palace of winds

Because I do not get sick, I did not spend yesterday feeling horrible. Aching everywhere, with a headache wrapping a superman hug round my whole brain and poking at the backs of my eyes, and a sort of dizzy feeling upon moving too fast, and I did not snivel like a little baby the whole car ride home, nor spend the evening sweaty and woozy and the night in fitful dreams.

So it is for no reason at all that I pampered myself with dinner of wine-braised broccoli and mushrooms over crusty broiled polenta rounds, followed by Allison’s dark chocolate pudding and a big bowl of cherries. If I had been feeling bad, I would’ve felt a little better after eating (or at least told myself I did), and believed that one should always soldier on through such things. I cleaned a little, in a wobbly sort of way, and got a little more ready for my trip to San Fran this weekend. I also watched the Crocodile Hunter. There was this great reptile out in the red wilds of Australia, a teensy little thing all blunt unreal spines with a smug sort of smile and a deliberate but blindingly fast way of eating ants. Steve and I were very excited about it.

If everything hadn’t been just peachy-keen yesterday I’d be feeling much more mobile today. I am finally going to try Galactic Pizza tonight, and I sorely hope the months of waiting haven’t built my expectations beyond all possibility of fulfillment. I wish I could get a little square of every kind, because I just can’t decide what sounds best. The Galactic, with the hemp pesto sauce and mushrooms and sundried tomatoes? The Paul Bunyan, with its native Minnesotan toppings of morel mushrooms and wild rice? Maui Wowie, sundried tomato pesto with pineapple and jalapenos? The Alamo? The CSA? The Mexicali? Thailander?! Too many! Best of all, the delivery persons come dressed in spandex superhero costumes, driving in tiny three-wheeled cars. Will the fabulousness never end?

No. Because while eating said pizza, I will be showing the Smile Time episode of Angel to Jo, and oh lordy. The only thing that would be better is if she didn’t know ahead of time the…transformation that occurs. Because that moment? Beautiful.

I finished Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell this morning, and still give it resounding endorsement. I’m a little afraid no matter what audiobook I start on next I’ll be disappointed. Simon Prebble was a brilliant narrator, and the story is fantastic, and it’s wonderful to find those two things together. The only thing worse than a great story with a bad narrator is a bad story with a bad narrator.

9 lasts

1. cigarette: In college; a clove while making the trek down to Barnett for my Judaism class. Sweet cinnamon on my mouth and a brief spate of blissful dizzy, and then I spent the rest of class wishing fervently for a toothbrush. I never was a smoker, though; that’s the only pack I ever owned.
2. beverage: I’m having a big old mug of chai right now.
3. kiss: Alex-roo, Wednesday night. His chubby little cheeks demand kissing.
4. hug: Yar. One of my family members, Wednesday. I don’t remember who was last. Mel, I think.
5. movie seen: Serenity! Just last night. :D
6. cd played: Uh. Man. Now that I have YME, I don’t really play cds like that. I’m listening to Kings of Convenience right now, though.
7. song listened to: I…have no idea. I just started listening so I haven’t actually *heard* anything yet.
8. bubble bath: Oi, *bubble* bath? Probably…a month or two ago. I took a bath with epsom salts…earlier this week? Last week? For my back, informing me I’d lifted too heavy the day before.
9. time you cried: Uh. I dunno. It’s been a while. TAKE THAT, birth control!

8 have you evers

1. dated one of your best friends: Nope.
2. skinny dipped: Alas not.
3. kissed somebody and regretted it: Eh, not really.
4. fallen in love: Nope.
5. lost someone you loved: Yes.
6. been depressed: Yep.
7. been drunk and threw up: Nope.
8. ran away: Not like ran-away-from-home in the kid sense. There was the time Steph and I hid from a certain someone in her room… Does that count?

7 states you’ve been to

California (and, incidentally, one week countdown to SF, woo!), Louisiana, North Dakota, Massachusetts, Alabama, Tennessee, Iowa

6 things you’ve done today

I should’ve waited and filled this out later in the day…

1. Dreamt of getting ready to go to Ikea with my mom, dad, sister, brother-in-law, and Jocey. Jocey wanted a white couch she’d seen there, and a few other things I can’t remember. Somewhere we’d gotten a red pickup truck for hauling all the purchases.
2. Eaten berry waffles with slices of banana and a drizzle of maple syrup.
3. Made lunch: a big spinach salad with carrots, cucumber, and red peppers, and more carrots for dipping in a bit of leftover hummus.
4. Gotten a call from my third boss-sort-of-person that he won’t be in today either. All Rachel all day, woo. S’gonna be a quiet one.
5. Finished Arthur & George — good stuff.
6. Finally ordered those Veronica Mars t-shirts from TWOP/Glarkware. Such good timing for the offer, t-shirt people!

5 favorite things in no order

• Fresh cherries
• Epic emails
• Sunshine
• Horses, oh sweet god I miss them
• Great hugs

4 people you last talked to

1. ‘Earwax’
2. Jo!
3. Some woman in the restroom
4. People at the movie…

3 wishes

1. Career epiphany
2. Tinyhouse
3. A pony

2 things you want to be when you grow up

1. An adventuress
2. Financially stable (not…that I’m not now — but it counts, right? I want to remain so)

1 thing you regret

1. Not going to London.

I slip easily westward with the other morning commuters; eastbound cars grow thicker, slower, and like clockwork I count my luck, the thought a daily touchstone, worn half-meaningless by habit. It’s nice, sometimes, to be going the opposite direction to most people.

And then there is the Interchange tower and I am woken from the mindless autopilot of my commute. I stare at it for a moment. The sky ahead is a nearly uniform slate blue, a thick dark muddle of clouds promising rain soon. Behind me it is still light, the rising sun making a deep orange light through the growing cover, and it’s this reflecting off the towering building, making the front a glinting golden grid. It’s…ugly, I think, the thought finally catching words. At the moment it’s vigorously ugly. The tallest thing on the landscape by far, and against the backdrop of the coming storm it’s garish, glowing. It eclipses everything lovely, dwarfing the redeeming carpeting of trees just across the freeway. For this moment, in this light, it’s aggressively hideous and demanding all attention.

Something in me recoils a little, worries over this whole suburb thing, but thankfully in another minute I’m past the building and I don’t need to think about it any more. It’s much too early for that.

I almost never get phone calls, but I had no fewer than five messages when I came home Friday night. So to everyone who picked exactly the wrong day to call me, being one of those rare days when I forget to tote the thing around with me: sorry.

Saturday we all got dolled up and went to the dinner theater for a matinee of Midlife: the Crisis Musical for Father’s Day. I was deeply excited to be presented with a whole separate vegetarian menu with no fewer than four delicious options (which was more than I was expecting, since the regular menu is somewhat limited itself). Though the lasagna promised generous slices of carrots and zucchini and other delights, the veggie steak won out as being the most unusual restaurant menu item, and the one I was least likely to make at home. It was a delicious savory thing made of oatmeal and brown rice and bulgur and etc, positively smothered in mushrooms and roasted red peppers, accompanied by steamed vegetables (oh yellow beans how beautiful and tasty you are!) and roasted red potatoes. The whole thing was done with heaps more oil/butter than I would’ve used at home, a slight mark against it (I find I much prefer the taste of the actual food to the taste of any fat basting it), but just as much a mark against me for not remembering to order it without.

The musical itself was funny, and my dad very much enjoyed himself, so it was all around a success. The thing was a series of sketches about middle age, the most hilarious of which was ‘Weekend Warriors’. The three men of the small cast were gathering for an afternoon basketball session. I will tell you that the one with a nice taut middle-age paunchy beer belly (and oh how I have to admire his shamelessness) was attired in tight red shorts and a white top cropped halfway up his torso, and another wore full ‘gangsta-style’ basketball attire and brought along the slang to go with it. I’d do it great injustice so I won’t try to describe it any further, but the whole audience was in stitches. Other highlights included the Singing Mammogram and the prostate exam song (whose title I can’t recall, but whose lyrics unabashedly included the word ‘rectum’).

Saturday evening my mom and I got to watch Alex; I am happy to report with a complete lack of bias that he somehow gets cuter each passing second. Though it seems like it took weeks and weeks of sharp anticipation for him to move from almost-crawling to actually-crawling, since then he has rapidly sprouted two teeth and begun pulling himself up to standing on everything in sight and motoring around with his push-walker thingie like there’s no tomorrow. He even stands on his own for remarkably long periods of times, considering how recently he wasn’t too sure about this up-on-hands-and-knees thing. I still love the way he falls asleep in my arms, the snug secure feeling of him there, the little dream-twitching of his tiny chubby baby fingers. Also, he has finally begun to appreciate the extreme hilarity of me blowing raspberries on his stomach. I don’t even mind that he often as not claws at my eyeballs while shrieking the joy of it.

Yesterday morning (and inadvertantly on into late afternoon, because dawdling is genetic) my mom and I puttered through the nursery at Home Depot and the fabric section (and, I’ll admit, almost every other section) of JoAnn’s. I’ve volunteered to sew the purses/tote bags my mom wants to make for my grandma’s birthday, since I a) have the sewing machine (rightfully, I might add, as it was a Christmas gift for my sister and me and after over a decade of her never once having touched it I’ve deemed she’s relinquished all rights; so, to sum: my sewing machine), and b) am the only one who knows how to use it. Not that it’s difficult to figure out, but it seems a shame to force someone else to labor through it when it’s something I can (probably, anyway) do quickly, and will enjoy. Incidentally, I have found sewing to be very much like wood-working, in that it’s all about precise measuring and cutting and picking the best way and order to put things together. The more I work on the current project with my dad the more I want to quilt. Not that the current project is anything like quilting, really, beyond the way all construction is like quilting.

Speaking of, said current project is coming along quite nicely, and is now looking just exactly like itself where before it looked like a lot of pieces of wood. Next session I believe we will officially begin finishing work, all the filling in of knots and things and the sanding and smoothing, and the general making-ready-to-be-painted. Things are coming along nicely indeed.

It’s testament, I think, to Arthur and George‘s new hold over me that I forgot my purse at home this morning. I realized it only after I’d parked my car at work, half-turning toward the passenger’s seat with this sense that something was not quite right. It’s such an absurd notion, yet this is the second or third time I’ve done it in the past two years. It’s like forgetting to wear pants, or leaving a limb behind. Coming to work without one’s arm. I am id-less, wallet-less, key-card-less, library-card-less. It’s disconcerting.

I actually started reading Arthur and George this past winter; it was a new release, which the library lets out for two weeks instead of its usual three, and as a Booker Prize finalist its waiting list is rather long. I couldn’t get very into it at the time, so I returned it and got back on the list, and it finally came back up last week. And Wednesday I finally pushed myself to open it again, and now I find myself at last pulled in. I think I had so much trouble in the beginning because something terrible is happening to the main character that he is helpless against, and it twists me. I am sick and dreading and outraged and I feel the futility of his plight perhaps even more keenly than he himself does. It’s torturous, but now I’ve gotten far enough into it that it has caught me and I must now see him through it. (Or I hope to see him through it, anyhow. I can’t dwell on the thought that it might just continue, or I’ll never be able to open the book again.)