Category: quotidian

There are over five hundred e-mails in my inbox. Probably fifty of them need to be answered.

There aren’t enough hours in the day. Utilizing all of them maximally leads to too much stress; underutilizing them saves sanity, but seems to have a detrimental effect on the to-do list.

April-May-June really sucked, personal-time-wise. July is half-over, and I feel like I’m still racing to catch up.

Here’s the thing: I haven’t been slacking. If anything, I haven’t taken enough time to just chill. And still there’s so. much. to do.

Right at the moment, I’m not stressed, which is why I’m able to post it. I’d like to keep blogging, but it takes time, and it seems to take up energy that I should really be putting into keeping calm and methodical about all aspects of my life.

Even given all of the above, I feel myself slowly getting a grip on all of the too-many things that need to be done in order for life to run reasonably smoothly. I guess that’s good, at any rate.

I’m happy. I just wish there were more hours in the day, not least to communicate with you.

Not yet to WordPress or similar, but in fact to a new apartment.

I’m exhausted, and no longer in a good way. It’ll take another week to make the place not-filthy, but it will indeed be kickin’.

Can you imagine me living for probably about a week without an operating kitchen? Well, it’s about to happen. The floor in there needs to be stripped, primed and polyurethaned; more importantly, we have no stove.

Well, it could be worse: we could’ve had no stove and no refrigerator. The ones in here, you see, are in hte process being replaced by various methods. We have the fridge now (following a day’s worth of helping to procure it – but now we have exactly what we want!); the stand-alone chest freezer, which we’ve been coveting for months, is coming on Tuesday; and the replacement stove should be here Any Day Now.

The last three weeks have been nigh unto insane. We searched for a place, thinking we might need to be out of town at the end of August (when my original lease ended) and ready to break the lease. We found a place we fell in love with (pictures etc. when it’s cleaned up). We searched for someone to sublet our apartment, or else draw up a new lease, a process that quickly turned into an unreal, nightmarish chain of people expressing enthusiastic desire to take the place off our hands and then disappearing. We finally found someone, and she signed the lease on Friday. Well, that was close. Oh, and we moved.

You know what? I love this place.

Sunlit moss in unexpected places is one of my favorite things.

Woke up in time to read all the news, blogs, e-mail. Left the house earlier than needed for the first time in ages, feels like. Asiago cheese bagel, passing Muzak van (I kid you not, they exist), blogging this, and I’m still on time for work.

There’s a new library opening in Kansas City, and I think of George.

Intricate shadows of tiny bare tree branches, on brick, and again I wish for a camera with me.

They’re promising temperature in the 70s next week. !!!

Pouring, roof-pounding rains have had us on floodwatch since yesterday. I came outside during a lucky lull, wearing the matte black coat over loud purple and intense burgundy. Tiny, unmistakable light-green shoots of grass are poking up through the jagged black rocks of the parking lot.

Suddenly missing the Black Rock Desert, I got in the car. Mileage is sucking, and a pang of regret: can’t ask my dad about the mileage, because he’s gone. It may not be anything to worry about – been doing a lot of city driving, and so warming up the car for several minutes before each 2-mile drive – but the point is, I can’t ask him, ever.

The air smells of ocean, like a Nor’easter. A sparrow perched, chirped and cocked its head at me as I was walking into Giddings House.

currently playing: amon tobin – “dream sequence” (bricolage)

“I was gonna be done with this file by noon. Noon!”

“Well, you know. Noon – eight – geologically speaking, they’re practically the same moment.”

I’m doing enough work to be satisfied this weekend, even considering that April is so busy we aren’t supposed to have weekends. In-between, we’re finding out that candy apple red works well not only on bleached hair but on henna-treated as well.

Today is 1/23/4.

First we forgot where we’d planted those bulbs last year, and then we forgot that we’d planted at all. Then we forgot what plants are altogether, and I blamed you for my freezing and forgetting. And the nights were long and cold and scary; can we live through February?

I took the time to go to California over the holidays, to visit my family, have my love meet my mother, and go preside over a session at the MLA in San Diego. (Preside, v. bask in the coolness of one’s presenters and participate in lively debate, without actually having had to write a paper.)

MLA was fun! I very much wish I could’ve stayed for the whole thing, but family took precedence. My session’s respondent was stuck in Denver with a broken airplane, which was a cryin’ shame because we’d all been really looking forward to having him there. Hopefully, our paths will cross at some later point.

Holidays with my California-residing family are never boring, and this year proved no exception. For the first time since my father passed away, I was there on the anniversary of that day; so E., my mother and I made the trip over to the cemetery and stood in the drizzling tinny rain, contemplating words to say. On another day altogether, two of us sneaked out of the house in the early hours of the morning, drove over to Malibu and the Pacific Coast Highway, and greeted the sun on the ocean’s shore. Rather chilly, but the most gorgeous sunrise I’ve seen in a while, with the added bonus of a lapping-water soundtrack and ocean salt on our breath.

My grandmother’s Alzheimer’s is progressing, and things are difficult for everyone. There are so many challenges associated with this that the sole mitigating factor of my mother’s cousin being there to help out is but a drop in the bucket.

Upon returning home to Providence, I spent a week or two reassembling my worklife; which brings us to now. Now, the weather is cold and dreary. Hasn’t been daylight enough in ages, which affects me more strongly than I’d like. Tasks take much more time than usual, and sleep is a precious commodity of which I seem to need more in the winter. It is difficult to do anything, much less keep up the pace I usually have no trouble maintaining.

And so I light candles against the darkness, put on music, buy gorgeous vegetables that do not smell of summer at all and wake them up by cooking them. Then I work, huddled in sweater and blanket, Earl Gray with milk in the mug beside me, soft warm metal of the laptop reassuring against my leg.

Solstice is past, and the days are lengthening little by little.

You know the little film that sometimes forms on top of milk, if you’re warming it slowly enough?

I actually really like that. It’s silky and tenuous.

If I get enough work done tonight, I’m allowing myself the luxury of updating the blog that’s been so neglected, the peanut gallery has actually begun to expostulate. And, oh, I’ll get enough work done tonight: it seems to be Appreciation Eve for my drug of choice, hot and fragrant in its black coffee mug with yellow writing.

Listening to the same poem close to a hundred times, as pronounced torturously by first-year students of Italian, can kill the poem no matter how beautiful it is.

On the other hand, the students made me smile and even laugh quite a bit, some with inventiveness, some with naive assumptions from other languages seeping in. You could feel them learning.

Making There Be Food for friends’ wedding is a fun enterprise! Farmers’ market people were duly amused at my purchase of forty-eight baby aubergines, in addition to mounds of other things. I’ve been making several little shopping trips instead of one big one, breaking them down by purchase location. The “light refreshments” will be mostly different kinds of Mediterranean or Med-influenced. Perhaps I will post photos, later.

Roland’s doing fine, though I haven’t written much: proofreading scanned text is not terribly exciting or varied. I’m coming to Really Appreciate good-quality photocopies, which make such activities much more swift. And, conversely, loathe bad-quality photocopies, which induce anguish.

Currently playing (for values of “currently” being “all day long” but not necessarily “at this moment”): mix of electronica, silly and otherwise, and Suzanne Vega, sent across the continent by a friend. Shpongle and pellucid, amon tobin and dj food, not to mention Carlos Paredes. I keep listening to it again and again.

Right around 11pm last night, a kitchen shelf decided to crash spectacularly. It was the one holding the sugar, flour and wine glasses, dividing that particular cabinet in two and overhanging the space where the plates go. Happily, I think none of the plates are broken; as for the glasses, well, the universe seems to have attended to my de-cluttering desires and left me with exactly two of them. Which is as much as I need, bar the couple of times a year when I Entertain with Wine.

Most of it amused me; cleaning up glass everywhere late at night wasn’t quite as amusing. When I say everywhere, I mean in my living room, too.

In other news, Mikhail Gorbachev is speaking at Brown next week. Tickets are distributed today and tomorrow; so I’ll be going to get one. Should be interesting.

Digitizing the Roland corpus is easier on the hands, thanks to the excellent scanner-cum-OCR-software in the Anthropology Department. They don’t mind me using it, either, as long as nobody needs it right then.