| (no subject) |
[Dec. 28th, 2011|01:03 am] |
Wildness, sweetness, stillness.
I am looking at the reflection of Christmas lights on the computer screen. No Christmas tree - my mom hung a string of white lights from a ginormous potted plant. I'm the only one awake. It's me, my mother, my grandma, two cats, two dogs: full house.
I'm so tired when I come home. I sleep for hours, I don't want to go out. I'm not like this in New York at all - there, I wake up before the alarm goes off, I stay out all night. I only need six hours of sleep in New York. Here, I move in slow motion. It's like I'm at the bottom of the sea.
I come here, and drift, and dream. It was warm today, and I sat outside on the bench, closing my eyes against the sun. I sat wrapped up like an invalid in my mother's sweater, basking. I sit in the living room and stare out the floor-length windows into the forest, the trees without leaves. I haven't watched anything like that in a while.
There's something so lonely and so beautiful about the winter silhouettes of suburban trees when the sun goes down behind them. |
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| this is how I feel |
[Dec. 13th, 2011|09:02 pm] |
The Great Sea has set me
in motion
Set me adrift
And I move as a weed in
the river.
The arch of sky
And mightiness of storms
Encompass me,
And I am left
Trembling with joy
- anonymous Inuit poem |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 21st, 2011|12:24 pm] |
Sometimes sensations come without warning into my mind - this morning, while I was at my desk, I was flooded with the smell of real tomatoes on the vine - sweet cherry tomatoes warm in the sun, in the rocky backyard garden my mother heroically attacked into being every year.
She would tie the plants to wooden stakes with white string, and the small yellow flowers became shiny green berries, and then hot red jewels hanging everywhere under the juicy green leaves. She would spend hours trawling through the dirt, striking rocks with the shovel, wiggling them out with gloved hands, throwing them aside. She'd come into the dark house panting, defiant, smelling of iron sweat.
First there would be only one tomato, eaten acidic and orange from the vine; then five or seven cherry tomatoes on the counter in a small pile; then a cereal bowl full of them; then two bowls that replenished themselves magically. Those were the days of waiting, and wanting, and then plenty when you least expected it.
I didn't know what to do with myself in the summers. Back then I wore glasses and when I went outside the sun would collect in the rims, blinding me, so I stayed in the cool house all summer reading. I never understood why everyone ran around so much outside. I wouldn't understand until I got contacts, years later, and my hand-eye coordination improved, and I could walk around in the sun. |
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| Wedding in Chicago: my 5th-grade best friend |
[Nov. 13th, 2011|11:27 pm] |
In the van from the airport, buckled in with silent strangers. Glorious industrial jawbones, cheekbones of a rugged city. Smokestacks and rail yards. Parks with marble statues alongside the road and the water beyond that, the very cold and endless water.
The fiery and glorious thrill of traveling alone, of my alone-ness wrapped around me. A beautiful fierce feeling of warmth and self-containment, like a wonderful fur coat - no rich person's stolen furs, but my own skin. The champagne-pop in my head of letting it all in, letting it through me, the transcendental heart's-flight of breathing in a strange city, trusting maps and passers-by to get me where I need to go.
Hours to go before the wedding. Setting out on foot for Powell's Books. Buying a copy of Anne Sexton's Transformations for five dollars. Drinking a perfect soy maté chai in a cafe. Walking to the chapel, surrounded by stone and brick and red vines all over the UChicago campus, feeling the tilt of emotion and time. A hundred starlings clung to the masses of wild grapevines on the side of the building, eating frantically for a few seconds, then erupted with a thunderous clap of wings over my head like an ocean wave.
( The wedding was in a chapel of dark wood, with carved angels hidden in the rafters. ) |
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| (no subject) |
[Oct. 28th, 2011|09:42 pm] |
So I have another freelance editing job! For a pharmaceutical advertising agency!
It's the real deal, i.e. girls I've never seen before drop piles of papers on my desk, squeak, "It's a cold read - it needs to go out today!" and hurry away without telling me where their desks are. It's hard, very hard, and I love the difficulty.
This on top of the temp 9-5 and the OTHER freelance editing job. This new job, well, sometimes they work late - as in, up to 11pm late. And then they need help. And then I am there! With this Murs song playing in my head to pump me up.
This weekend: three wild parties! Tom the British Actor very kindly made me coffee a few minutes ago as I lay on the couch with a coat on my head after a 2.5-hour nap. We've also got a second Brit staying with us, no relation, a very nice guy who's doing math with Jonah and also thoughtfully providing coffee for non-mandibular-manipulating-sleepy-morning-me.
That's all the news from this front - now back to you, Barbara. |
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| poems about October and autumn |
[Oct. 21st, 2011|01:44 pm] |
Poem In October - Dylan Thomas
It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
And the mussel pooled and the heron
Priested shore
The morning beckon
With water praying and call of seagull and rook
And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall
Myself to set foot
That second
In the still sleeping town and set forth.
My birthday began with the water-
Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
Above the farms and the white horses
And I rose
In rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.
High tide and the heron dived when I took the road
Over the border
And the gates
Of the town closed as the town awoke.
A springful of larks in a rolling
Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling
Blackbirds and the sun of October
Summery
On the hill's shoulder,
Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly
Come in the morning where I wandered and listened
To the rain wringing
Wind blow cold
( In the wood faraway under me. ) |
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| (no subject) |
[Oct. 17th, 2011|08:01 am] |
In the style of Naomi -
You should know that I've been loving my life in New York. Loving it like a dog loves a toy, shaking it back and forth, chasing it across the room. This weekend I went to three parties.
On Friday, I went to a loft right on the waterfront under the Brooklyn Bridge. A tree tossed in front of the neverending water, and the bridge was lit up from underneath, and we were all crammed out on the fire escape. The people living there are aerialists - they'd hung silks from the ceiling, and undulated on them all night. I met a silvery lawyer named Roger and teased him mercilessly. Towards the end of the night, Jonah and Tom (my English actor roommate) and Alisha (a new friend) and I danced around like beasts. So many new friends.
On Saturday, we went to a house full of friendly musicians only five blocks from where we live. They're all fluently talented and completely nice. We had just missed the dance party, but got there in time for the jam sessions. A flautist, with features drawn by Michelangelo, held his flute up to my lips and showed me how to play it. We improvised hours of music in two different rooms - one for Indian traditional, the other for Anything - and I sang, and felt strong in my singing, and set the melody several times, and other people built off of what I had sung in cello, and violin, and guitar.
On Sunday we went to a brunch party in Williamsburg. At first, we thought the apartment was a storefront - there was lawn furniture out on the sidewalk, twelve-foot silk curtains blowing through a huge open door into the street, a glass-paneled flat window from floor to ceiling. But it was an artists' colony - a juggler lived there, dancers, circus people. There were tutus and hula hoops from previous residents. We ate savory curry pancakes with corn inside them, and banana chocolate chip pancakes, and fruit salad with mango and blackberries. And the people! I met someone who looked like a younger Javier Bardem and whose name was Earth, who lent me his sunglasses and, when I returned them, insisted I put them myself back onto his face. I made up a song outside in the surprisingly kind sunshine with Roger, a record producer who was strumming a ukulele. The chorus goes like this:
Money
Can I call you Money
'Cause you're the sweetest thing
I've never had... |
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| I have a job! |
[Sep. 15th, 2011|07:52 pm] |
A temp job, anyway.
It's my third day. I'm working in the Campus Card Office of the New School, a college in Manhattan. I get to take pictures of the little freshmen and tell them to smile! And I also get to learn a huge, thorny diagnostic process for figuring out when things go wrong, which seems endlessly complicated and therefore endlessly fascinating.
My coworkers are solid. My (funny) boss is going to let me spearhead the process of writing a policies & procedures manual, which might sound straightforward and tedious until you realize that the New School is in fact seven different colleges, with different operating systems, and the Campus Card Office has to interact with all of them.
The bureaucracy is formidable. The procedures are no longer intuitive. Communication has broken down between departments. But friends, apparently that's what making a policies & procedures manual is all about - you actually get to streamline all the procedures as you go, and understand how everything works. My little geeky organizational heart is thumping. It's like taking apart a car engine! I get to learn why things don't work!
It's 4-6 weeks, but we'll see. I also plan to apply for other permanent jobs at the college, now that I'm working here as a temp, and approximately a gazillion people work here, so positions open up all the time. And who knows, maybe I'll get to know this office so well that I'll stick around there.
It's true that office jobs are damn tiring. Who knows how I'll feel about it in the future - attitudes towards jobs tend to change over time. But it's such a lovely change, to be tired from working hard - a worthy tiredness - and to know that there's lots of work to be done in the future.
And it's lovely to get paid for it! |
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| (no subject) |
[Sep. 7th, 2011|12:20 am] |
Dear World,
I've been thinking in broad strokes lately. Big splashes of black ink from a paintbrush. My mind is wrapped around next year, the architecture of my happiness, what it would be like to have kids. I'm so tangled in the future, I can barely see the now. I feel like I'm in a waiting room, and even the memories of this time will be watery and vague.
Big change is twisting inside me, pinching from time to time, like a spiny creature preparing to be born. I can't choose when it will come, but I can choose how I will meet it - hopefully with grace and guts. Jon is moving away for two years. He leaves in three weeks. And gah, we need to find a new housemate. Hopefully a potential friend. And Jonah is planning to be gone for about half of the year. So this next year will be... interesting. Very interesting.
Also, in case you haven't heard me nag on about it a million times, I NEED A JOB. Y'know, in case you have one lying around. |
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drabheathen's journal