Sunday, November 22, 2009

oh, that's right. this is here.

What I am doing is lamenting the cold. North Carolina has spoiled me. This weather would be practically balmy by the standards of central Pennsylvania, but I am grouchy because I can no longer walk around barefoot all the time without fear of losing my toes.

What I am doing is writing an essay about synesthesia. (Or synaesthesia. Why do I like it so much more with the a?) To get myself in the mood, and to postpone cracking open the serious neurological research, I reread Jeffery Ford's short story, The Empire of Ice Cream. It is this wonderful, muted piece of magical realism about loneliness, and art, and friendship, and betrayal, and gifts that isolate, and sacrificing crucial parts of one's identity for the sake of acceptance and understanding, and whether that kind of sacrifice ought to be seen as tragic or as necessary or as something of both-- as seen through the lives of its synaesthetic main characters. Beautifully written, and a lot more complicated than it initially seems. Unfortunately, it hits very, very close to home for me, touches on a lot of my secret fears and anxieties (even ones that are connected to deeper things than the fact that I unfailingly taste something like sweet milk in my mouth when I walk barefoot across a cool, smooth surface), and I've learned that it's an absolutely terrible idea to read it if I'm already somewhat angsty on a particular day. To do so is only a recipe for tears, inertia, overwrought guilt, and bad haiku.

What I am doing is waiting to be brave.

What I am doing is thinking about how player pianos are never as good, how everything looks different on the other side of the camera, how I love bright colors but black and white makes the world seem so much sadder, so much more mysterious, so much more like it is crumbling away, but that the apocalypse will, at least, be a stately and elegant one.

What I am doing is breathing November, and letting it infiltrate my blood. I don't know. This is how I feel when everything begins to turn gray and brown and it gets dark early. Though, if there aren't too many clouds, the early darkness means that I can see the stars for longer, and they are very clear here. I watched part of the Leonid shower, and I wished on what I saw even though I don't really believe that wishing does anything but make your chest feel full of birds, but it would have been as good to simply stare up at the constellations, how they've shifted since June.

I should talk more. I should type more. I should say things. I should think about them first so they'll come out the way they should, the way I imagine having them enter the world, perfect and pointed as arrows. I should climb more trees. I shouldn't stop singing just because someone else walked into the room. Next time some blue-haired, steel-toed-booted, nineteen-year-old hardass starts in about how humans should all just fuckin' kill ourselves, how we're everything that's wrong with the planet, how pretty soon there's bound to be a big die-off because our current population is not sustainable in the long term, Malthusian catastrophe blah blah blah, but it'll be exicting and cleansing and tasteless joke about offering free razor blades to depressed students, I should stand up and take him to task for being a callow idiot with no sense of his own privilege, and also maybe throw in something about how I think misanthropy of that caliber is generally cowardly and small-minded. I should do that instead of just looking away and shutting my eyes and shaking my head very slowly and slightly.

Monday, November 2, 2009

Happy November!

It's a full moon tonight.

Did you know that in certain Balkans folkloric traditions, inanimate objects left outside beneath a full moon will turn into vampires?

(Vampire boots. Vampire bikes. Vampire umbrellas.)


My Halloween was dreary and damp, but I did get invited to the library staff's party. (I spend so much time in there, I think a lot of people assume I am an employee, or else extremely studious.)

We ate owls:


They were by far the best owls I have ever eaten.



Costumes I saw:

Captain Kirk, Malibu Barbie, Eddie Munster, zombie, zombie cheerleader, zombie Catholic schoolgirl, zombie park ranger, Pippi Longstocking, medieval Batman (actually just a knight costume with a bat motif, according to its wearer, but I prefer to think of it as medieval Batman), zombie with a classic "bedsheet ghost" costume draped over top to create a terrifying zombie trick-or-treater, the Queen of Night, dragon, Artemis, fairy, zombie fairy, Mary Poppins, zombie Celtic warrior, zombie housewife, Tank Girl, Gogo Yubari, "lipstick librarian," spider, gypsy fortune teller, werewolf, candy corn, zombie UPS guy, princess, zombie princess, Link, Max in his/her wolf suit and crown (the character is a boy, the person in the costume was not), zombie waitress, and, of course, two-bit floozy with animal ears.

I was lost things. Mainly, this involved wearing the sort of clothing I normally wear, but sticking all the lost things I found over the course of the day in my pockets, or safety-pinning them to my jacket.