kitty's fine & curled up on the bed leaning on me right now.

blackwater castle is fscking awesome, & my mad love affair w/the whole island of ireland has gained a point of very sharp geographical specificity. in the works: recommending patrick and his stunning property and his overwhelmingly generous hospitality and his impish cheer to everyone who ever again even mentions the emerald isle in my hearing, and figuring out how to get back there.

headlamps and raspberry-picking expeditions are essentials for castle-occupation.

italy--or at least the 3 of her major cities that i was in for my 2-and-a-half-day-tour with walkinthewilds--is sunny and friendly and kind to those who fumble with her tongue, as well as being just as red-tile-roofed and liberally peppered with mountain-skylines and statuary as one would expect.

also, she is awash in gelato and wine.

stadium tours are stadium tours, with or without cactus-flowers, so the sound and the lighting are a bit brash, but you can't keep the magic down, and the old songs layer well with new songs, and the crowd didn't seem to mind at all singing in english--of course, there's no language required for the tonal variations on "ohh-oh-ohh" that dominate a number of those tunes and roar so rewardingly skyward from 100,000 throats howling all together.

a particular couple of italians at san siro got a crash course tuesday in "don't mess with texas."

my students have either taken care of themselves or dropped the ball on their own; i came home to no angsty e-mails at all, just one question and a follow-up answer, & a smaller-than-it-should-have-been folder of assignments that i've skimmed and downloaded to grade tomorrow when my brain catches up w/my body a bit.

i spent my entire birthday in airports/planes--all 24 hours worth. no cake, no booze (except for a wee duty-free sample of coole swan in dublin at our stopover), no wild antics of any kind, really. now that i am done w/class prep, i am considering devoting the rest of my day to catch-up tv and more sleep. after grading, there will be photo organizing. and after organizing, there will be pictures.

to tide you over, l_stboy put one up he took of me when we were climbing on the ruins of an abbey on the lake-isle of innisfallen.

in the packing and tying-up-loose-ends days, both the cat and i ended up needing to be seen by doctors, which are time-consuming processes even if everything's okay (and if everything were okay, you probably wouldn't be going in the first place). me, i've got a little run-of-the-mill lady-parts issue for which i am now outfitted with antibiotics, and mercifully, considering where i'm bound, they're NOT the kind you're forbidden alcohol whilst taking (although i will have to pay attention to what time of day i'm snacking on whole bowls of little bits of scone afloat in clotted cream!). that's the easy part.

the cat, on the other hand, i took in because he kept sneezing, and he hadn't been around any cats with colds to get a cold from, but he was supposed to be staying with shawn and matthew while i was away, and i wanted to make sure he (A) wasn't contagious and (B) wasn't going to see a development of dangerous features to whatever it is that he has on somebody else's watch--at least without me being able to deliver a warning. turns out that none of these precautions paid off quite right. first off, the vet (who didn't get to witness, even after poking the cat in the nose repeatedly with a q-tip, any sneezing) said that because of Pid's age he'd rather be safe than sorry with respiratory stuff, and gave him an antibiotic that i won't be here for most of to administer, so i have to beg that arduous task of shawn too. he also said if it is an infection, Pid could be contagious, so i should keep them separated, which means Pid stays here, all alone, instead of having friends to play with and a human to to sleep by, because shawn's apartment really doesn't have a feasible cat-separation layout. but wait, there's more.

the vet also said he heard an arrhythmia where before there was only a murmur, and that Pid's heart rate was about half that of a normal cat's. but then he couldn't reproduce hearing the arrhythmia, so while he thought we should run some tests sometime soon, he said it would be potentially $140 worth of pointless to try it right then, when the flutter wasn't really happening, so we should do that when i get back, but in the meantime, i should watch him closely and be on the lookout for coughing and fainting. except i'm not going to be here to watch him closely, and Pid's not going to be where anybody else can watch him closely, because he's potentially contagious with the sneezing and needs to stay separated.

anybody wanna come live in my house for a week to run-call-the-vet if you notice my cat coughing or fainting? he's really cute, the vet. fumbled his q-tips while talking to me. is that good incentive?

if it were just my money i'd be throwing away, instead of the kindness and generosity of a number of my friends as well, i'd scrap the trip entirely to stay here and hover, because this is my baby, and that's what you do. instead, i'm trying to prepare myself to go, and worry and hate myself the whole time, and be terrified of coming back to find out how bad it all is, assuming he's here to come back to at all. so i'm pretty unhappy right now, and finding it hard to concentrate on 3-oz bottles and my 1-qt bag.

a couple of weeks ago shawn and i steeled ourselves for a somewhat poignant and bravery-requiring trip to the syracuse farmer's market, where we ended up not needing too much bravery at all to buy tomatoes and lettuces and incense and heaps of strawberries for that evening's potluck up at nellthegreat's. also we got to sample a scape, which i'd never seen for sale before, or known the name of, but i felt all kinds of smart for sight-guessing what it had to be even before we were close enough to smell their cut ends. and then we walked by a center kiosk mostly decorated by stained-glass bugs and ribbons and other small, cute pieces, in the midst of which was this gorgeous moon-adorned tree-scape that i fell completely, extravagantly in love with. i don't spend money on me. i don't grab up things. i'm not a must-have-that sort of girl, but i kept going back and back, and eventually the must-have nature of the scene became clear to the girl selling the art, who lit up like a firework. "really? really? you have no idea how starving we are. you would make our day--hell, our week if you bought that. you would make this month's mortgage!" with encouragement like that, the deal had to find a way to come through, although that became logistically tricky for a while, because neither of us had enough cash, the artists (minding-the-booth-girl and her brother) didn't have a card reader, and the market's ATM was down. after much questing shawn found another, and retrieved his own money for the beautiful thing, calling it a (wholly undeserved and phenomenal, if you ask me) birthday present. while he was off making that happen, i stood and chatted with the sister of the set, who told me about the piece, that it was her brother's, that he'd done it in an inspired fit of careless making, not even using the pencil to draw the pieces first, just free-cutting and hoping they'd fit together, that they were both in their first year of the craft, that they were working out of their basement with supplies they bought for $50 off craigslist when an artist had died and his friend had put up posts to offload some of his belongings, that they'd gone without heat half the winter to save enough to buy the glass to make enough art to sell come summer--and then she ran to the car to grab her brother and drag him back so he could repeat the creation story and we could thank each other, me--him for the act of creation and him--me for the patronage. the picture can't do it justice, because whatever light you use to grab a piece of good stained glass accentuates a range of features at the exclusion of a hundred more, but see:



and this is my favorite of the photos i came home with from the bridge in frederick, which there's not much to say about other than it's worth stopping by and wandering around peering at the detail of for far longer than i had to spend, so you should try it sometime:



and i neglected to mention it at the time, but a few weeks before that paul and john and jill and i took a field trip (literally) out to a venue in canandaigua to hear david byrne (and ani, who was kind enough to open, and kick a little ass all of her own) burn down the house in many, many tones and colors. and also we got to see him wear a tutu:



also: ( monkey redux )

she was the one to hold me
the night the sky fell down
and what was i thinking when
the world didn't end--
why didn't i know what i know now

and that's every last word i'm going to say about that.

today i learned that advertisers target young people because young people are "self-obsorbant."

i'm not sure whether that's supposed to be "self-absorbed," whether something about being observant was intended, or whether she was trying to explain that they absorb information readily, like sponges or three-ply paper towels. some language mutations survive in the wild, but the lack of clarity in this one makes its longevity unlikely, even though it is funny to imagine teens with extra-porous skin, absorbing their own puddles of lip gloss and dramatic effluvia.

first, overall recap: weekend jaunt to MD & VA for afore-mentioned baby shower, jungle-themed. these are people who take a theme seriously, and there was serious monkey coverage at this shower. monkeys in the baby-room decor, monkey pinata, bundles of monkey-bait bananas, monkey finger-puppets, monkeys in the animal crackers, monkey baby clothes... kyneburh assured me that dave's monkey-themed-ness had long preceded the planned arrival of the incoming small person and that the monkey mat in the bathroom had nothing to do with the adjacent nursery. the fact that their wireless has a monkey in its name does kinda back up her story... (more pictures can be found in her friend wendy's flicker batch, which is where the above link will take you to show you the monkey--and if you go to the end of the batch, you can watch video of dave smashing a hole in the monkey's butt, which will become also-thematic.)

driving home today from said event i got to meet up with metalmonkey (see?) for coffee in frederick, which turned into iced-coffees-to-go on a quest for arts-research and bridge photography, which turned into 2 hours of wandering awesome. i took pictures (and when you and another person are at a place both taking pictures, you end up taking pictures of object-with-the-butt-of-the-other-person-taking-pictures), and eventually i might get them off my camera, but there's no hurry, because the ones you want to see are all here (scroll down to get to the slideshow if you're in a hurry, or read the article to learn about our scrap-of-a-day, if you have three minutes. did i mention my co-wanderer wrote it? and took the pictures? his are phenomenal. GO LOOK AT THEM RIGHT NOW.)

and THEN i arrived back at the house to be mobbed by the two wet baby-pool monkeys who live next door, one of whom was in the pool in power-bandit underwear and the other who was all naked monkey-butt, and they dragged me into my own house to chase the cat and fight over paul's exercise ball and chow on my chocolate chips and drop things on the floor and screech at their mom across to the other balcony while pushing buttons on my cell phone and otherwise monkey around (which depiction makes them sound annoying, but they were actually thoroughly adorable, and i have a couple of very cute photos of jonas with towel-cape and naked-monkey-butt escher leaning into the bathtub to poke the cat, but i have a vague sense that posting his naked monkey butt on lj might be rude, if not illegal...)

after typing all of the above, i can't help but hear wahyagar's voice in my head from about 1993 saying "sheah, and monkeys might fly out of my butt."

have you looked at the pictures yet? if not, you are TOTALLY MISSING THE AWESOME. & you wouldn't want to do that...

i came across this today in a picture-and-poems book about renaissance art and heaven on kyneburh's bookshelf while i was taking a people-break from her baby shower--she and dave were thoroughly showered with fuzzy blankets and washcloths and cute clothes, all of them with monkeys on, so life is good in the weese household, for everybody except the traumatized dog chased by small children all afternoon. it made me think of little things that are true about lots of you, and lots of people who aren't still on here or were never on here or aren't still big-picture here at all. it's a lot to live up to, if you want to take on the whole picture, which is why it was in the "saints" section of the book, but not, necessarily, entirely out of reach.

THE GOOD
by Brennan Kennelly

The good are vulnerable
As any bird in flight,
They do not think of safety,
Are blind to possible extinction
And when most vulnerable
Are most themselves.
The good are real as the sun,
Are best perceived through clouds
Of casual corruption
That cannot kill the luminous sufficiency
That shines on city, sea and wilderness,
Fastidiously revealing
One man to another,
Who yet will not accept
Responsibilities of light.
The good incline to praise,
To have the knack of seeing that
The best is not destroyed
Although forever threatened.
The good go naked in all weathers,
And by their nakedness rebuke
The small protective sanities
That hide men from themselves.
The good are difficult to see
Though open, rare, destructible;
Always, they retain a kind of youth,
The vulnerable grace
Of any bird in flight,
Content to be itself,
Accomplished master and potential victim,
Accepting what the earth or sky intends.
I think that I know one or two
Among my friends.

Poll #1417056 the sound of surrender
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

which of these is closest to what surrender sounds like in your head?

(also, i'm covered in spots. actual spots. tiny, pink, pervasive, spots. i've told and told and told you people that i'm allergic to this stuff, but nobody ever seems to believe me)

One may think we’re alright
But we need pills to sleep at night
We need lies to make it through the day
We’re not ok

last-last weekend, not this weekend, which i spent here, trying to work and spinning my wheels, i joined the smiths up at lake bonaparte for a surprise-you-have-party-guests! birthday weekend for jenn. i snuck up first, following matt's excellent directions into the middle of nowhere, letting myself into her parents' lake house with the hidden key, frosting her birthday cake on the counter, and settling down on the porch to grade, scare the ducks off by lifting the camera, and listen to the water lap for a couple of hours until they arrived.

From Lake Bonaparte

i did get some grading done even after they arrived, but mostly we spent 2 days eating, drinking, playing washers (a portable, more points-intensive variation on horseshoes, without horseshoes, b/c of the washers, see), prepping food, eating some more, coloring with caleb, playing cards, toasting marshmallows, taking pictures, ogling sunsets, communing with ducks, tossing things for and shouting at the dog, and skimming around the lake slowly in the house-boat and faster in jenn's cousin's boat when he came by, while folks stopped by, stayed for a while, & went on their ways again.

From Lake Bonaparte

jenn's friends crystal and andy brought their little boy, so there was a great chasing of toddlers with crayons all over the house, usually to the soundtrack of dialog from finding nemo. there were also late night conversations of Great Complication And Import, at least at the time, which we've learned is a matt-tendency and a me-tendency that we bring out in one another when we're drunk. jenn might have preferred that we learn something else, but she was enthusiastic enough about the complicated and cardamom-ed spice cake that i think i'm forgiven.

From Lake Bonaparte

it turns out everybody on the lake is related to everybody else, and everybody knows dirt to swap about the others, and everybody's spent their summers out there since they were kids, and you can feel that vibe and catch the edges of the gossip in the trees even when nobody is talking--it feels like being "from" a place in ways i've never really been. follow the picture-link (any picture-link) to the rest of the set to see washers in action, more lake, duck choreography, low-res fuzzy pictures of the ripe-peach moon, and the world's laziest hummingbirds....

From Lake Bonaparte

we got some sunny weather, and some cloudy weather, and by the time we left, it was raining and brooding and grey, but overall (pics are proof) it was just plain pretty. the best views didn't make it into any pictures, though. saturday night i sneaked away from the firepit and its cheerful company to follow fireflies into the back field behind the camp, where the full moon was an apple of light in a filmy, grey-streaked sky of vapor and ashy stars. once, the clouds made the perfect shape of a landing dove, tracked through with satellites like a giant nebula, and the satellites facilitated a little texting, bringing together fantasy and sci-fi, the immensity of alone-ness under that expansive arch with the immediacy of digital approval of my cryptic planetary observations.

From Lake Bonaparte

this is why it's better to leave the house--because things happen when you go out into the world. today i walked over to jeremy's to drink tea and do homework (which turned into coffee and salad and homework, but that's close enough), and on my way to jeremy's i found myself approaching a house where a man in thick gardening gloves was just adding to his trash pile a tremendous bundle of thorny rose-branches, rich with balloon-red already bloomed flowers and tiny, perfectly shaped buds. he looked up just in time to see my stricken face and said "we've already got vases and vases full in the house--they're getting unruly." "but they're so pretty," i said, pulling out my earbuds so as not to be rude, having already unintentionally by implication criticized his gardening. "they are," he agreed, unremorseful, "and they smell good too." he started back toward the house, and turned around to see me fingering one of them. "do you want some?" "yes," i said, "but i don't have a knife on me." "hang on," he said, and went around the back of the house for longer than i thought it should take to find a knife of pair of scissors. he came back with the scissors and a box, thorns and my bare hands apparently in mind, and cut me off stem after stem of beautiful freshly clipped roses. i thanked him earnestly, and marched merrily on to jeremy's, earphones back in, old happy tunes in my ears, up and down the jagged sidewalks of his old neighborhood, with my gigantic box of roses, which we found a vase for and spent the first part of our visit clipping farther and arranging for his wife to find when she came home from work. so today's lesson: leaving the house = gifts from strangers to share with friends. free roses!

my friend escher is not quite 2--his birthday is six days before mine, so it's soon, but it's not here yet. his face and his haircut and his hair color and the way he runs in his little tiny shoes break my heart some days because they fold my world of memory in on myself; he looks so much like my baby brother to me, and that makes me extra possessive of him, because i like to imagine that if i'd ever had any small boys of my own, instead of being a perpetual borrower, that mine might look a great deal like this one.

yesterday, he and i had tea.

this was sort of impromptu: i had asked paul to pour water in my tea mug when i left to go next door to watch escher, which i'm doing every day last+this weeks so annabel can finish up her wretched math without worrying about her baby boy, but i completely forgot about the tea as soon as i stepped outside to meet him playing on the sidewalk in between our houses. as is our wont, he and i went up and down the sidewalk a few times with a tricycle, and then he led me enthusiastically up my sidewalk and up the stairs, looking back to make sure i was following him. i knew what this was about, of course; escher loves cats, and he knows i have one. sometimes there are cats in the neighborhood to approach, and say "wo-!" about, and sometimes there aren't, and then he wants mine.

so i let him in (he can't reach the doorknob), and he ran to find the cat, and there was a little mutual gazing-at and a bit of gentle poking, and then he wandered into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, pointed out the cows on the milk carton, and then climbed up onto one of the tall kitchen stools beside our counter/table/furniture-object, as if he were right at home, pointing to the fridge again, and the cupboard, babbling happily in his nonsense tongue. the was really nothing to do, with this adorable small person sitting expectantly at my kitchen table, but to unwrap him a granola bar, fix my tea, pour him milk in one of vilejynx's re-purposed-for-juice-glasses jam-jars, and sit down with him for polite, tonally various, entirely vocabulary-free conversation.

the attention span didn't last for the entire granola bar, even with the pictures of the mouw and lala on the lint-roller to talk about, escher chattering cheerfully and intently, such that i end up feeling something-like-illiterate, because it's so clear that he knows what he's saying. when my brother was that age, my mom said he did that, and i, at just-five, could speak both tongues and translate, but either they're not comparable or i've lost the knack. eventually we had to go poke the cat again, and then take our snacks back next door, to finish our tea sitting side-by-side on his front porch-step, where he scooched over to sit glued to me, and leaned, and pointed at everything, watching the cars go by, while we sipped the cold last drops from our respective mugs--the last bites of his granola bar were dumped in the milk, one at a time, for me to fish out and pop into his gleeful little mouth.

that i'm going to grab some time today sometime, to do a little writing for myself, and then somehow it's 11:25, and my brains are all gone to pudding, and i can hardly string sentences together at all, and, damnit, that's not what i want--i'm worth the good language. so every day i go to bed instead, because i'm just too tired, and i tell myself "tomorrow, i'm going to find some time, sometime, to do a little writing for myself."

(instead: grading, course materials, babysitting, editing, angsting, chapter-revising, emailing people in various departments about meetings, schedules, pedagogical technologies, emailing students about technology, grammar, and incomprehensible sentences, occasionally washing a few dishes or vacuuming the pollen-y house, interviewing potential new roommates, & okay a little IM now and again. couch all day working on the above (except for the hour and a half i spent doing it in annabel's art-room, and the half-hour i spent throwing driveway-gravel into the mud puddles at the edge of my yard with escher) = one thoroughly numb butt, to balance out the mushy brain. tomorrow, i should also find some time to take a walk, maybe to timbuktu, to remind my muscles that that's what they're for. i thought the irish coffee reward nellthegreat so cheerfully helped me create by knocking on my back door holding 3 kinds of whiskey & saying "that's a silly question (i'd texted to ask if she had any) might keep me up long enough for art and substance, but it looks like l_stboy was right about the counteraction issue (although definitely not about the mermaids). tsano wins the day's best distraction points, though, for directing me to yesterday's onion article about friendships and dating (which i'm too lazy to look up the link for right now--y'all can all of you handle a little research. i leave it in your capable hands. i'm off to bed; i have some long-distance dreams to influence. muahaha.).)

Q: what can MacGyver make with 2 ziploc bags, 15 inches of duct tape, kitchen salt, a couple handfuls of ice cubes, raw sugar, half-n-half, & a dash of vanilla?

A: ice-cream, if his name is Annabel! (or Jonas or Escher or Adrian)

by M.S. Corley on blogspot

it took me a minute, on first look, to get it, but once you catch on to who you're looking at, every pen-stroke is a tell. poking around the rest of the guy's site is also a sure-fire route to other kinds of cool. the pac-man contest poster is a special fave for this child of the 80s. (passed along from susanargus)

epica from the other room = very guitar-grungy and dramatic, and contrasting very oddly with rabbit in the moon remix of "possession" playing in here where i am (the smiths' house sending emails to professors about chapter-drafts while my wee charge naps, and matt tries to write his own chapters "off duty" in the study)

rain is temporarily gone, and everything's switched over instead to broodingly grey, which i'm not sure i really need much more of, thanks.

sending chapters off is not gratifying, it's just exhausting. all "something's done" means is that now it's time to worry about another fifteen things that should be done already, and "done" is ephemeral anyway--it's always only "done for now" until somebody else who has more clout than me in how this goes says "hey what about."

i need to stay off facebook. i log on to do things like coordinate get-togethers with tammy or see how some kid i knew in high school is doing lately, but inevitably i see things once i'm there that make me ill, and the ill is accumulating; it doesn't wear off as fast these days as do the tiny charms it's intermixed among.

plus, did you know people can lie, and automate robots to make it look like they're online playing games and interacting with other people even when they're not?

earlier, when i was building monster-sized lego-block towers with caleb, journey's "separate ways" came on the radio & made my nose get stuffy. it's been the same voice i hear saying the lines underneath the steve perry's ever since i met the person whose flesh houses it. it turns out (again) that it's not all the way gone after all, but honestly, although i feel a bit of an ass for saying this, the relief there is mediated by something that reminds me a bit of sending chapters off--you know the "no" is going to come again, you know it's going to feel like the whole thing's worthless again, and when you finally take another little step, underneath the hope it'll feel a little more like asking for another punch than the time before.

by the time i "defend," i sometimes fear all i'll be capable of doing is sitting at the conference table in silence, wondering when the ceiling's going to cave. and it's thatposition from which i'm supposed to make important life decisions about careers and committing to geography?

but (this is the part ranagar hates--if by some rare chance he's reading, he should stop here) it's fine, right? it's all fine. the baby will still fall asleep in my arms, sliding into trusting, open-mouthed, limp-fingered dead-weight, and even though they're virtual this summer the students must need me for something, and matt wants to saint me for making his family happy, and escher's little face splits with glee every time i wave at him from the porch next door, and the basil is so green and full it's almost fluffy, and twice this week someone has gifted me with food from alto cinco, and i have plans for several work-and-food dates coming up with friends i haven't seen in a while, and there should be grilling on friday, and transportation plans are falling into place for italy and ireland, and, anyway, diamonds. everything's fine. they're just... things.

Q: why is it that although i've been working on my damnable dissertation all day and i still have heaps left to do and i have no idea how to get any of this crap into anything like a coherent shape and etc. etc. etc., i'm smiling (even as i get on with the ugh)?

A: because (word on the web says) i rock so hard i should give lessons to diamonds.

happy birthdays to metalmonkey and rvy_m, who are both darling gems of bright-eyed wonder (even on surly days) and make my world a more colorful, hopeful, lovely place: i hope your days bring each of you at least one wholly unexpected treasure, and a smile from somebody who loves you.

also, happy me really having no lingering angst today about what day it has been in my own calendar. out here in 2009, it's sunday, and it's pretty here in the uber-sticks of Alfred, and it's time to go forth and see if, of the three buildings actually in this town, one sells coffee.

the dance

still groggy from an all-night drive
i walk out into the violent wind that rushed
us home, and stand, the only stillness in a vivid,
sun-blind storm. fibonacci patterns in black branches
cross and re-cross as if trying to invent
some frantic new mathematics, and through
the rustling tumult i can hear, from several
blocks away, the booming splinter of a tree
torn top from bottom. (fallen, it fills a street,
and by the time i make my way back home
the siren-trucks are gathered,

the neighbors whispering 'disaster')

but the fragile flowers keep their heads, tossing
them like ice-cream-colored ponies, jealous beasts
brought into being on the whims of little girls—
ivory, lavender, thulian, mauve—
and keep their secrets, perfume teased
fro and to across the edges of perception
by those seismic shifts in temperature,
the gently curling shields of leaves arrayed
in prayerful poseys, bobbing neatly down
into the grass and out again, unyielding,
unrepentant, undisturbed.

spring, they say, is no disaster.

last night i called you 'robin' on the phone
after the bandit; i don't recall
what you were threatening to steal
this time, but here in the lilac grove
the bird completes the metaphor: fearless
in the face of winter, first to arrive, orange-vested,
like a rescuer to some dismal scene, he tiptoes
in the tall grass to stare down these gales,
but wise to girls and ponies, he makes his acquisitions
quickly, and if any blushing cluster comes
too close, he flies away:

sharper, darker, faster.



(xp to seanachaia, but it's friends-locked, and something needed to be said to honor lilac season, as it falls away...)

(today is a very good day to quote this little piece of vile-lore)

child/id: "I've got a great idea!"
parent/superego: "a great idea, huh? ...is it really even a good idea, or is it just an idea?"
young person/id: "... ... ..." ::hangs head:: "just an idea."

and planetary obliteration is averted for another day.

somewhere after the middle of the night the piercing cold of the stars gave way to a milky, warmer wind brought by a high, pale moon, chalk-blurring the edges of a grey-black night (all of the blue was gone), & i walked under it a while past the shadowy impressions of what might have been trees by daylight. also in the wind, in the rain, there was poetry, and i found this one too late to share, but this is what it felt like, although i wasn't reflecting on sadness at the time, but rather magic, and the lifting of the feet from the asphalt, and the spasmodic tricks of radiance the rising light played about on the water just over the edge of the ridge.

( tonight the moon )

the storm-band that blew across the eastern half of the US last week kept this one from being 3 days in thumb-country Michigan, but after driving all the way across Canada for the privilege of being there at all, you can bet your buns i squeezed the better part of 2 out of the journey. okay, fine, "all" is an exaggeration--i drove across 3 1/2 hours of Canada, but that ended up being 4 international border crossings in a 48-hour period, which might beat my previous record (t might know; i can't connect the days with places anymore), although it has in common with that long ago European dash that i got few--this time not any--stamps in my passport in the process.

From michigan

Southern Canada, it turns out, is pretty much Southern New York with different road signs, some of them culturally interesting by being bilingual, but it's otherwise highway, with farms, more farms, signs for wineries, & occasionally a stripmall with a Staples & a Burger King you can see from the road. and thumb-country Michigan, it turns out, is pretty similar too, but then if you park your car and follow the sound of waves and that odd echo of vacuum that comes of the pull of vast water against the edges of your sense of space, you find yourself in some magic beachside kingdom where there's no salt, and the cries of birds aren't seabirds, but the eyes and ears cry "ocean, ocean," and your feet roll in the tiny dunes of footsteps to a rhythm kind of like the water.

From michigan

and then if you're me, and a great chunk of your soul is forever ten years old (turns out i'm not alone), you happily spend a day or two (interluded by a long stretch of sharing mead in renn faire mugs and poking burning sticks into the embers and shifting your gaze back and forth from fire pit sparks to stars to sparks to stars to satellites before curling into the nylon snail's-shell of a little tent to listen to the morning-birds chirp restlessly the whole night through) counting stones, and collecting shells, and turning colored pebble-gems over in the light, and dropping the bigger ones as plunking craters, and wandering amid the dune-grasses and the tiny sand's-edge trees, following deer prints, overturning bird-bones and the painted shrines of other seasons' passers-by.

From michigan

there are more pictures through the link of art and scenery, and none at all of fire, because i thought i'd have a second night for that, but you can't always plan on swaths of thunderstorms. you also can't plan those unexpected holes you fall into in unfamiliar places, the ones where you just blink and do become ten again and spend who knows how long peering under the branches of some other kid's abandoned fallen-limb lean-to, twisting the chains on a rusty swingset you find in the woods, dangling your feet, talking about video games, talking about changing your name, the part where your focus narrows to the miniature, to the cube structures of crystals in stones, to ribbons of glitter in swaths of sand, to what creatures you can shape out of small slivers of packing-wax, to just the toes of constellations, to the reflections of sun-caught first-leaf trees and still-stick-stark dark skeletons in tea-spoons. all in all, it was more than a bit enchanting.

From michigan

(it also pointed out to both me and metalmonkey that we're technologically dependent to the point of being stupid: we had his laptop out tuesday night to look for star-maps, and found out that we were too far out to gank a signal. then we sat in a tent in the rain for 3 hours wednesday grumbling, and wondering what the weather forecast looked like, and bemoaning how we didn't have a wireless signal to find out. and then we got into the car to go look for dinner because it was too wet to start a fire, and that's where we got the weather report that told us to give up and go home. but did it ever occur to us before seeking food that the cars had radios and the radios knew about the weather and we didn't need a wireless internet connection to get to a storm report? nope, not once. so also, i'm a little bit ashamed, but at least it's in a laughing-at-self sort of way!)

next in my “three days” series (united airlines should hire me, except i do mine as a beggar rather than a princess, so i wouldn't be that valuable for advertising purposes)--three days in manhattan. there's a grey eye glances song called “manhattan,” which could have been concordance; it's an old song, and maybe they played it this weekend. originally, they were the pivet point on which the trip was hinged, why this weekend as opposed to any other would be the one i'd finally buckle to the insistent pressure of my very favorite of my chosen-sibs, who's been living in the city for four years, years during which i've been in cny with both feet down, saying “i hate it there i hate it there i hate it there!” and refusing to cross the distance. this time, he bought the train tickets, business class, even, to spoil my little ass halfway to rotten long before i ever set foot on the isle, and i had no choice but to climb aboard. the band did a breast cancer benefit show somewhere in north jersey friday night, and aaric bought us tickets, and the plan was he would meet me at penn station, we'd stash my things at his place nearby, we'd go back to the station to catch a train to jersey, see the band, benefit research, bask in nostalgia (we used to chase them from show to show in virginia & maryland in the late 90s), & come back up late that night, so he could spend the weekend showing me his city.

what really happened was he met me at penn station, stashed me at his place nearby, and went back to work, because corporate law is a fickle business not well suited to making plans, and folks w/expensive contracts don't really give a crap if you've got concert tickets and your best friend from when you were fourteen is languishing moodily in your room. fortunately for all of us, aaric's bookshelf had on it the last of carey's second “kushiel” trilogy, which i hadn't read and had to (5 down & this one out since last i'd permitted myself an indulgence in epic fantasy, as it tends to be a (glorious) time-suck), and his freezer held cold vodka, and his cabinet/fridge things to mix it with, and his red couch is ever so smushy and comfortable, so my languishing turned out to be a quite delightful way to spend an evening, and while i regret missing out on the show, the nice part is that since it was a benefit, the money wasn't wasted. i alternated reading on the couch with sitting in the windows watching people on the streets for a few hours, and when eventually he came home we went out, wandered the streets of hell's kitchen for a while, decided on thai food, had a very tasty dinner at one of the tight, tiny, elbow-to-elbow seating, posh little restaurants in his neighborhood, and then played wandering phone tag for a while w/his friend adam and eventually met up with a crew of folks at a courtyard bar with $3 margaritas and hung out bantering with actors and polished young professionals until last call, by which point i had entirely forgotten thinking i might have something to be moody about.

saturday i learned about grocery-store shopping in the city, how the stores are always in deep basements and you have to know where they are to find them, subterranean florescent aisles of all the the same goods, accessible only through such narrow walkways that everyone's always in each others' way before anyone has hands full of bags; it's hard to imagine how any of the goods got in there! we had a birthday party to prepare for, though, which required snacks and liquor, so a-shopping we did go, weighing the different economies of buying heavy things like soda and ice at the corner store where they're more expensive but it's many fewer blocks to carry them home. we rearranged his studio apartment to look less like a bedroom/living room/dining room continuation and more like a dance space (which turned out to be a very important likelihood to have prepared for), and i washed all of his dishes for free (i didn't know 'til monday that there was a maid, so i didn't know to ask what her going rate was) and drew on his windows with soap, we ordered saag paneer and tiki masala and naan in for dinner, and he said 8 so around 9 (he guessed 9:03; vince, the first guest to arrive, said it had been closer to 9:09 that he'd sent a text announcing his arrival) people started coming in to mingle and eat the food and drink his booze and hijack his itunes and augment his list with the infinities of youtube and dance and clown and create photo-opportunities that might not all be entirely suitable for lj (suffice it to say that if one had been expecting a small crowd version of a drug-free (at least in sight) queer-as-folk boys party (at least in the first 2 seasons, which are all i've seen, the lesbians are known for incredibly dull showers and tea parties), one would not have been disappointed; partial nudity occurred, clothes were swapped, we learned more about amy's underwear than perhaps we'd wanted to (although we also learned she's got the body for it) and the birthday boy was gifted with a lap-dance from hot canadian named kenny). i also got to talk philosophy-and-religion for an hour or so with a future lifetime-academic (who isn't quite sure he knows it yet, but i am), & met a boy named only initials.

sunday i ventured out with a building key all by myself to go down around the corner a couple of blocks to bring us back coffees and biscuits/scones for breakfast, & then we went to spend a few hours wandering central park in absolutely perfect spring weather, sunny, high 60s, a strong breeze blowing elm-seeds in flurries like petals or snowflakes, cormorants sunning their wings alongside painted turtles in the ponds, where mostly we people-watched—small children striding purposefully in their backpacks, middle-school orchestra members milling around in 2s and 3s between sets, plumed horses with top-hatted drivers pulling bored looking families around, women in elegant hats and clunky shoes, men in motorcycle racing-jackets with movie-star sunglasses, an old man (or a young one with a costume beard) inexplicably in full wizard's regalia, a jazz band by the fountain, a raucous something-like-bluegrass-comedy band with a tuba, every kind of dog (ranging in size and cuteness from earnestly striding long-haired chihuahuas to ungainly standard poodles).

eventually we got hungry, and caught a cab to chelsea, where there was an all-you-can-drink mexican brunch at maraca's, and the waitresses kept coming back with more plastic toys propped up in new doses of diners' frozen drinks. we walked back across the neighborhoods afterwards, peering at towering architecture, puzzling at an infinite variety of how-things-work-different-here scenarios of people on and yelling down gaping-stairway holes in sidewalks trying to accomplish tasks that happen behind the scenes at the back doors of stores in smaller towns and suburban strip malls, grabbed a movie for the evening, and contented ourselves afterwards with an evening spent hanging out on the red couch with a film, leftovers from the party and several nights' dinner. in the morning, there was shouting political news on tv, taken in whilst still in bed (a practice i find abhorrent—no wonder people in high stress jobs are angstful all day long), then some more wandering the streets to pick up coffee on the way back to penn station, and then i spent the remains of the day like i spent the first half of friday—watching the underground graphiti and leaning-beam tunnels and slid-downhill forgotten trashpiles of the city, mansions of new jersey, and the backyards and abandoned stations and garages and green fields and rivers of rural new york slide by the windows of amtrack's empire service train, where there are plugs by all the chairs so that the working never, ever has to stop.

(actual album will follow--i haven't had time to build & caption one yet is up now! (click here))

[drafted 4/30 but abandoned when i ran out of time to finish sentences; finished tonight b/c i just got home from tutoring, am too wiped out to make enough sense to grade, & am just trying to stay awake long enough to eat something for dinner so that i'm not up & hungry at 4 in the morning]

---

a kid i like just came into my office to collect the portfolio he hadn't picked up when i gave them back on tuesday, because he wasn't going to be in class today either, he said.

"i've just given up."
"are you going to turn in a paper?"
"i might. i don't know. it's not you. i hate English, but i actually looked forward to your class. it's just everything."
"sometimes the crap gangs up on you, i know. it can be tough."
"and you don't even know the crap that went down last week. anyway, i just wanted to say thanks for everything."

he held out a hand for me to shake, shrugged his backpack onto his shoulder, and walked out the door. there came, not surprisingly, although i'd hoped, because he could have passed, no last paper.

often you win, but sometimes you lose them.

or just the only one who's bothered by it? (this is the sort of thing, by the way, that keeps me from getting my papers graded. i'm reading innocently along, and a perfectly "normal" word jumps out and bites me, and says "hi, i'm violating a primarily unwritten rule of English orthography!" and then i have to make lists of words and explain my distress to the internet)

the word "smooth" is spelled wrong. we use an e, in English, at the end of words that end in "th" to indicate that they're the hard "th" we say in "smooth" (the hard "th" is the (voiced) eth in "this" and "that"; the soft one is the (unvoiced) thorn in "thursday").

to wit: breathe, bathe, teethe, tithe, seethe, soothe,
but
breath, bath, tooth, truth, and forsooth

if we're going to spell it "smooth," it should be pronounced like there's a different vowel in "smith"; the way we say it ought to be spelled "smoothe."

breakfast—the other b—was provided down yet one more flight of narrow town-house stairs, in a snug little basement decorated with sketches of flowers and old black and white photos of the town's maritime history; the food was perfect (perhaps barring the ubiquitous white toast), the tea was plentiful, and our host on hand to offer suggestions for what to see during our day and how to get there. he also, being a traveler himself, had thought of all of the important things, and showed us around the outside to a combination locker where we left my huge backpack and saint213's suit for retrieval on our way back to the train so that we didn't have to drag them all around town with us. equipped with combination, suggestions, and of course the google map, with instructions for where to meet for brunch at 1:30, we checked out at half-ten and struck out in the direction of the farmer's market, the shore, and wherever else the sun would take us. what we found was that portsmouth of a sunny sunday april morning is charming and gorgeous; we walked its streets, sampled pepper-jellies in the market (and the “we” that was not me added a bison burger to the things-to-sample), took pictures of statues and churches and buildings and old forts and sea weed and flowers and trees and gravestones and leisure sports and midway-signs and sailboats and old town houses, read up on our history on various plaques, learned a bit about art (apparently it's impossible to sculpt a true-to-scale statue of a man that depicts that he is both short and slender, because sculpting him slender makes him look tall, so to show that he's a small man, which is apparently important to his one-armed, one-eyed legend, he has to be presented as if of a normal girth).

From england09

we wound up walked-out (the hungoverness might have contributed to our lack of stamina) just early enough to the brunch-café to have time for a lingering espresso drink at the bar and to chill for a while in its quiet shade listening to coffeeshop radio and speculating about wine notation until the new bride and groom and all their local friends and in-town family arrived. i made a fuss at katie as soon as she came in, declaring that since i'd flown across an ocean for a weekend, i hadn't seen her in some 6 or 8 years, and i'd hardly gotten to stand still near her at her wedding party (weddings are notoriously like that), she was sitting by me and i would fight anyone who tried to horn in on my privilege. she laughed, and said i'd get at least some katie time but she had obligatory flitting to do, and then sat down across from me and stayed, and let the others flit to her. ::wins:: also the food was terrific, even for hungover people, and nothing like white bread, and there was much mingling and merriment and getting to chat at least a bit with pete, & to find out for certain that katie's staying, having already signed paperwork to make her married-english, and that their honeymoon would be (by now has been) a sneaky little trip to somewhere not too far away that they weren't telling anyone about, so that nobody would be able to find them. saint213 colluded w/dana about her next couple of days in england and meeting up in london, which by all reports they did, and i swapped gossip with katie about various folks-back-home and their houses and babies and all of those growing-up things they keep acquiring, and then somehow it was going-on 4 instead of the 3 we'd expected, and it was time to head back towards the storage-locker and the train station and, eventually, by way of a scenic slow train with lots of naps and pleasure-reading, the chaotic undergrounds of london, where saint and i parted our ways with a hug and a shared grin and a “thanks for being so truly excellent to travel with,” and he went off to catch up with the gf and his real life, and i took tubes and trains across the night up into the suburbs of wherever, where ssartain put me up for a last night after a tour of his gardens, tossing my travel-clothes in the wash, letting his mad little mops-of-dogs wag all over me, and feeding me (white bread) cheese-toast (for which he's forgiven, because he has small children) and chamomile.

From england09

morning, then—-more trains, more tubes, more planes, more idling in airports than anyone would ever really need—and home again in time to crash for <6 hours before dashing off to work in the morning, exhausted but rich with miles and towns and accents and voices and seasons and transport modes and architectures and treats and smiles and purchases (candy for the roommates, the bear for the bebe, postcards for family & almost-family written at heathrow & sent off with english airmail stamps, magnets for a birthday down the road somewhere, tea to take home and espresso-and-an english-pickle-sandwich lunch for me), and of course pictures, lots and lots of pictures. reflective conclusion: parts of london are quite nice, and parts i could do without, but it's a city; even parts getting the thumbs-up is impressive. as for the rest, if i were employable in the country at all for doing what i do, i'd be all set to move. i love the shapes of the insides and outsides of houses, i love everything in bloom, i love how the woods look like faerie-stories in ways i can't articulate, i love trains that lead to everywhere, i love all the shapes of vowels and voices, i love tea and fascinating candies, i love the way the guy at the newsstand who sells you the candy calls you “sweet'eart,” i love the smell of curry-shop intruding between other cigarette- and bus-exhaust and from-somewhere-unseen-flower-smells (even when i'm not in town long enough to actually taste any), & even at King's X, which was way too much crowded, chaotic train-and-tube station for my liking, i loved the community spirit and orderliness of the soccer hooligan trying to rouse the rabble after some game of some sort, the bobbies arriving to drag him away, and the whole gathered crowd of train-awaiters singing him some sort of in-unison goodbye song as he bounced manically, waving back at his friends from within his captors' grasp as he was removed from the scene. third trip over, there really was a sense of home about the place, especially in the air outside the city, how it always smells like something sugary has been steeping in flower-cups of dew all night. england (with a lot of help from the ex-pat friends and their english cohorts who've shared their hospitality and expertise over the years of those trips), she's been good to me.

From england09

morning came on thrumming bus-wheels, accompanied pleasantly by the aforementioned amazing breakfast (smoked fish of multiple varieties, and all sorts of fruit, and of course eggs and sausages if we wanted (i didn't), and miso & other japanese breakfast foods as options, and snug little cooked tomatoes, and figs in syrup, and pastries and muselix and pickled onions o my (i'll spare you the accounting of what i actually consumed; suffice to say you'd find it weird, and i thought it came together nicely)), and then ssartain and i parted ways across the tracks from one another at the station, catching trains heading in opposite directions; he went back north to his suburbs, and i went south to Victoria to meet up with saint213 at exactly the appointed time and place. his gf was with him, playing porter with his things, and helpfully got us straightened out re: ticketing computers to acquire our already-purchased rail passes, and he and i had just enough time to buy a pair of egg sandwiches (his was breakfast; mine would be lunch at the other end of the trip) and hop onto a train for the southern countryside (a confusing prospect that i was very glad i had him there for, because i'm capable of following signs to platforms, but it turns out there's more to it than that; trains in england tend to split apart at various junctions along the way, and you have to know which car to be in to split in the right direction later in your journey. the train loudspeakers make lots of announcements about which cars you should be in (“the rear four cars will be continuing on to portsmouth”), but there's no clear labeling anywhere of which car you're on; the only thing for it seems to be counting, or from the inside, counting sets of doors).

From england09

despite confusion trains are charming: we sat across from each other at a little table beside a humongous window, and he told me stories about when he'd lived in various places in london, as we made our way out of the city, and then we gazed and rolling hills in sun and cloud, made bets about the weather, speculated as to the purposes of tall, spired buildings rising on distant hills, and bought chocolates to share when the little cart came by. he had a camera full of pictures and a head full of stories about crossing and adventuring in spain, so we spent a good while on that, telling travel tales, daydreaming about the romances of the road, talking wistfully about the writing we're not doing, and pondering what to someday do with our lives (it felt a little like being ten, or at least the ten i could have been, in all the right ways, and i only kind of know what i mean by that, but if you're interested enough to ask, i'll try to elaborate). something like two hours later we found ourselves following a print-out of an email of very descriptive walking directions from the fratton station to the portsmouth b&b i'd reserved a room in (hereby recommended to anyone who has the slightest inclination to spend a day or more in the south of england—place was marvy, host was grand, & i felt a bit like a genius for securing it, even though all i'd really done was follow a link katie had sent me in a list of nearby options), where the code in the box got us a key to a completely darling attic room with dramatic eaves and a kettle & basket of teas there for the brewing. we opted out of tea for the time being, instead perusing the what-to-do-in-portsmouth guide with an eye for the next day's sightseeing for a while, cross-referencing paper maps with the google versions on saint213's pocket-internet, and then availing ourselves of the handily-provided iron to un-travel-wrinkle our fancy duds & getting pretty.

From england09

getting to the wedding meant, following the morning's tubes and trains, a walk across a section of portsmouth, milling for an hour in the groom's family's kitchen with a bunch of reservedly-friendly young strangers also seemingly out of place in party clothes (after killing a bit of time taking pictures in a nearby kirkyard, because we'd planned so well that we were early), milling for another few minutes in the yard hoping that would magnetically call the running-late party bus, and then riding said party bus back up into the rolling hills, telling a few more stories but mostly listening to the bantering of the flock of friends all around us getting in and out of their bus-seats, mocking each other mercilessly, and otherwise being infectiously entertaining. eventually the bus left the highway for winding, climbing roads between farm houses and cottages and tiny barns thick with overhanging foliage of every shape, and pulled into the gravel circle in front of the manor house just in time for us to pile out, tumble into a pile of meet-and-greets at the door (although the only person i had to meet, and introduce saint213 to was dana, because the bride was off being pre-wedding secretive and chip was lurking in the dark corners of rooms being mysterious), file through and into seats, and start a wedding. the ceremony was sweet and thoughtful and just long enough, and involved (along with the rest of the evening, and brunch the next day as well) a lot of kissing—i've never seen so much kissing in one wedding, and it made me rather gleeful, really). the groom was overtaken by goofy grins, the bride had feathers in her hair and cried a little, and small children passed around handfuls of rose-petals for us to throw at them when they came outside just after (where we learned that throwing rose-petals while trying to take pictures of throwing rose-petals while holding a glass of champagne just provided by a circling member of the manor staff is somewhat difficult, and that the most technically valuable part of taking a date to a wedding is so that he can hold your other stuff (purse, jacket—and he volunteered, i swear) while you're trying to achieve such feats).

From england09

the rest of the afternoon and evening were consumed by photography—everyone of everyone else—drinking out on the gravel, catching up with katie and chip and dana, making new friends, drinking with said new friends, taking pictures of the house, taking pictures of the yard-chickens, taking pictures of other people taking pictures, and eventually going inside to have an amazing four-star restaurant dinner with our drinks-and-pictures; we were seated with the party bus kids, and had a grand time trading tales about our respective homes and travels, although i also did a bit of flitting, trading spots with dana for a while to meet-and-greet with chip and some of katie's family. at the link are pics of the scene from every angle, the bride in all kinds of light and wearing all sorts of faces, the groom beaming like a lighthouse, the bar upstairs where karl drunkenly recommended all sorts of bands to me that i can't now remember, and the nest of underground rooms—dug out by prisoners! who may or may not have had anything to do with nearby encampments of soldiers from new zealand (i'm shite even with my own history; expecting me to get the english right would be absurd)—that tell and were a good setting to re-tell stories of the manor's history as well as its part-time status as an enclave for romantic dinners and its suitability to tipsy american girls photographing one another imprisoned and endungeoned. the underground rooms also made a grand setting, as the night grew late, for saint213 and a couple of musically-inclined drunk englishmen, one of whom had brought a guitar and another of whom turned out to be quite handy at playing the drums on a coffee table, to create a rousing pub-sing of old school reggae and r&b tunes with glasses of scotch in hand, and the gardens, crazy as this sounds, because it's england, turned out to be a perfect fit for stargazing, waxing poetical about childhoods and the magnetic pull of the yawning black, and trading observations about wholly different geographies and their respective constellations (and the sharing of orion, who wanders back and forth between the two).

From england09

the party bus left at midnight, and was a much different bus on the way home than the way there, because everyone was drunk, and so everyone was bestest friends, and there weren't quite enough seats so some folks were on the floor in the aisles, and once singing has started it's hard to stop, so it was a twisty-road high school flashback of songs and laughter and rowdiness, and although the motley crüe was my fault, it was saint213 who got us started singing (and whistling) guns-n-roses. there were vague plans for an after-party at karl's and kat's place that disintegrated before we made it back to portsmouth, which was vaguely disappointing at the time but which we would agree come morning had probably been for the best, and we left dan trying to stuff karl into a bin for fun along the sidewalk when we tottered off in the direction we had come, room-key in hand, to traverse the town through scattered flocks of drunk-o-clock natives clustered in and around the fast-food chicken places, where we ended up spending most of an hour trying not to ogle too much at the girls' slutty saturday night attire when saint213 decided a greasy burger of some sort was exactly what the hour required. i was theoretically horrified by this idea, and yet ate plenty of his chips as we finished off our shivering walk before tip-toeing with the remnants of his illegal take-away up the several flights of stairs, to crawl happily into our respective beds, only a little spinny, and lie awake for a half hour or so giggling about the evening's people and events before setting his phone to wake us in time for the latest possible breakfast and bidding each other a friendly goodnight.

as was notable by my appeal for layover-intervention, the first stage of the england-adventure involved managing not to go mad before even getting to england, a feat with, thanks to how i've got lovely friends, was managed in stellar colors of silver and blue and yellow and baby-leaf green—i landed at dulles, called erc from one of the adorable little endangered inter-terminal shuttles (apparently we've decided to upgrade to a tube), sat and journaled outside in the sun for no more than ten minutes, and then hopped into his shiny silver convertible for a mid-day diversion that included a tour of his and dru's new suburban home and all of its paint colors (turns out that while red and green are out, he can see race-car orange). my favorite part was the yard, because it was spring down there, and there were flowers growing... along the road sides, in the front yard, under the swingset in the back. up north we'd only just started getting forsythia and bulbs, but down in VA everything was nodding tulip-heads and daffodils and the snowy blooms of pear trees already down and rolled, brown-wrinkled, into the curbs and corners. we met uttencookie for lunch at a strip-mall pizza joint, and then dru joined us for a while, and then mommy came by for a little mall-sidewalk ice-cream with the table positioned so she got sun and i got to stay in the shade, since i'd already gotten slightly burnt in the 12-minute pre-noon ride across chantilly with the top down, and so when she dropped me back off to go through security again, i was full-bellied and sun-drowsy and had just enough time to buy ear-plugs to try to sleep with, change some currency, and board a plane across the ocean.

From england09

actual england started very, very early in the morning, with a landing sometime before 6am, although it was 8:30 or so by the time i got through customs, across the infinite poorly labeled subterranean expanses of heathrow, across town on a couple of tube lines (only screwing up and having to double-back one stop, which on no sleep and with the right fare-card anyway i thought was not poorly done at all), and to the hotel where i was to meet ssartain for a day of sightseeing. i beat him there, so i availed myself of a lobby powder room to wash my face and change out of airplane-clothes, and then sat in plush lobby chairs journaling again for a while, 'til he arrived so we could stash our bags with the concierge, wander across the rainy street for breakfast and tea, and plan our day. breakfast was a white bread and white cheese and salmon sandwich (i learned, over the course of the weekend, that the british are very fond of salmon and even more fond of white bread, preferably with white things on it), and although the tea was just stash or twinings or something otherwise perfectly pedestrian in its little anywhere-café foil package, it convinced me it was morning well enough to make a pretty good day out of my no-sleep airplane mental-fog (although london's actual fog that friday did its damnedest to counterbalance the effort). we settled on a walk along the thames, westminster to the tower bridge, and despite the grey i did an admirable touristy effort of taking lots of pictures. also, i might be in a youtube video posted by a group of touring students from someplace interestingly-accented; they stopped us along the walk, on a scavenger hunt to record agreeable strangers performing odd tasks, and made us warble “my bonny lies over the ocean” at them, for which we were rewarded effusive thanks and lots of giggling.

From england09

the highlight of the thames for me, unsurprisingly, was being surprised by stumbling across The Globe, right there in all its reconstructed glory in our path, and having ssartain say “you know, i've never been inside. we could do the tour.” he's lived here for 6 years, people, and never seen The Globe. i was too sleepy to be appropriately appalled, and too delighted by the opportunity to haze him much, so merrily we went. at first there was disgruntlement, because they said we couldn't take pictures, and i wanted pictures, even though they said no for a very, very cool reason: rehearsals were going on, and the schedule had been screwed up so that although usually tours and rehearsals didn't coincide, today they did, so we had to have our tour in bursts—gather outside for some briefing and explanation, file in in silence to sit on the wooden pews to watch a while and gape at our surroundings (from below, where we could see the ceiling of the stage), file back out in silence for more informative backstory, file in to watch a while longer from a different vantage point (up top, from whence we could see the trap-doors), & file back out again for a final debriefing on our way to the gift-shop. the actors, of course, were amazing and also hysterical; they were running repeatedly through a few early scenes of “romeo and juliet,” and the boys—romeo and his cousins—chasing each other about and lolling their tongues in lewd iambic commentary and rolling around playing drunk on the floor were impossible not to laugh at, no matter how quiet we'd been told to be, and they were supposed to be paying attention to the director, but they kept hamming for us (which, really, is what Globe-actors are hired to do, so you couldn't blame them). and we got luckier—when we first went in, the actors were at tea, and we got to take a few quick pictures anyway before they came back to the stage.

From england09

after Globe, lunch (v. posh version of fish-and-chips that really wasn't like fish-and-chips at all, and mostly tasted of clear fry-grease and blank potatoes and white sauce) and more walking, past buildings and boats and tunnels and buses and museums and pubs and giggling groups of schoolkids and accents from mostly all over the world except england (this was particularly noticeable along the thames walk because it's so touristy, but it was really a problem all over london—i heard very few british accents, and certainly no accent-continuity, until i got down to portsmouth where people from there actually lived). when we got down near the tower bridge we called saint213 and played bridge-tag for a while (i.e. wandering the road sides dodging tourists in the high wind, shivering, wondering if cell technology is really all that cool, and eventually realizing we were on the wrong sides of the bridge from one another & regrouping, after we'd each climbed the stairs at least twice) before finding one another and having a coffee by the “tower” whilst the menfolks traded working-abroad-in-england stories and i listened to accents in passers-by, ssartain's thoroughly mutt-ed from growing up everywhere but with strong notes of the carolinas, saint213's a self-described muted kiwi (“the trick is not moving your mouth at all”). the latter had to run off soon to an appointed getting-cleaned-up-for-a-wedding haircut, & the former & i bought a few postcards and tea in a nearby shop mostly for the fun of spending adorable pound-coins (i brought home 2 new ones for my collection!).

From england09

& then at that point i declared myself done for the day—it was somewhere near 4 in the afternoon and starting to rain, and i'd walked my new sandals for miles of city and suburb and airport and theatre for 2 days straight, and it was time to take them off and crash, so we found the nearest station (we meaning "me," who is apparently handy at this sort of thing), tubed back to Paddington, checked in to the free-night Hilton, & forced a few more hours of low-key awakeness via reading novels, watching bad Jim Carrey movies, & ordering dinner from room service ("panini" of thick white bread that somewhat overpowered the tasty greek fillings that came inside) so that sleep would happen at an england-normal hour and with it, hopefully (successfully) would come morning and the actual day of adventuring that i'd flown over for. chapter 1 fin = (with the addition of the airplane ear-plugs to drown out the idling buses stopping at the station) zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

wee mr. smith may be, as his da points out daily, half-English, and therefore surrounded by (or at least at the other end of a post-route from) English relatives, but it seems i brought him back his very first Paddington Bear (whom he brought with him on our walk today, and held by the hat, and had animated baby-babble conversations with, to which a number of passers-by said "awwwww"). super babysitter points: they go right over here.

remember that comment about how it was 32 on the 3rd-to-last-day of school? tomorrow is the 2nd-to-last-day of school, and today it's 95. going out to meet a friend to sit and grade requires sandals, a tank top, 2 kinds of sunblock & a long-sleeved shirt to cover my arms with anyway.

this place crazy, yo.

cray

zee.

it's not quite as dire as all that.

this time.

but the chastisement is still more than justified, so it stays.

choose your enemies carefully, for they will define you
make them interesting, 'cause in some ways they will mind you
not at the beginning, but when your story ends
[they're] gonna last with you longer than your friends

they're mine, anyway; they always have been. there's nobody to blame but the same culprit as every other gorram time. sweet-baby-j says everything is going to be okay, but it's comfort and not prescience we call him for, and i don't think he can drawl me out of this one (either, any more than all the rest). i have begun to wonder how long it can really take one person to learn that doing anything will eventually equate to doing more harm than good, so long as that person's the one doing the doing, but the new math answer is too simple to even warrant a good wonder: too long. too damn long already, and too many messes made along the way. o self-loathing, if you would just learn to speak up before i get close enough to people to fucker-up the in-between; if you would just shut me down sooner, i'd do so much less damage, and leave so much less disappointment and well-earned anger in my wake.

at the point of reckoning there's a new math in play,
all subtraction, all the minutes taken from the length-of-days,
no matter the bright pennies that we thought would weigh like gems
we find we're nothing but the sums of our sins.

i'm grading portfolios, and portfolios, for my students, are a collection of all of their informal stuff for the semester: homework assignments, class notes, workshop questions-and-answers, brainstorming, visual idea clusters, etc., etc., etc. this means the doodling they do in class while taking notes and listening to me talk also comes home to me in their portfolios, and sometimes it presents me with a glimpse of myself from the other side of the great divide.

J, in my 4pm class, finds me funny, & has all semester. he's the one i told i would immortalize on Facebook (but then forgot to) when he told C (different C), who had just asked a deliberately dumb question to which i'd flown back with a technically cumbersome and correct quick answer, "whoah--you just got smacked with some Englishnometry."

apparently, like i remember doing myself in school, J also decided to record some of his amusement for posterity. on the back of a page of notes alongside a doodle of a horse, some spiral threads up a margin, and a sketch of a rock and a ruler named after himself and me telling each other, respectively, "you rule" and "you rock," i found this little gem:

CUZ "
I know that when
I talk to you,
some of what I say
goes in --> [sketch of a face w/one big ear here]
some of what I say
hits & bounces
off & lands on the
floor"
TYRA

i think, as recorded observations go (and could go)... i'm okay with this.

it's just the dissonance of it that's hard to get over--i was leaving campus last night, 6:30 or so, and the sky was dark with cloud, there was rain on my windshield, i was holding onto the steering wheel tight to compensate for the slipping of knit-gloved fingers, and the trees along both sides of the road were wholly barren clusters of brown-grey sticks, and i was trying to overlap that with the class-planning in my head--planning for the last 2 days of classes at the end of spring semester (don't get excited--that doesn't mean the working or the grading's done, it just means a break in the schedule of that commute) before they scatter for the "summer."

the end of the semester where i'm from correlates with pale kids sunbathing outside their dorms, throwing frisbees accidentally into just-past-blooming pear trees that sneeze puffs of leaves and lingering petals with resentful shudders at the intrusions, showing off with dogs, flip-flops, sunblock, students falling asleep beside radios under leafy shade trees with their books spread around to feign studying, sweaty hands on stubborn coffee cups because it's too early to give in to icing it... it's nothing like that here. once in a while they wear shorts and sandals, and come in blue-toed and shiver-kneed, and the occasional lower-to-the-ground shrub has begun to shyly leaf, but the hot coffee's still an equilibrium necessity; yesterday it was 32 in utica, and there were rumors, albeit so far as i saw unfounded, of snow.

(more to follow, about the wedding i went for and all i got to do and see while i was there, but i came back in work-debt far over my head, so there's only time for this one wee jot for now):

ridiculously fluffy bedding, a complementary breakfast with more things to choose among than i could possibly have consumed if given the whole day, and a hot shower with excellent water pressure at the paddington station hilton thanks to ssartain's accrued points from frequent business tripping (which left money over for a movie and room service) are a posh and lovely way to surrender to jet lag for a night in london, and yet...

and yet.

there's still an intangible measure by which they don't actually out-do sleeping curled into sweaters in the rental car the night before returning it, in a hotel parking lot because i and my then-companion lacked the cash to go inside, or, for that matter, even find a hostel, calling dinner/breakfast the last crumbs of bread bought days ago and the crusty nutella left around the bottom edges of a jar.

the road is not what connects the points and places in a life; the road is the life, and for all that hands and pens contribute, often it's tired feet that tell the best tales.

last night i ended up with seven people over, music requests, work-and-giggling, and the whole pie gladly and quickly gobbled up, so the evening turned out just fine and dandy.

now i'm in a robe letting the lotion on my feet soak in before i get dressed and cram the last of my re-arranged articles in my bag and head out... got lots of grading done, although not as much as i'd hoped, but my hopes were unrealistic (and the music requests, ultimately, worked against the goal).

it's sunny and lovely out and yet something feels brooding and ominous somewhere... probably it's got something to do with the numbers of hours i'm going to have to pretend to be a person who can sit still, but you never know--i could land in england in the middle of a zombie invasion, or whatever it was exactly that happened in freakangels, or that they're-not-exactly-vampires movie, so if this is the last i see of you, think fondly of me, and when they get to your shore, blow the bastards to smithereens.

my roommates are away at various functions & obligations. earlier, i had random company and help making pie for study hall, but now the help has gone off to, variously, functions, obligations, and naps, and i'm not sure who's even coming to study hall, but the folks who are likely to are not likely to be here any time soon. appelachienne and escher were outside playing with the baby swing, but bedtime (for the not-yet-2-year-old) has come, so in they went, and now it's just me and a sleeping cat, a pile of grading to attend to, not even any thumping on the ceiling from the neighbors upstairs--perhaps they're all out too.

i had a drowsy sunbeam for company, and some silent dust-motes moving too slowly to be called dancing, but the moment has passed, in the typing of that sentence, and the temperature in here will drop ten degrees in the next ten minutes, which will at least bring the noise of the heat kicking back on.

i think i made tea an hour ago and left it cold on the kitchen counter, so there's that and some bizarre new zealand country music... it's the best i can do to cram a little character into this evening. tomorrow, it's highways and skyways and stripmalls and nappy blue pillows, but tonight it's all about chaining self to desk and trying to leave at least some of this work in the done-pile instead of only all the to-do.

the random: as many do, the carafe to my coffee pot has warnings printed on it about not boiling water in it, not leaving it on when empty, not using when cracked etc. as many products sold internationally do, it has warnings in both french and english. however, as i noticed today while standing near it for an extended period of time (chopping up an apple for lunch), THE ENGLISH AND THE FRENCH WARNINGS HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH ONE ANOTHER. neither is a translation, even loosely, of the other. they are two separate warnings about completely different dangers: the english warning (2nd) is a bulleted list of things like the above to avoid. the french warning (1st) is a brief paragraph explaining that, if you choose to pour coffee before the machine is finished dripping, you'll want to to replace the carafe within 30 seconds so as not to risk being burned by being dripped on by hot coffee. apparently, this coffee pot is intended only for bilingual users; everyone else is exposed to the danger of injury (although, as paul pointed out, perhaps there's a message here about what sorts of injury different language-speakers might incur--only the english instructions say not to hold the full carafe over another person).

the suck: plagiarist. got one. kid was looking right at me when i said "no outside sources, and if you look at reviews to get a sense of how people talk about films, look at reviews of different films so that you don't even borrow their language by accident. i want to know YOUR judgment according to YOUR criteria for film-goodness, not anybody else's." and yet i don't think he's devious, just sloppy and not thinking about how when i was talking, i was saying something important that might relate to how he might approach the project later. deserves a penalty? certainly, because they have to learn somehow that there are rules and consequences and that when people TELL you things, you really ought to listen. but i'm sure he's got no idea it's coming.

the awesome: erc and uttencookie are going to break up my airport stint by meeting me for lunch tomorrow, and if plans go according to, well, plans, i'm also going to work in a brief (no time to argue, cross-your-fingers) coffee with mommy before i have to spend 2 hours going back through security... this should make my long day much nicer, and greatly decrease the likelihood that i'll be a surly, miserable grouch by the start of a 7-and-a-half-hour flight across the sea...

plus i'm sure they'll give me hugs to pass along to katie, and they have some of my favorite hugs in the world.

this thursday (Apr. 16th) i'm going to be hanging out in dulles airport from about noon 'til about 6 (although 6 is a boarding time for an international flight, so i'll have to be back where i belong before that). there is nothing--nothing to do at dulles for 6 hours.

so who wants to come hang out with me and/or kidnap me for a while? (i've thought about the shuttle over to wander around the museum & check out the stealth & the space shuttle again, but i've done that, and a solo repeat-journey isn't much more fun than lying around in the airport...) i do realize that thursday is a workday, but maybe you work close by and can take a long lunch? or maybe you're overdue a mental health day anyway and would like to use me as an excuse?

let me know...

sound that signifies that spring has circled back to the sorta-sub-urbs:

skateboard.


(there's really no mistaking, and nothing like, that particular arhythmic clatter of thin wood against concrete & asphalt punctuated by brief, smooth sussurrations--that soft roll of chewed-rough polyurethane wheels. i still wish i'd been cool (or coordinated) enough to have been a skate-kid back in the day. for at least a while, my hair was perfect.)

Wake you up in the mornin' so early
Just to tell you I got the wanderin' blues

i was up at 4:45 this morning, out the door in time to be at a friend's at 5 to make a karma-collecting airport run, and i expected to be crabby and sleepy (albeit quietly so as not to make the beneficiary feel bad for having asked), but the moon was full and low, rushing like a paper boat in a fast, dark river toward the day, the stars were shyly giggling their goodnights like high school kids at the end of their first spring dance, and what i was was energized and jealous, with the radio doing everything it could to pull me along.

my passenger was bound for new orleans for a conference--but who cares if there's a conference; it's new orleans!--and i'd been envious months ago when plans were made, but then i'd started making my own travel plans, and more travel plans, and more travel plans, and the whole thing was starting to look overwhelming and expensive and exhausting and i'd begun to wonder if i'd gotten too old for this sort of "fun," or at least too far removed from the people and circumstances that made it so compelling.

between now and the end of July, between grading 3 more sets of papers and a portfolio for these 40ish students, teaching a summer course in a subject i know nothing about, and maybe leading another children's lit workshop, i've got concrete plans for a wedding in England (next week), a long weekend in NYC/NJ, the week in Ireland, a few days in Italy, and a wedding in Blacksburg, plus there's a not-yet-concretized potential plan to spend a couple of days in St. Louis, & then in the slightly-farther-distant future, there's this thing in Boston in September, & even writing out the whole list makes me think about how i could really use a nap already.

but under those stars this morning, chasing that moon, with a soundtrack that started with Dire Straits when i turned the car on and went in to include, in only the short, empty-highway jaunt up to the airport and back, a little Zepplin, the whole six minutes of Styx's "Come Sail Away" and some Bob Seger to glide me back into the drive, all the jealousy was back--i wanted to stow away onto the plane and just go from there to every place else on my itinerary and a hundred places that weren't, i wanted to make more plans and confirm more plane tickets, i wanted to turn that car anywhere but back into its gravel cradle at the house so i could come inside and pack a lunch and get to work on time.

i can sleep when i'm dead; in the meantime, there are all of these places to be.

the point, in the poem, was that everything was vivid and sunny, sandals and floral-prints, and it seemed a harsh contrast to the broken heart he harbored. by contrast, my point is that the adornments that have drifted into the window-wells of my car in the morning are still perfect, six-sided flakes.

mid-morning class-prep involves a run over to the copy center in the next building. i duck my head against a strong wind and hold the loose sheaf of papers bent so that the shards of ice will bounce off instead of sticking long enough to melt and blur the ink. i've thrown on a scarf but haven't bothered with a coat. it's only snow, after all; suiting up every time one was going to be snowed on, here, would be as ridiculous as carrying an umbrella in hawaii--the weather is unavoidable, but the exposure short-lived, and it's not worth the prep time.

the official report, for supporters, friends, and the simply-bored-and-curious: team walking on sunshine made good on the promise to walk our miles for your donations last weekend in the 2009 national walk for epilepsy, down on the rainy mall with thousands of other chilly but enthusiastic fundraisers. there's more evidence where this comes from, but here's the team, sporting hoodies designed by miss christalle herself, posing for team pictures before the event and about to cross the finish line after trekking down the mall, around the far side of the monument, and back again.

predawn metro, waiting for the first train of the day:

From spring09

team shirtbacks & numbers in front of the capital:

From spring09

brek & christalle approaching the finish line:

From spring09

thanks one more time to everyone who helped make our participation productive for this very valuable cause--it was worth spending a day shivery in rainy weather while rumor has it there were warm breezes & sunny skies back here to advance research and activism that will make life better for somebody i'm awfully fond of. and we had fun (for metro-ninja evidence, follow the links...)

passenger-jet o'clock on a sunday morning finds me with a cup of grubby, dusty tea steeped from old bags into one of my mother's severe-lined white china coffee mugs--bags because it takes two to try to overpower the dust with the taste of tea--waiting for everyone else to wake up so that i can contrive an exit. part of me would rather be on the road already, because it's a long drive home, but i know that there are plans afoot for my mother and brother to go to brunch alone and leave his girlfriend here, and it seems unkind to imagine ditching her to an empty house, especially considering the mood of the house i'd be leaving her in.

we walked. there will be pictures once i get back, because i forgot the camera cord that lets it talk to the computer, and storying will go with photo-documentation.

in the meantime, i'm contemplating the joys of finding unexpected allies and the prices one can pay, the likelihood that the economies of webbed relationships will make this one short-lived despite my best efforts and intentions, & how far back some of the threads go of the things i'm seeing in myself and my own relationships lately, and struggling with because they're completely unhealthy and always have been and i'm only just starting to get a sense of even their shapes--i'm a long way from definition and enough comprehension to consider excisement.

"you can't be nice to both of them," he told her; "that looks like taking sides."

anybody got a translation for that that's not completely broken? at the very least, i think i get why i've never really thought my brother liked me--because he had to pick a side, because there was no neutral territory, because even getting along with his sister automatically came across to his mother that they were aligned against her, & the only way to soothe that fear and earn + keep her love was to choose her instead. how's that for a choice to have to make as a 2-3 year-old? if we lived anywhere near each other, i'd be thinking hard about dragging the whole group to therapy. as is, i'm thinking hard instead about stopping coming "home" for a while. or maybe altogether.

getting in the mood by chasing down the music, i spent tonight w/jenn @ kitty hoynes with seven nations. those of y'all who've been around a while might remember when we used to chase them from celtic festival to celtic festival all over virginia & maryland. there were no kilts and combat boots this time, just jeans & converse, & we saw the pipes but couldn't stay out for the third set where they might have played them, it being a school night, but their fiddler was incredible, and they're just as good musically as ever, plus small clubs make them easier to get at than big festivals--here we've grabbed lead singer kirk for a hug and a photo:

From spring09

going to bed now--long drive to DC in the early morning to meet up with the family for epilepsy walk weekend (& thanks again to everyone who contributed to that--it means an awful lot to christalle and brek & so, by proxy, me). but i'll sleep well; my knees are tired from jumping about by the stage, my ears have that blanked-out close-to-the-speakers fuzz, and there are fiddles rattling around inside my head (victor played the pennywhistle parts on that fiddle, not just the pipe-parts, and the effect even on songs i knew the parts for was seamless!). once again:

old soundtracks, new stories. tonight, anyway, it's working for me.