felt closer, stronger, untenable today. the weight of watching something i can’t stop, of seeing people living in pain, having to do things that sometimes make them even more uncomfortable, of seeing their personalities and habits change in the course of just a few months, or see them stop being able to do things for themselves that they’ve always been able to do… there aren’t even words for all those losses.

there’s a window of time that i think has opened now – when i can write my schedule and know it’s not four more months, or years or weeks, but four more days, when there is a (temporary) end in sight, the edges of whatever is between me and this experience that makes me able to do my job start to get a little bit soft. it starts to let in something a little bit different… maybe some kind of anticipatory relief for a break, but help! it started too soon!

so it may be an interesting week.

getting rid of stuff i do not need

{ January 27, 2008 @ 1:49 pm } · { Uncategorized }
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and there’s a lot of it. as i write, i am looking at 6 bags of detritus from the closet, which are waiting for transport to the salvation army. most of it i haven’t worn in a year or more. then there’s the stack of papers… old credit card & bank statements i am supposed to save (i guess) in case i ever get audited or something… granted, i am not the most fiscally savvy person alive, but doubt that the IRS would find me very compelling as an auditee (nor could my tax mistakes be worth much). then again, i suppose it would be unpleasant to be caught with no proof that i am not involved in money-laundering or anything unsavory. but really, don’t you think there is some kind of electronic  record somewhere of my W-2s from 2003 and my tax return that the IRS could read? and at the credit card company, for that matter? do i REALLY need those paper copies?

but i digress. i do! i think i have relatively little STUFF but it still seems like way too much for one person. the only time i really realize the extent of my possessions is when i have to move them (this time, just to the basement to make way for a subletter). box after box of things i (mostly) use and (presumably) need. i remember back in the peace corps days, a friend of mine was telling me about a freewheeling expat type she’d run into who claimed that all his worldly possessions fit into one small trunk. i remember being vaguely envious at the time. since then, i’ve developed a bit more of an affinity for my stuff (or maybe just for not having to toss and then replace the exact same things every time i change address) and for the sense of continuity and security it brings to me.

yes, good or bad, it does bring me those things. i like having my riverside shakespeare, though i probably look into it only once or twice annually. it brings back fond memories of the long-gone english-major days, and there is just something about knowing i could have an annotated experience of any given play of the Bard’s at any given moment. i can’t seem to make myself get rid of old photos and correspondence – as unwieldy as it is. i keep some clothes that i only wear once or twice a year just because i like them. i parted with all but one bridesmaid dress this time around (garish, expensive things!) – the one i kept i thought i might get some mileage out of as a halloween costume one day.

it’s not pure pack-rattishness but more of a conserving bent, i think. what i keep is what i think will be useful or needed in the future. and i do tend to use the things i keep. though there’s no way of knowing what i might not have ever needed if i’d thrown it away, or what else i might have used if i’d saved it. and the fact is, i’ve rarely regretted getting rid of anything if i’ve even remembered its existence at all.

i’ve actually been looking forward to packing up and the accompanying possession-purging this time around. feels like a good time for shedding the old to make way for the new. a little physical and psychic spring-cleaning can never be a bad thing.

snowbird nearly freezes in poorly heated dressing room

{ January 20, 2008 @ 10:25 pm } · { Uncategorized }
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spent part of the day shopping.. resulting in:

*three tank tops

*three swimsuit tops

*two swimsuit bottoms

current outside temperature: 19 degrees fahrenheit. inside temp in target dressing room: 45. i am SO ready to head south. maybe i should just put a down payment on a trailer in florida right now. i would be so ahead of my time – by at least thirty years!

robot hamster

{ January 20, 2008 @ 12:20 am } · { Uncategorized }
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ran on a treadmill yesterday, as a resort from concrete and cooling temps. o treadmill, though you save me from shinsplints and cold-induced bronchial irritation, how i hate thee. let me count the ways!

picture: half an hour on a flat, moving rope, bobbing up and down at an unvarying pace, staring at my shadow while it flickers back and forth on a white-painted cement-block wall. meanwhile, a digital console feeds me unwanted, unnecessary, unavoidable information.

my pace is a 10-minute mile. my heart rate, after 25 minutes, is 179 beats per minute. i have burned 264 calories. i have run 2.5 miles. i don’t actually care. i feel like a robot hamster. but i can’t turn it off. so i watch it. mind-numbed, i watch the distance creep up by the hundredth of a mile.

i’m grateful to have a place to run inside, but i miss the park, with its smooth outdoor loop of track which, though unchanging, affords pretty, slow-shifting views. i miss the open meditative conduction of the outside air. there is no room in a low-ceilinged basement for the migration of memories, for the freeing forgetfulness of motion.

here’s hoping for a few more mild days before i leave… and summer runs to come.

the nature of the beast

{ January 13, 2008 @ 10:48 pm } · { Uncategorized }
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this whole blog medium bears more reflection, i think. i see it as something experimental at present… a new medium to explore.

as a sidenote on another medium – i have been rediscovering paper correspondence – actually writing real letters on real stationery, then putting stamps on them and dropping them in the mailbox. and then a few days later they’re delivered to someone i care about who is far away from me. they’re both communicative tools and physical artifacts of time and attention. it is incredibly gratifying – albeit in a totally nerdy way! – to rebel against the instant gratification and impersonalization of email. i’m not a real luddite since i actually like technology and what it can enable… but there is something sad to me about the fact that i don’t know what many of my friends’ handwriting looks like. it is a loss.

there’s something extremely personal about getting a letter on paper that someone dear to you actually selected, touched, breathed over, licked (the envelope, hopefully not the letter itself – but look out for suspicious smears in the ink just in case), and carried to the post office. but at the same time, the immediacy of electronic media, combined with the deceptively solitary face of a computer screen, sometimes pushes us into overly personal places we might not otherwise go. it softens the boundaries somehow, stretches time in funny ways. i write something when i’m by myself, then a moment later it becomes public, accessible at any other moment to a variety of readers known and unknown.

i remember a few years back an acquaintance was reflecting on the distinction between the personal and the private, and how over the past few years our culture has paved a “boulevard into the  private.” i thought his distinction was brilliant. unfortunately, it’s tiringly evident how right he was. witness: reality shows taking over tv, memoir taking over literature. and of course, the blog. and you-tube! now, finally, anyone anywhere can say anything they want and broadcast it in print or video to anyone else who has the least inclination to tune in.

it also feels a bit temporocentric – of all the eons and epochs of history, ours is the only one with this abundance of ways and means to record, publish, broadcast information. when we look backwards, we may be tempted to think that just because there’s less recorded, less was happening – and more importantly, that what was happening was less important. everyone else loses by default… world history overwhelmed by a cacophany of everyvoices.

so…. i write here to communicate, think, reflect, observe, express, and create – the same as when i write in my notebooks or journal or word files, save, possibly, the communication aspect. (the journal-writing in particular is an admittedly solipsistic literary form. though literary is rather a stretch, come to think of it.) whereas here, i also publish instantly to everyone, or possibly no one. an interesting tension - one i think i can live with.

heart and heaven

{ January 8, 2008 @ 11:33 pm } · { Uncategorized }
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tonight a meditation with Fellow Travellers:

i find thee enthroned in my heart, my lord Jesus,/it is enough./i know that thou are throned in heaven./my heart and heaven are one. (alistair maclean)

“my heart and heaven are one?”

i can definitely feel some unheavenliness, and therefore un-oneness according to alistair, in my heart. in fact, it’s pretty messy, dark, and disordered in there. sometimes well-intentioned, largely selfish. usually confused. often compassionate, occasionally downright mean. rebellious and contrite in equal parts. in short, very, very far from heaven.

but then, what would a heavenly arrangement look like? really, what’s the alternative? i remember reading a book in grade school, called something like “how to be a perfect person in just three days.” the kid in the book goes through several silly ordeals (like wearing broccoli tied around his neck) only to find out that all the “perfect” people do is sit around in a darkened room drinking weak tea. probably so they’ll never risk doing anything wrong again. NOT HEAVENLY!

my guess is that heavenly does not look like one of those sleek ikea demo rooms, with little cubbies (which look great as long as you have nothing much inside of them) and everything made of hollow metal and canvas and plastic and polyester batting and geometric designs and matching rugs and totally self-contained.

no… heavenly would be more like a big, bright open space, with a fireplace and a writing desk by a huge window and other old, usable furniture made of real things like wood and feathers and upholstery, everything unmatched but beautiful, clean but not fussy, and near friends.

the sunday-school point, i suppose, is that if Jesus is in the heart, the heart must be as perfectly tidy as heaven. the prettily subversive conclusion is that there is nothing more perfect than the heart, that my self-generated mess is as good as it gets, and Jesus is a handy holy-looking yet useless accoutrement. both obviously wrong - the first graceless; the second, hopeless.

what i am chewing on is the idea that somehow there is a way to actually live between the fallen and the pure - that pefection and imperfection are reconciled outside of time but coexist inside it – and yet there is a possibility, somewhere even in time, of this paradoxical unity. 

ticketing travails

{ January 7, 2008 @ 11:33 pm } · { Uncategorized }
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is it just me, or is the whole process of airline travel just getting worse and worse??

i finally booked my ticket this afternoon – nailed down the dates, ponied up the plastic, and thought i was on my way. it looked cheaper to go through the airline, but then they said that i had to trek out to the airport in order to pick up a paper ticket prior to the actual departure. with that in mind, booking through travelocity and paying $30 more didn’t seem like a bad deal for skipping a 3-hour roundtrip to the airport. sure enough, at the end of the process, there was a message telling me my etickets had been issued. voila!

mais non. a couple of hours later, i looked at my phone and found 3 missed calls from travelocity, telling me that there was a “problem” with my ticket. worse, i was on hold for at least 25 minutes before speaking to anyone, listening to an inane hold loop of conversation between a man and a woman who are discussing their travel arrangements made through travelocity. apparently they are not denizens of the age of technology, because they kept telling each other “no, you don’t have to call an agent, you can do (fill in the blank) on the website.” i guess it was aimed at all those people who pointlessly tie up all the agents answering questions like, “how do i find out my confirmation number?”

i tried to interject my own experiences into their conversation – let me tell you, i definitely would not be sitting here if i could do this online!! they paid no attention. and apparently they weren’t deterring their ilk from calling agents either, because all the agents were occupied for a very long time.

finally, someone in india picked up. “hello, my name is jaden,” &cetera. i had to spell my name with exemplar words. i was chastised for L as in larry. “M as in mary?” he asked? i repeated it. “lima,” he muttered. oops.

i sat there glowering. evidently jaden could hear it through the phone. he ventured some smalltalk while he was looking up the details. “how has been your day?”

no energy for anything but honesty. “well, it’s been a pretty long day,” i said. i’m sure i didn’t sound the least bit happy.

“i will make you happy,” my dashing prince of a travel agent volunteered.

i held my tongue. 

back on and off hold a few times, subjected to more of this tech-inept couple’s banter.

finally, jaden was back. he sounded triumphant. “i have sent the request to the department that is responsible, that is, the ticketing department. now you just have to wait for 3-4 more hours. i’ve done everything from my end, all you have to do is wait for the email.”

“i’m going to be in bed, asleep, in 3-4 hours. there’s no way i can follow up on this at 3am. is my ticket going to be booked or not?”

“let me reassure you, ma’am, i’ve done everything possible and all you have to do is wait for the confirmation.”

“i hope you’re right,” i said. always the pessimist in this relationship.

“oh i am, i certainly am, all you have to do is wait for the mail.” 

i hung up, still somewhat less than happy, after 43 minutes.

but now, here’s to beachdreams. i’ll wake up happy.

too much/not enough

{ January 4, 2008 @ 10:21 pm } · { Uncategorized }
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bought a central american guidebook tonight. browsing through nicaragua, honduras, guatemala, mexico..  and all i really want is a nice beach and a spanish school. i’ll admit to being a shameless snowbird in the making!! had pretty much settled on honduras, but now experiencing that last-minute chocolate-box phenomenon. too many lovely-looking things to choose from, and no way to tell which might be the dark chocolate caramel and which might be the strawberry marshmallow.

i’ve long thought that growing up in prairie country has given me some innate connection to the ocean. as contrary as that might sound, consider the commonalities: both are vast and windy, the horizon is always visible, the vista divided equally in two (sky/land and sky/water), both unchanging with continual minute alterations.

it is worth remembering that millenia ago, the prairie was covered with sea.

can land have memories? i think it’s possible, even likely — somewhere there in the earth’s unconscious. and mine, it seems.

a very good place to start

{ January 3, 2008 @ 4:49 am } · { Uncategorized }
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in the end, every story begins in the middle. 

this one starts in post-holiday turquoise blues and caribbean fancies, the dregs of vocational crisis, fledgling poems, hidden stories, pilgrimage, impending change both incremental and catastrophic, and plotting my flight from the chilly throes of Metropolis.

and all of this to be put down in a medium whose name recalls an under-bed monster or ectoplasmic goo.

 it is undoubtedly a very good place.