Words’ End

4:42pm: Molly and I leave a BU parking lot and head out to get her daughter Natalie from daycare, near their house. Normally this is a 25-30-minute drive.

5:20pm: traffic crawling the entire way there, both on Storrow Drive and on I-93. The sky’s been dark on and off for several hours, and thunderstorms were in the forecast, and at this point the clouds are black and boiling. We take opportunities to [photo|video]graph them off the freeway.

5:28pm: we’re on the off-ramp. The skies open up. Truly impressive sheets of water come down.

5:30pm: we’re underneath the big freeway overpass. Whoa, man: we’re at least fifty feet away from the nearest spot under the open sky, and we’re still getting wet from all the rain that’s being blown our way by the wind.

5:35pm: we’re at the daycare. Parked practically right in front of the front doors, and armed with Molly’s hyooge rainbow-colored umbrellas, we still get soaking wet up to our waists in the twenty feet between the car and the building’s front porch.

5:37pm: we open the doors to go outside and the poor child shrieks, terrified of the racket made by the rain and the wind. She’s still wailing when Molly puts her in the car; we make big excited noises about omigods it’s raining SO HARD and isn’t it COOL and we’re all WET and COLD and we should really get home and put on some dry clothing and maybe have tea! And isn’t this fun! Natalie, being a smart human, looks at us sceptically, but we actually mostly mean it. The flooding rain is ridiculous and exhilarating in its suddenness.

5:45pm: we’re at their place. Safely inside, we change into dry clothing – I get to wear her dad’s warm, awesome flannel-lined jeans. Her dad juggles and does other circusy stuff. This is relevant later. There is dinner full of noshing, and leftover beers from a birthday party last weekend. They are cool, and have a warming effect.

7:15pm: Natalie wants me to do bedtime with her. I read her two books, we giggle a lot, I turn out the light, we cuddle and giggle some more, she gets goodnight kisses from me and from mommy, relocates to her big-girl bed, and quietly sings herself to sleep. Bedtime is pretty fun these days, apparently.

8pm: Molly goes off to play Rock Band, as an entire Pixies album (their first?) was released for the game today. That’s why I’m monitor-sitting, you see.

9pm: I’m totally asleep on the couch, with the monitor.

10:15pm: Molly sheepishly wants to know if I’m willing to stay a little longer. I have no idea what time it is, so clearly, the answer is yes. I mumble as much into the phone.

11:25pm: she returns, grinning from ear to ear, the evening a total win. “B and C are waiting outside and can give you a ride, if you like!” Of course I like. B and C are also circus people – aerialist and musician, respectively.

11:30pm: David, whose clothing I’m wearing, returns from his evening’s outing and happily announces that there are circus freaks outside his house! I make a wide-eyed face and ominously declare that they’re waiting for me. Good-byes, a ride, conversation about accordions and a bass and how cool the Pixies album was.

11:45pm: I get home, and receive an offer of whipped parsnips with butter and cream. I swoon, but am not hungry, so this is a useful mental note for later.

11:50pm: I get an irresistible urge to juggle. And do. Must be channeling all them circus freaks.

00:21am: I take echinacea and goldenseal, just in case, to ward off what I think might be a cold. Or maybe it’s just allergies. Or maybe I should be asleep again. Or maybe I should’ve had tea instead of beer.

In conclusion: I love my friends.

OK, an hour ago I still had the excuse of long-overdue catching up with a friend. Now it’s just the sneezing and the achy throat keeping me up.

Significant bright sides, both from tonight and from the past weekend: conversation over ginger lemon tea and a hummus plate at Diesel right up until they closed. Coming back home and preserving lemons brought to me by erstwhile Croatian visitors. Tasting the resulting lemon-juice-and-much-salt concoction, which won’t actually be ready for 5-6 weeks, but hey, I was curious; and experiencing a unique taste sensation that is oddly compelling. Listening to Ottmar Liebert, one of my favorite guitarists, whose album “In the Arms of Love” I’ve come to associate with the calm of late evenings.

Last Friday, seeing Mischief in the Machine, incredibly satisfying not least because the musicians have been practicing in my living room for the past several months, and some of the other performers are friends and acquaintances, and oh, also because it was an excellent show.

Food shopping with two friends and a kid, and helping the two-year-old through a comparative critique of two fairly complex cheeses.

Dinner (involving sushi), dessert (involving cherries and really actually unfortunate bacon chocolate) and conversation (involving three of my favorite peeps) underneath the Templet.

Helping a friend move – not under the best of circumstances for him, but satisfying both in a physical sense and in that I was able to participate. I’ve been on a bit of a streak reacting to what I see as empty pronouncements of love and sunshiny feelings towards the world – the only meaningful way I’ve found to counteract that is to invest of myself in my world, in practical ways that benefit it (them) and therefore myself. Hey, it’s not the best of motivations, but whatever gets me up and running, no?

Speaking of up and running, weightlifting is still having a profound effect on my life. Have I mentioned that? Yeah, like, every other post. Well, it’s true. Soon, if Molly and I succeed at mutually motivating, I’ll go check out BU’s gym facilities.

Going from strenuous move to the best picnic “brunch” yet this season. Quotation marks because it lasted most of the day. Molly and Rosa really know how to make a girl happy with food.

And then quiet and important conversation with Mark, one of the aforementioned favorite people; feeding my haptic interface; and an opportunity to start organizing my life – and snail-mail – and other paperwork – that seems to have been just the push I needed to start digging myself out of the piles-of-paper-everywhere hole I seem to get into at least a couple of times a year.

On balance, things aren’t bad. Except, of course, for the things that are. But, as I’ve written for the past several months, that’s largely out of my control.

Aki is sitting guard by my side. Time to go cuddle the cat – if he deigns to assent. Here’s hoping that the echinacea and goldenseal capsules counterbalance the lack of sleep, where my immune system is concerned.

Been a while since I’ve blogged publicly, hasn’t it? Hello, again.

I go to write this post, and notice a new comment from Regina, an old friend from Moldova who now lives in Israel, with whom I’d fallen out of touch a while ago. Holy cats. Hello, again. It’s lovely to hear from you.

(The timing of the comment and of my being compelled to write here again are a coincidence.)

Yeah, there’s been a lot of sadness that I’m not quite ready to write down. Luckily, the last month or so has also been filled with joy and light and smart people and work (hooray, work!), so it’s not like there’s nothing to tell.

My job at Boston University, the title of which has now settled at Digital Collections and Computing Support Librarian [in the School of Theology], rocks my socks so far. It’s not that I’ve done a whole lot, yet; it’s only been a month, and the end of the academic year at that, and my boss the head librarian has been out on vacation for the past two weeks, so things are relatively slow. On the other hand, there’s plenty to do in the computing-support half of the job. I’ve been learning [more] about how BU’s network is set up, which is nifty. We’re purchasing a big pile of equipment to replace old stuff – both servers and personal workstations for faculty and staff – which, you know, from the support standpoint is great. Soon there’ll be no more @$#%! five-year-old Dells to support, and many of the four-year-old machines are going away too. People are open to the idea of Macs, which is huge in such a behemoth mostly-Windows org. (BU is an immense bureaucratic machine, and I say that with all the affection that one would expect a girl to have for her alma mater.)

Best of all, people want to learn. I’ve been getting to know the faculty and staff. Some of them are already doing digital humanities projects (like the History of Missiology site). Others have cool ideas (hello, Admissions Director using Facebook in all kinds of cool community-building ways). And still others want to figure out how computing can make their research and teaching (and administration, and the school as a community) more awesome.

This is what they hired me to work on. I’m unspeakably excited. Yeah, so far it’s been all support and no digilib, but I expect that to change. There’s a lot of hardware overhauling to do, and some basics to catch up on. That will take some months. But there’s already so much concrete investment of time, thought and resources in digital library stuff at STH that I have no doubt it’s going to go somewhere interesting.

Then there’s life outside of work. That’s been filled with friends, children, loved ones, cats, cooking, Burning Man planning, hand drumming, sci-fi reading, Battlestar Galactica, water and fire and earth, casual photography, breathing deeply. And the weather’s been nice.

Yesterday I flew to DC. Today I participated in a day-long grant proposal review panel for which I read a total of thirty proposals, which took an unreal amount of time and was fascinating and instructive, and I’m not being sarcastic about any of that. The panel itself was great too; in the past month or so I’ve learned a ton about the grant review and award process, and I fully intend to use this knowledge for good. I have generalized thoughts on the whole thing, but have to formulate them separately – must wrap my brain around the whole thing first, and also make sure not to cross any confidentiality boundaries. The whole thing made me feel awfully important, and going away for just over 24 hours meant I could travel with just my work bag, light and easy.

Coming back tonight, at the Reagan Airport, I texted a friend something to the effect of, I like traveling – the interstitial part, the going – even more than being places. She laughed and declared me liminal girl. Certainly that holds true for my life in a larger sense.

There’s more, always – the children I get to hang out with, the surprisingly strong presence of love in my days, feeling so strong from weightlifting with one of my dearest, the USB turntable I bought with which I’m digitizing records from the old country – but it’s 1:45am, and tomorrow’s a workday. Er, today. Whatever.

Penultimate drum-and-dance of the year in South Amherst yesterday. I brought my drum, even though I don’t have a bag for it yet and it was raining a little – but Molly and I threw garbage bags over the drums, and I’m very happy we did. By the end of the evening my hands were somehow hurting and a little numb at the same time, and I could still feel the just-played drumbeat in my ribcage.

I did better than had seemed possible, given how out of practice I’ve been with things that require sustaining a regular rhythm with my hands (drumming, juggling, playing the guitar which I haven’t done in any sort of sustained way since my first year in grad school). Concentrating on picking out, playing and sustaining relatively simple rhythms for several minutes at a time was great practice.

Molly and Natalie and I stayed over at our friends’ place in Hadley (Inspirit Common), and had breakfast at Cafe Esselon there. Natalie kept feeding us pretend food. The more ridiculously we reacted, the more giggles scattered, sparkling, across the table.

Days are filling up with small things of consequence.

This morning Molly and I punted on weightlifting in favor of coffee and quiet, sleepy conversation. You can’t photograph these moments of quotidian perfection, so the vignette is put into inadequate words here at words’ end.

This morning I noticed that my singing voice is getting stronger again. Must be springtime.

This morning I am thinking of late-night driving through city streets, and then on a perfectly picturesque winding highway, straight into the heart of Saturday night. Boston’s smaller highways are magic. If I could drive all the way out to the Nevada desert on them, awake and thinking and singing and arriving into the wide expanse of nowhere, I would. And I would channel Kerouac.

This morning I was fed pretend chamomile tea juice for breakfast by small children. Also, chocolate almond delight pizza.

This morning I fantasize about buying food with money from a reliable income source. Bonus: this would mean a job with a regular schedule, which in turn prooobably means I’d be making coffee or tea every morning. That’s a nice ritual I miss.

This morning I am restless and thinky and observing the undercurrent of sadness that runs through my days with a detachment I rarely achieve. All of this is illuminated by a flowy light somewhere in the middle of my ribcage, right under the skin.

I dislike Valentine’s Day with something between deep indifference and red fiery passion. That said, as a member of my household I just got the best V-Day present ever, and am now almost – uh – sanguine about the holiday. From an email by housemate/landlady’s awesome partner: “For Valentine’s Day, I brought you a dozen duck eggs, just laid today.” !! Thanks, Paul!

It’s snowing white all over and so, so quiet outside.

This past Saturday was Frostbyte’s memorial auction. I arranged food for what probably ended up being a couple hundred people over the course of about 24 hours. Didn’t really cook, except in a minimalist sense. Still, it was lovely – several times that day people asked me the requisite how-are-you and I would answer, “in my element.” Providing good food for people, even if I just shop and chop veggies and open cheese and get others to help me, fills my soul like nothing else does. Especially when people I don’t know take note of the food and are pleased with it. Especially-especially when I get to participate in a group effort such as this was, two years in the making (by others: I only came to it within the last month). Labor of true love, it was, despite the complexity and frustrations of the organizing process. The next day, as we were finishing cleaning up, one of my co-organizers smiled at me and said, “You’re a new old friend.” Burners’ spirit of instant community is priceless.

(I don’t actually know whether the person who made the above remark has gone to Burning Man. But he’s old-school TEP, and I gather that’s pretty close in all the relevant ways.)

Saturday evening I sat on a couch in front of Tensor, weaving slow conversation with the human beside me into its constantly changing color-light play. A swing hung between us and Tensor. Its shadow in the bright lights, sometimes swinging empty, most of the time complete with people’s silhouettes, was the narrative of remembrance unfolding. If the mark I leave on my community when I’m gone even approaches Kevin McCormick’s – he died at just 29 – I’ll have done well.

Yesterday I spent a few hours with a sweet, social two-year-old and remembered how exhausting and satisfying it is to live only for the present moment, all the time. I remembered the realization I’ve been coming back to over the last couple of months: the kind of family I want, the village that it takes to raise children and be the change I/we wish to see in the world, is already there. Here. All I need to do is participate in it.

Last night another new old friend, the luminous human with the Tensor-side conversation, brought me a present, a square of squares of color-cycling light. It is making slow progress in its simple programming as white snow layers itself onto the skylight, sounding like grains of sand falling. White cat at my feet, I watch the color cube and feel his still calm.

The last couple of weeks have been, let’s say, challenging. My experiences during this time have spanned from some of the worst of my life to great.

The worst was bad, a fast and furious storm. But I have amazing friends, and the good thing about hitting bottom is that everything after is going up, and I feel stronger and more balanced now, and that’s as much as I’ll be dwelling here on the worst, which is now past.

The good! There’s much more of the good. I have a floor, for one, and soon I’ll have molding around it. The bedroom is transformed by the lighter walking surface; even today’s grayness is not as oppressive as it would have been two weeks ago. I’m making fast friends with some [more] foodies, which has already resulted in delicious meals. (Oh, I’ve been eating better, have I mentioned? And cooking. There’s a joy rediscovered.) Reading, too: am only a few chapters into John Connolly’s The Book of Lost Things, but can already heartily recommend it if you’re into magic realism.

This weekend an important memorial event will take place in my larger community. I’ve gotten more involved with it than I’d anticipated, given that the person remembered was not someone I knew at all well. But it’s community, and I’ve been meeting great people, and most importantly I get to organize the food. And, well, you know how I feel about that. It’ll be good for the soul.

Life’s swinging pendulum aside, right at the moment I feel good, centered, purposeful. And powerful. This may have something to do with having started my day with a dear friend, delicious coffee and weight training. Who knew weight training could be this much fun? Now to stick with it: I’d forgotten how radically working out changes my internal state for the better.

This afternoon the sun was shinin’ like there’s no tomorrow. Barely out of the door on my way to the only open nearby coffee shop, a car pulling out of the neighboring driveway blocked my path so that an elderly couple could get in. I didn’t feel like climbing over the melting snowbanks to both sides of the walk, so stopped and waited. The old lady looked at me with a slightly apprehensive smile and said, “We’re going to delay you for a while here.” I assured her that it was ok, and looked around at all the gleaming-clean houses.

They took their time with the complicated affair of one getting into the front seat, the other in the back, unable to do so simultaneously because of strange car-door geometry. “Merry Christmas,” the car people called out. “And to you,” I said, and meant it. I don’t like Christmas, but I liked the old lady and her partner with their slow ways and their festive sincerity.

I walked to the coffee shop wondering about what Christmas might mean to those people. Davis Square was ghostly-empty and, if not for the cold and the snow and the barren trees, if you only looked at the light and the buildings, felt like deep spring. Everything bathed in light.

Then there was a pumpkin spice latte by the dancing fire in the gas fireplace, and a book. By the time I came outside again an hour and a half later, clouds had moved in and the light was whiter, less expansive.

Then out again in the twilight, and the blue houses stood out among those of all the other colors. There are at least half a dozen blue ones between my place and Davis Square, and they’re all different glorious colors. If the house I live in weren’t a pleasing shade of purple, I’d be jealous of all those blues. As it stands, I get to look at them in the changing light of the sun.

Coming back home, it was dark enough that the strings of tiny lights on our porch were already lit. Whenever I open the front door in the dark, I feel like I’m entering the secret center of some deep-playa Burning Man installation. And speaking of Burning Man, if you haven’t yet, do check out Neil K. Guy’s photos from this year’s event. He is easily one of my two favorite BM photographers, the other being Bucky Sparkle.

Dinner of tiny quiches and raspberry vodka. Conversation with beautiful women. Cats sleeping on me for hours as I do my thinking and writing. The blissed-out quiet of a house large enough to make it seem like we’re all impossibly far away from each other. Aaand an 8:30am interview tomorrow morning. Nothing like job search to bring a girl firmly back onto the ground.

“Scarborough Fair” is an old one! The Fair itself, a huge month-and-a-half-long trade show, originates in the 13th century, and the ballad appears to have its origins in another one from the late 17th. I, of course, am partial to Simon and Garfunkel’s version (link to YouTube video), because it takes me all the way back to 1993, when I moved from New York to sunny southern California (and hated it). S&G’s “The Concert in Central Park” was one of the first CDs I mail-ordered from BMG, an unspeakable luxury back then. That CD came with the bonus of “A Heart in New York,” which I sang to myself whenever I missed Queens. Which was often.

Come to think of it, I also hummed it to myself whenever I flew into New York to visit my brother (or whatnot). Have you flown into New York City in the dark? It’s unbelievably cool.

But this is a recipe post, of course:

-Take a chicken breast. Preferably a locally-grown, awesomely outrageous chicken breast, like the stuff I get from these folks. Defrost if necessary. (Never ever defrost meat in the microwave: potential health problems aside, it just gets an icky texture.) Preheat oven to 400F (200C).

-Put some salt, pepper, parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme in a leettle bowl. How much? I dunno. It’s hard to over-herb a chicken breast. Mix.

-Put in a couple spoons of mayonnaise. Again, I don’t know how much: enough to coat the chicken. Mix well with the herbs.

-Slather the mixture all over the chicken. Use your hands. Get some under the skin too, if you like.

-Put chicken in a foil-lined or greased baking dish. Bake for 45-50 minutes, or until the juices run clear when you poke it with a fork. Eat, and tell me you don’t love me. I dare you.

By the way: I’m generally not a white-meat person. The meat CSA share has changed that! The Chestnut Farms chicken – as all their other meats – is amazing, and given that I’m not going to give up meat for environmental reasons anytime soon, it’s just about the most eco-conscious stuff to get. We get to eat meat of animals raised humanely, meat that hasn’t been plied with mysterious ingredients and transported the usual long distances. Support local agriculture, and all that.

If you have a chance to support your local agriculture, meat-raising or not, I encourage you to do so. Chestnut Farms’ minimum monthly share (ten pounds) is way too much for us, so we share it among three households. That way, even though the per-pound cost is high ($7 or a bit less, depending on whether they have thrown in freebies), it doesn’t break the bank to get a 3-4 lbs a month. Paradoxically, this arrangement has encouraged me to eat less meat than I normally would: store-bought stuff just doesn’t compare unless it’s really great and thus even more expensive.

Being able to participate in this meat-share thing has made me very, very happy to be back in Massachusetts: there was nothing like it around Providence, although the fruit-and-veggie farmers’ markets there are pretty good. It’s just one more thing that makes Boston feel like home all over again.