I read somewhere (I think it was in Cunt, which is a fabulous book, one of my favorite of 2006; everyone should read it, truly) that for women there’s a particular time of month when you’re super-clumsy (and what a delightful word, clumsy, all bumbling and warm, like chum and daisy have met and become a puppydog) — some hormonal thing, I guess. Anyway, I’d never noticed it before but today I’ve spilled like six thousand times, which is unusual, and I figure it must be that. I really shouldn’t be allowed the tea currently steeping beside my keyboard, but the ache in my throat is whimpering for peppermint, and so peppermint it shall have.
Speaking of books, I’m currently listening to The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion, and it’s exquisite. I’ve never read grief described so exactly right. (It’s especially wonderful coming at a time when I’m also trying to listen to Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, which I’m not enjoying at all. Which is embarrassing to admit because it’s the sort of book I’m supposed to like. I don’t know if it’s because I’m listening to it instead of reading it myself [a disadvantage, I find, with books that take a lot of thinking, because it's much harder to pause and go back, to reread passages, and this book is chock full of time jumps -- jumps so abrupt I more than once paused while cooking or washing dishes to inspect my ipod to make sure I hadn't somehow messed up the track order when making the playlist] or if I’m just not in the frame of mind or if it’s because I haven’t read the synopsis so have no clue what I’m supposed to be expecting or what, but it’s hard, and I find I’m frustrated. I’m usually such a fan of subtlety, the submerged truth; I’m not used to it kicking my ass.)
Work’s been making my head spin around lately. The saving grace of last week was Monday off, and Tuesday half-off (thank you NASD & cohorts), but there’s no such reprieve this week, and it doesn’t feel like Tuesday. It feels like a day that doesn’t exist, something out beyond Friday, the work week stretched to infinity, and I feel a thousand years old. It’s hard to conceive of managing anything beyond driving home and dragging myself straight to bed.
One day to The Talk. Thirty-eight to San Francisco.
So I’m exhausted, but feeling strangely complacent. I’m coming off a very successful shopping weekend: I finally have things on my living room wall, and fabric to attempt a dress, and two new necklaces (which are hard to describe exactly — one’s painted metal, all shades of plum and darkest turquoise, a square nearly half the size of my thumb stamped with a tree, with a little pair of golden leaves hung over it, by Kevin n Anna; the other a Kathy Loewenstern piece, a reversible necklace made of silver and Japanese Chiyogami paper, one side with small pink blossoms and the other an orange goldfish swimming in blue [though I see now if you go through the site you can customize your own, wah! I wish I'd known]; they are nearly enough to make up for the piece I really wanted, the necklace that was over $100, inset with pale blue silk and bordered in tiny exquisite beading).
And it’s taken me half the day to write this (sad indeed), so I’m going to give up and get fully back to work.
