Words’ End

News in the past day or so: out-of-state couples will soon be able to marry in MA!!, as a 1913 state law originally aimed at interracial couples is repealed.

AND.

Jetpack.

I’d say we’re taking off, as a society.

Haven’t been updating, or not here anyway. Dealing with taxes and other emotionally loaded issues, as well as being super busy at work, participating in my village and preparing for Burning Man and its attendant road trip, have all kept me running around. You can see some of my life on Flickr. I suspect this – both the relative dearth of posting on Words’ End and the snippets viewable on Flickr – is going to continue for a while.

Today I went out on my bike for the first time in well over a year. Halleluiah for bike paths! I got past Arlington Center and out towards a football field – no idea how far that is from home, probably no more than four miles or so. Were it not getting dark fast (and had I had any water or food with me), I might’ve kept going – and will, soon, because oh gods that felt good.

Riding through swarms of insects out by Spy Pond in the dusk, though, maybe not so good. On the bright side, glasses double as mini eye shields!

On the way back, the ripening moon was peeking through the tree canopy straight ahead of and above me, along the path. And on ’til moonrise.

The lovely, warm evening ride gave me hope for dealing with the tax man tomorrow. Word to the wise: don’t be late filing your taxes. The penalties, they hurt.

At least one more ride this week. Next week I’d like to bike out to work.

Just under 7min long. Watch it. Worth it. What’s your dream for your society? What do you consider your society – like your friends and your family and your pets, an entity that gives you much, and for which you’re responsible? I want to know.

Barlow, by the way, is fantastic. I want to cook him dinner and ask him about the world.

Dream with me, oh, dream with me, and we’ll wake in better life / And until we rise with open eyes, good night, my love, good night / Yes, until some sun wakes everyone, good night, my love, good night. –Kris Delmhorst, Jeffrey Foucault and Peter Mulvey, “Lullaby 101″ off of Redbird

From NBC:

Exclusive Heroes Webisodes Coming Soon!

On July 14th, Heroes unleashes its first ever web series, “Going Postal.” The trilogy of online-only videos introduces us to Echo De Mille, a seemingly ordinary mailman with an extraordinary ability.

The three-part series is written and directed by the same creative team behind the award-winning TV show. Part one, “A Nifty Trick,” premieres Monday, July 14th, with new episodes rolling out on subsequent Mondays. Visitors to this year’s Comic Con, will get a sneak peak at the epic conclusion at the Heroes panel on Saturday, July 26th.

Here’s the trailer, if you’d like to see it. As usual these days, the links are to pretty processing-intensive pages.

I got hooked on tobacco several years ago. Been quitting it ever since.

It’s easier not to smoke when it’s warm outside. Particularly when it’s warm and humid. And in the past six months I’ve had maybe a dozen cigarettes, if you don’t count the Quebec trip where I slipped and had, like, five. But sometimes it’s really damn hard. I didn’t know the meaning of addiction before tobacco. It’s been particularly difficult to stay away lately, and I don’t even know why.

Tonight I spent half an hour looking at anti-smoking ads on YouTube. Suddenly it’s a lot easier to resist.

On a brighter note: those new glasses I got have literally changed the way I look at the world. This happens every time I get new glasses, but it is no less amazing for its frequency. My eyes used to be rather far apart in their sharpness; my right eye had almost perfect vision at one point, while my left eye had deteriorated a lot. Now my right eye has mostly caught up with the left, which – the optometrist said – is actually better for my brain, even though my overall vision is worse. The glasses have restored some fundamental balance, [it feels like] somewhere around my brain stem. All I want to do is look at the world.

I want to be in the world. Perhaps, next time I get a cigarette craving, I’ll go look at more YouTube’d ads.

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.

At the moment of the summer solstice – at least, it was solstice as far as the internet was concerned – I was washing dishes in a quieted house, after an exquisitely summery grilled meal. A year ago I was in a very different place. The last year has brought with it changes I’d never imagined, not then, not in the near future. I went to the darkest place I’d ever been, and have come back out into the light.

Life is softly humming along. I’ve been getting re-acquainted with how it feels to rely almost exclusively on public transport and my feet for getting from point N to point ΔN. It feels long-ago-homey – more like Kishinev than even my recent experiences in New York and Boston. Maybe it also feels a little like London, where I also took both subway trains and buses regularly. It’s an entirely different pace of life, and (aside from the fact that some things are just not possible without a car) I think I like it better. But I need more audio books.

There are still many, many days left in the season before I begin feeling like they’re getting short again. The sun tends to lighten people, and I’ve been feeling my friends’ burdens fade into the background even as they don’t fall away. My own, too.

Been daydreaming about the Burning Man road trip. Right now I’m thinking something like this on the way out, and maybe a southerly route on the way back. It’s a lot of driving – the way out west as I’ve mapped it out is 11 driving hours more than the shortest route, and the way back – 13, which amounts to two extra days of driving. I don’t know how I’ll afford it, but this is the year of a cathartic road trip, so hopefully I’ll find a way to make this happen. Or, you know, shorten the route. The shortening will likely be on the southerly side, though, because the northern plains and the Bad Lands (thanks for the link, Rosa) are calling me.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some mushroom caps to stuff. Happy solar holiday, all.

Satisfying:

-writing my very first AppleScript, and having it be reasonably clever (for a first script, yo) and work.

-lunch of spicy Thai beef salad and a gingery tofu-veggie dish with Molly. There’s just nothing bad about that.

-decent talk with my therapist earlier this evening.

-lovely time with Colleen, whom I’ve known for ten years this year, and gods, knowing her is one of the best things that ever happened to me. And with her kid Sylvana, a giggly, smart, developmentally fascinating toddler.

-fiddleheads, slices of cheese, and riesling for dinner. As a “picnic” on the kitchen floor. Complete with real wine glasses.

-a garden full of roses that have a scent, around the corner and down the block from my house.

-my house, with its murals and animals and human animals and quiet when I want it.

-summer, even despite the heat wave.

-lying around naked on a weekend morning, underneath a ceiling fan, grinning ear to ear because you just can’t help it.

-being dependent almost entirely on public transport, and finding that to be very pleasant.

-Mac OS Leopard and the upcoming release of the 3G iPhone.

-reading more, as I ride the T to work.

-making a mental inventory of the last week or so, and of the rest of the summer, and realizing just how lucky I am.

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.