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.

we are on a rescue mission, not stealing from the candy jar, honest

The head librarian's daughter, who's around eleven or twelve, I think, and an assistant librarian and I played pretend today, you know, like kids do. Crawling around on the floor, talking in bad fake British accents, riding the elevator up and down repeatedly, hiding from bad guys in the mop closet. I'd forgotten how much fun that can be. Sometimes I think it's sad that people start feeling too grown-up or too self-conscious to play around like that, just imagination and a couple other people and a willingness to look sort of ridiculous to outsiders, once they get to be teenagers.

two things and a theory

Planting tiny cabbage seedlings at the Black Mountain Community Garden today, I realized that my depth perception was off and my reflexes were a lot slower than normal and every time I stood up quickly, I'd black out for a few seconds, fainting on my feet. Or there'd be little colored dots obstructing my field of vision, and I'd feel myself start to tilt towards the soil, lightheaded and nauseated. It was similar to the physical effects of doing physical labor while severely sleep-deprived, or dehydrated, or when you haven't eaten in a day or so. However, I'd had both breakfast and lunch, plenty of water, and seven hours of sleep the night before. I'd felt okay for most of the day, and I'm not recuperating from an illness or anything. It was really puzzling and scary, and eventually I felt so bad (and concerned that the probability of my doing a faceplant directly on top of the baby cabbages was steadily increasing) that I went to Diana, who helps run the garden and was kind-of in charge, and told her I had to sit down for a while. She was very understanding about it, asked me what was wrong, was I sick, and I told her about the dizziness and disorientation and nausea. She hmmmed a bit, then said it sounded like I might have an iron deficiency.

I then remembered going to donate blood a few months back and being rejected because the preliminary blood test showed I was mildly anemic. Since I felt fine, and hey, the nurse said "mildly," I decided to ignore it. If I had anemia, it clearly wasn't having much of an impact on my health, so why make a fuss? I made a half-assed resolution to eat more raisins, went home, and promptly forgot.

Obviously, without a blood test, I can't know for sure whether I'm (still) anemic or not. But Diana dug up this root for me, this yellow root, I forget the name, and she said it's very iron rich, that if I put it in boiling water, let it steep overnight, mix the result with molasses (also iron rich, and apparently the flavor of the root is pretty terrible and needs to be disguised by something sweeter if it's to be at all palatable) and take a few spoonfuls every day, I ought to feel a lot better very quickly. I don't know whether I can get molasses, but I'm going to try steeping the root tonight. I'll let you know if it works.

For the time being, I still feel strangely woozy, though not like I'm about to pass out on the keyboard, thank god.

The garden was ridiculously lovely, though. Here in North Carolina, early October is still more late summer than fall, it seems. There's gold-green light coming through the trees in translucent columns and sparkling off the river. The grass is still alive and springy, the sky a flat blue with big fluffy cumulus scattered around it like dropped marshmallows. There were a few leaves starting to come down in the garden, and it seemed like they would all drop together in big clumps, which little breezes would swirl in to pick apart and scatter, sending leaves floating slowly through the air in ethereal drifts, waltzing soundlessly. It was like standing inside a painting. Monarch butterflies wending their way through. Mountains in the distance, older than any in the world. You forget places like that exist in real life.

Big, hard green walnuts were also falling from the trees today, though. Sometimes they'd hit me on the head or between the shoulders, and that was decidedly less pleasant. (Actually, it really hurt. I cussed the tree out every time it happened.)

* * * * * *

I spent a lot of the afternoon trying to submit poetry to the student literary magazine, Peal. Today is the last day they'll accept it. I had copies of the three poems I wanted to give them neatly formatted and typed up and paperclipped together, and I went to the Peal office to hand them to the editors in person, for reasons. They told me I had to submit by e-mail. I said I was sorry, I hadn't known, but since I was here now and I'd obeyed all the rules about presentation and formatting otherwise, couldn't I just give them the poems I was holding? Nope, they said. It has to be e-mail. No exceptions.

They were kind of snickering at me behind their hands, partly because I have this unfortunate nervous tic of fidgeting around like someone put squirrels in my pants, contorting my mouth weirdly while I'm at it.

I walked away feeling more hurt than the situation warrented, imagining myself as Miranda July's character in Me & You & Everyone We Know. There's a scene where she tries to give a videotape of her performance art to the snooty director of a local museum on an elevator, and is rebuffed. "Send it in the mail like everyone else."
"But I'm so close!" she protests, holding the tape out with both hands.

* * * * * *

My Theory Of Peanut Butter is this: Everything tastes good with peanut butter. Everything. Period. Pizza? Tastes good with peanut butter. Chalky chocolate sandwich cookies with preservativey, partially hydrogynated corn starchy, bright white filling? Taste good with peanut butter. Tacos? It probably depends a little bit on the individual taco, but in my experience, they taste good with peanut butter. Pasta? Pad Thai with peanut sauce. Tastes good with peanut butter. Strawberry yogurt? Tastes really good with peanut butter. Avocados, pears, grilled cheese sandwiches, breakfast cereal, ice cream, tofu, pesto, coffee, potato chips? They all taste good with peanut butter.

You know I'm right.

(Unless you have a peanut allergy.)