A week or so ago. I touched the tender fuzzy buds with one finger for several minutes before snapping out of my reverie and snapping this shot.
nice summary of my next project.
“You know what I would do if I were in your place? I’d drink from the milk basin of the Milky Way; I’d swallow comets; I’d lunch on dawn; I’d dine on day and I’d sup on night; I’d invite myself, splendid table-companion that I am, to the banquet of all the glories, and I’d salute God as my host! I’d work up a magnificent hunger, an enormous thirst, and I’d race through the drunken spaces between the spheres singing the fearsome drinking song of eternity.”
This is what Galileo’s spirit told Victor Hugo at a séance, per Hugo himself (source). I suspect we bow to different deities, but this grabbed me by the heartstrings, flinging me out into the blue.
Next project: learn eternity’s drinking song all by myself.
3am comfort food
(Really, this is just a post to test Flickr’s blogging feature. Not much of interest here.)
Came home from a four-hour job interview yesterday and didn’t know what to do with myself. No problem! My body did. I ate dinner – first real meal of the day – and promptly fell asleep, from sometime before 8pm (!) until after midnight.
Then I stayed up until 5am. Around 2:30 I glanced around the kitchen cupboard, saw the mac-and-cheese box and realized I was ravenously hungry. So I made some, tip-toeing through the quiet house full of sleeping foik behind closed doors. Pietro the canary seemed amused and perplexed at my timing, insofar as a canary can seem to have any moods at all.
Interview itself went… well enough, I think. I’m too close to it to tell. Now I wait, and maybe finally de-lame and paint some walls in my landlady’s other house like I’ve been promising for something like a month and a half. And have comfort food at 3am.
inch by inch…
Life proceeds apace. The last week has been filled with good people, and a much lovelier living space than it’s been of late, and baby therapy (I got to hang out with a visiting friend’s 14-week-old boy wonder). My cats are lovin’ on me, my friends continue to amaze me with their magnificence, a few important connections are quietly blossoming, I have a job interview on Monday for an as-yet unnamed but very exciting position. Yet there continues to be an undercurrent of sadness and various other negative emotions. At times I feel like I’m walking upstream, knee-deep in fast-running water. The exercise is good for me, but its inescapability is still no fun at all. Good thing the bad stuff is background to so much love around me, and – for once – not the other way around.
American Gods free, online, for a limited time.
Neil Gaiman’s blog readership has spoken, and Harper Collins has put the entire American Gods online for free for a month, starting yesterday. If you have not yet read it, I highly recommend it; but then, I’ve never failed to like anything Gaiman has written. Some of his wor[k|d]s leave more of an impression on me than others, of course; American Gods is right up there at the top.
Of course, the publisher didn’t go so far as to allow you to download the thing; as far as I can see, you can only read it on the web. So it goes, step by step… at least they’re making it free in the first place!
cinnamoon.
The Moon is my mistress; has been for just about ten years now, ever since I noticed the reliable upward mood swings during full moon evenings.
So tonight’s full eclipse, spent alone and then with housemates and then alone and the entire time chatting with people online, was a salve for a hard February. I would have photos, too, but can’t find the camera cable – phooey.
She was red and pink and blackish and gorgeous, and always changeable. Saturn and Regulus hung out nearby (well, sorta). She was a clown nose, a koala, a cinnamoon (thanks for that last image, Molly). She’s almost out of penumbra again, bright white and always a reminder that the world is big and full of new things to discover.
Spring is coming.
fog, live-action and animated
Insomnia is no fun at all. Or, I don’t know – what do you call going to sleep utterly exhausted, then waking up five hours later feeling reasonably rested but knowing that that’s an illusion, and yet staying up because if you go back to sleep then you’ll have to deal with the emotional repercussions of the dreams you’ve been having?
Yeah.
On the brighter side, a few daya ago my housemate found my favorite Russian cartoon, “Hedgehog in the Fog,” with English subtitles so I can share it with you! It has won all kinds of awards since it was released in 1975, including several years ago best piece of animation of all time at a festival in Tokyo. It’s just about ten minutes long.
Sometimes I feel like I’m in a temporal fog. The furthest I can see is a day, maybe. Maybe several hours. Maybe a couple of days. Certainly no long-term clarity (which tends to be an illusion anyhow). I make tea, sit down wih the mug, close my eyes and breathe.
reminders of power.
It’s been raining on and off for hours, but (and? – this is, after all, New England) it’s surprisingly warm: 44 degrees F, or about 7 C.
So I opened the window, if not the mesh screen. Mostly for the cats: Aki misses being able to go outside onto the roof, like he did in Providence. But the howling wind is tugging at my heart strings.
Soon it will be time to visit the ocean again.
mundane details are people, too.
Yesterday I spent about four hours making chicken soup, complete with roasting the chicken parts I got for it. Hey, there was nothing else to do – no job on the horizon, which is wearying – and chatting with friends dealing with random illnesses inspired me to go buy soup makings, including enough meat for two batches. Of course, instead of the intended one-batch-and-leftover-chicken there ended up being more soup. My entire household, and then some, seemed to approve; and I felt close to my grandmother, who’d spend entire days in the kitchen cooking stuff up for the sheer joy of the process, and of feeding people with the results. I joked with a friend that one day I’ll get a dozen friends to make a kept woman of me, and will feed them in return.
(But no, srsly, a job – preferably an interesting, challenging job that pays me enough for me to feed friends anyway – would be way better. You hear me, multiverse?)
Then we drove to the wilds of R’dale with soup, getting astonishingly lost for, like, half an hour within a mile of the place we were going to. Classic Boston adventure. I’d intended to drop off soup and friend, but ended up staying and chatting and laughing with folk in a room painted a pleasing shade of orange.
Last night I dreamt of having a good, loving and kind and familiar conversation with someone I don’t talk to much these days. Waking up to reality is a bitch sometimes.
But it could be worse than a sunny day, ice cream for breakfast (because what’s better when you burned your tongue on hot chicken soup yesterday?), and a small black cat curled up beside me.
V-Day goodness!
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!
