winter, in all its glory

and tomorrow never comes.

jetlag, travel, and reading lists

Starting the year in Times Square (not watching the ball drop, since the NYPD had effectively barred new bystanders from the relevant viewing areas by 3pm) led to finishing the first week of the year in the city's tourist hotspots, museums, and Peter's Manhattan apartment. Which led to more reading than one might expect, as the concentrated activity during daylight hours nearly always led to long periods of downtime after early-afternoon sunsets.

Which means that I really started the year with Blue Nights and Ethan Canin's Carry Me Across the Water, both of which now haunt me far more than those Fifth Avenue window displays, Wall Street, or the Empire State Building. I'm rolling words and scenes and images through my mind's tongue as I walk and eat and think, and I feel lucky to have started the year with Joan Didion and a perfect, accidental find at the apartment's communal bookcase.

Which is not to say that New York wasn't amazing in its own right--it was. MoMA and Natural History Museum and the museum at Ellis Island filled me with a sense of physical wonder that is hard to replicate with books and in humble, underfunded Spokane museums, and I consider the trip an absolute success.

But after the jetlag passes (good lord, we flew in yesterday and I'm still reeling from the day of flying and turning back the clock), I can't guarantee that anything from the trip will continue to resonate the way  those books did. When I'll think back to New York City in a few months, I imagine that my memories will be colored by my experience of reading and thinking about what I was reading while exploring the city. The two experiences have been permanently welded together.

I went to the library today--after rolling out of bed with great effort--and I checked out some new books to read before my semester starts later this month. I'm a few chapters into The Maytrees by Annie Dillard, and I've noticed that the speed of the city hasn't left me left. I'm stumbling over the airy sentences that seem to end too soon because I'm reading them to fast, and I have to remind myself, frequently, to slow down and read as though I'm breathing deeply.

I wonder what experiences I'm welding to Annie Dillard, now that I'm so conscious of how my living and reading lives intersect. I feel, currently, listless and fatigued, ambitious and drained, hopeful and cynically worn-out. Which is to say nothing at all, because I'm not sure what I'm saying. Excuse me while I go look for a grapefruit to eat while I wait for you to come home.

walls, windows, and fires

This is what the wall above my desk (top of my six-inch hutch included) looked like in Portland. I would post a photograph of what the window above my desk looks like now, except that it might accidentally serve as proof that the only window in my new room might not be up to code.

I had a dream last night in which a fire was spreading through the house and no one paid attention to me frantically urging them outside, and in the end, I suffocated as parents stared at me voicelessly screaming at them to get out. I haven't had a fire nightmare in about forever, and I woke up remembering why I hate them so much. The second-to-last Monday of the semester started with a kink in my neck and chest congestion from the cold I caught over the weekend.

It finished with me catching up on the last of my research for a term paper, followed by a long-overdue rewatch of Wes Anderson's Life Aquatic. I can't imagine a better way to make a full recovery, unless I could've thrown a clear nasal passage into the mix. All in good time, I suppose. I'm glad you got into your classes at Eastern. I love you, and goodnight.

thanksgiving

 

After the most delicious (and largest) dinner of the year, and after spending the entire day surrounded by family and love and laughter, I left the main house and walked out to my room for bed, and the sky--black and vibrant, with hardly a cloud in sight--stopped me in my tracks. 

Jupiter has edged west (do you remember August like I do, and seeing the planet and its moons through the telescope for the first time as soon as it showed up in the east?), and now Orion is prominent where Jupiter used to be, the Three Sisters instantly recognizable and the rest of constellation easily picked out afterwards. 

I feel so small, and so large, and so, well, whole. 

Thanks for everything. Amen.

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mid-november blues

Today was bleak, a cold and numb precursor to the Thanksgiving holiday, and the wet sun and melting snow seeped straight into my head.

I left classes feeling worse than I had come, a recent, uncomfortable development. I've been feeling so off track in the grand scheme of things, that the details no longer seem to matter.

I drove to Zach's place after school and talked with him for an hour, then came home and took Amy to the library and sat there thinking while she found books to read, then came home and studied my life, and after thinking long enough, I realized I will be okay.

But good lord, Ann. Let's get out of here.

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