Words’ End

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.

A quick snapshot. But hey, I upload because I can.

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.

Sure way to lose my banking business: be obliquely idiosyncratic with regard to when charges post, even as pending. (It’s often out of banks’ control when a charge actually posts, and that’s ok; but there’s no reason a point of sale debit card purchase should not immediately register on my account as spoken-for funds.) Let some charges go through that you shouldn’t have let go through, charge me $93 in overdraft fees in the span of two days, then claim that this is all out of your control.

Then, take a check that bounced the first time (for which I took responsibility) and post it a second time, claiming that it’s not you, it’s that other bank, and that checks might be deposited like that 7-10 times in a row, and if I don’t have sufficient funds, that’s $31 each time. Claim that you don’t have any control over either these deposits or the overdraft fees, and not five minutes later turn to the woman at the next desk and ask her if she’s approved the charges from this morning yet. When called on the discrepancy, insist that no, the entire process is automatic, oh, except that every morning we decide which transactions go through.

Also, have an online billing representative claim that funds are withdrawn from my account on the date for which I set a bill to get paid, regardless of whether it’s an electronic transfer or a paper check. Then have the reality be patently different.

Sigh. Goodbye again, Wainwright Bank. You’re socially responsible and local and all kinds of nifty, but you don’t do the banking part well, at least not the aspects of it that matter to me. I was with you before, left in frustration, decided to give you another chance, and nothing has changed in the last several years. This time I’m breaking up with you for good, you hear?

Today has in fact been long, what with catching up with my boss, who is newly returned from vacation (good!), doing phone tech support late in the day when already tired, and updating Windows on sixteen machines, each of which has 512MB of RAM. On the other hand, evenings have been pleasant indeed. Done with the grant proposal review process and some other obligations, I suddenly have room to breathe. And cook, and plan, and make to do lists, and do many of the things on those to-do lists, and plan menus so I don’t eat out as much during the week, and put together lunches to bring to work, and spend time with friends and loved ones, and watch a movie or two, and do laundry, and clean, and read for hours.

Not that all of my outstanding obligations are dispensed with. There’s the matter of a 500-word abstract I’ve owed folks for some months now… the shorter the piece, the harder it is for me to write.

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.

In an hour and a half or so I leave for the T (public transport!! don’t have to drive!) to start my new JOB.

Why, yes, I’m pretty thrilled at the prospect. The title keeps changing in the various documents they’ve sent, but the most recent one is Digital Librarian / Computer Support Manager at the Boston U School of Theology Library. The potential range of what my work days will involve is too large in my head right now, which means life will totally fail to be boring, and I’m likely to get flooded by information overload for the first few weeks, and I am so looking forward to that. I’ll tell y’all more when I get oriented. But… it’s an exciting job in my field. Holy cats.

Thus ends eleven months of unemployment.

On another note: praised be the sun and the moon and cycles, and spring. Did you know they’re saying 71 degree high today in Somerville?! And – just looked this up: there may or may not be a 5-degree difference between my house and my workplace at any given time. Well, of course: Commonwealth Ave is a wind tunnel, and work is also closer to the big water. Good to know.

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.