..Forty-Four Sunsets..

compensating

In an effort to bring myself out of the trauma-induced funk of yesterday, I have been listening to this fantastic Yann Tiersen song. You should as well.

My mom would be proud--this time I'm compensating with a good song played on repeat, versus a bucket o' whiskey. Oh, yes. Just the picture of balance and mental health.

reality

A man got hit by a truck just outside of the bakery yesterday afternoon. He was apparently a bit intoxicated and sort of jumped out into the path of an oncoming roofer's pickup--I didn't see him actually get hit; when I looked out the door, he was on the ground with blood literally pooling under his head. We called 911; there were several passers-by already attending to him, but we brought them a roll of paper towels to try and staunch the bleeding. Ambulances didn't get there for a solid five minutes, and the police officers didn't get there much before then, so it was just the small group of witnesses and the man on the ground.

The bakery happens to be catty-corner to a local elementary school, and it had just been let out when this happened. A boy came out of the school and started to join the cluster of onlookers, then sprinted towards the accident. He turned out to be the man's son--couldn't have been more than 11 or 12--and I watched his expression as he recognized his father on the ground. He sort of stiffened at first, then his entire body sagged for a second, as though he didn't know how to react to this. Of course he didn't know how--who could? Seeing your father lying in his own blood on the pavement.

He walked right up to the truck, this little boy standing as tall as possible and not even coming up to the windshield, then pointed his finger directly at the driver (who was standing beside the car door) and started SCREAMING. Pointing, screaming, and crying. I couldn't hear him because I was inside, but his face was completely crumpled up and I could see the veins standing out on his neck from the force of his yelling.

It reminded me of a newspaper photo I saw in a textbook once, where a boy had just drowned at a waterhole and his family was standing around him, his older brother sobbing and collapsing to the ground. The face of the child yesterday, screaming and crying and pointing at the truck, is burnt into my brain just like that photo was.

The boy turned away and ran back towards the school--I thought he was running away from the scene just to get some distance from it--but he picked up his skateboard from the sidewalk and then came running back with the board held over his head; he was going to attack the driver. Someone caught him around the waist and the force of it took him to the ground. He dropped to his knees beside his father and stayed there until the ambulance came.

Seeing something like that was like getting punched in the stomach; I came home in sort of a daze and just shuffled through the rest of the evening. Woke up this morning to find that the knot in my stomach hasn't gone away--I just keep wincing and shaking my head and frowning a bit from time to time.

I don't know. I write so much about the small joys in life, and I suppose that in theory, joy would be indistinguishable from other emotions if sadness didn't present its antithesis. Still, seeing someone's pain and sadness--watching that small boy as the horror crossed his face--is hard to move past.

the ongoing effort to be continually aware

I don't think it's just that I'm "turned about and overwhelmed by tiny happenings" and am thus moved by matters that would be inconsequential to others--moments in time just make themselves so clear and I can't but be totally taken aback by them.

Last Saturday night I was in a bar in Columbus, Ohio, midway through a ridiculous roadtrip with two of my roommates. The roadtrip was partially so that Lena could visit her parents and partially in honor of the non-existence of what would have been my wedding day. (I have historically been reluctant to write about relationships on here--not being one to trot out personal issues in a public forum--but the other night was rather epic in quality, because it was the day I would have gotten married, had my life played out the way that I thought it would a year ago.)

Saturday night, as it stood, was several months in the making; Steve and I had planned early in the summer to have a celebration of the absurd reality of life and how it never quite works out the way that you think, how it is a constant surprise and a wonderful chaos. The choices made, the chances taken, have such far-reaching consequences and my day-to-day right now is filled with joys that I never would have expected a few months ago. Steve, more than most people I've met, is caught up in the magic of the present and was a fantastic person to share this celebration with.

So, I was in a bar in Columbus. There was a nominally depressing emo-esque singer onstage, but I wasn't in the mood for wistful, lovelorn music. I went outside for a smoke and left a note on a bar napkin beside my drink: "I'm smoking. Please leave this here." I went outside, made a phone call to a loved one, then came back in to find little cloth autumn leaves scattered in piles beside by glass.

Little autumn leaves. So random, so surreal. But wonderful; I sat back on my barstool and looked at them for a long time. It was a perfect gift--from whom, I didn't know--and, for some reason, utterly touching.

Hands-down creepiest work encounter thus far.

One of the jerkiest things ever said to be by a customer was last winter, when a guy who looked like Christopher Walken came in one morning just as I was unlocking the door and flipping the 'open' sign. He scowled at me when I told him that he'd have to wait about 2 minutes for the breakfast fritatta because sometimes not everything is ready right when we open. He proceeded to just be generally nasty to me while I poured him his cup of coffee. When I gave it to him with a frosty-but-polite smile and bid him good day, he looked at me for a long time, smirked, and said,

"You know, I REALLY don't like you." [long pause, while I stood there in silence, wondering what to say in response to a comment like that.] Then he spoke again. "But when you smile, I like you just a little." I told him once again to have a good day and returned to the kitchen, shaking my head at what some people deem acceptable to say.

The guy came in again this afternoon; he looked familiar but I couldn't place him until he smirked at me. Then it hit me: the asshole from the previous winter.

I was nice to him--"kill them with kindness," as my mom would say--and he remained the surly character that I remembered, except that he didn't insult me personally this time. He ordered a meal that, of course, took a long time to prepare and just sort of watched me with a frown on his face the whole time that he was waiting.

I finally got his order ready, gave it to him, and breathed a sigh of relief. He was gone. I got away without any bizarre or overtly mean encounters.

Five minutes later, the phone rang.

ME: "Good morning, Angel Food Bakery."
HIM: "Hi. Is this the female with the black hair?"
ME: "Um, excuse me?"
HIM: "Is this the female who works there with the short black hair?"
ME: "Yes it is; how may I help you, sir?"
HIM: "It's Howard [name NOT changed to protect the innocent because he's a creepy asshole], the guy who just came in." Great, I thought. His order got mixed up somehow and he's upset once again. "Yeah, there's something that I just wanted to say to you. You, well, you just sort of have this effect on me..." [by this time, I'd grabbed a pen and a scrap of paper and was writing all of this down. See? I think of you all even in moments of crisis.] "Yeah, anyway, you just have this effect on me; makes me all jittery, I guess. Yeah, you make me feel all jittery..."

The line went dead. I stood there. Weird.

Then it rang again.

HIM: "Hi, this is Howard again. I don't know if we got cut off or if you hung up on me or what."
ME: "No, sir, the phone just went dead."
HIM: "Well, listen, what I was saying is that you make me feel all jittery and--"
ME: "Sir, if you felt that I acted in any way unprofessional towards you this afternoon, then I do apologize. It was not intentional."
HIM: "Oh no, you were fine. You were great. I just get nervous around you... you're just..." [and here his voice got all low and creepy and breathy] "just sooooo sexy..."
ME: "Listen, sir, that is an entirely inappropriate thing to say. We run a customer service business and you, as a customer, cannot be calling us up to say things like that. Thank you and have a good day."

I hung up.

Things like that frustrate me so much--the whole thing's such a power play on his part. He's this truck driver who moves antiques and art across the country (he told me this while glaring and waiting for his sandwich) and he comes into town, treating me poorly TWICE. The first time, like an incompetant fool who's to be blamed if his food isn't ready for him exactly when he wants it--someone he can insult to their face because they are there to serve him--and the second time, like an object that he's allowed to harrass and intimidate, just because he feels somehow "nervous" or "jittery." Projecting his fear onto me, simply because I am in a public position and am forced by definition to cater to his whims.

No. That's totally unacceptable.

I told my boss what had happened and she contacted the company he's moving stuff for in the area (they're friends of hers) so they're passing on the message to him that he's no longer welcome at the bakery. It was nice that she was so up-in-arms about it--I'd probably have just shrugged it off myself and been quietly horrified--because, when all is said and done, I do NOT need to be made to feel uncomfortable or intimidated at my place of employment. I don't deserve to have to walk home looking over my shoulder every 5 minutes.

Children, some things to remember when you encounter people in the customer service world:
1. do NOT insult them to their face.
2. do NOT laugh in their face.
3. do NOT track down the number of their workplace and call them with inappropriate comments.

If you violate any of the three rules laid out above, be forwarned: they're people with feelings just like yours and they--like everyone--have crappy days that can be easily made crappier by your nastiness. Also, if you're mean to them then they may or may not write about you and call you a creepy asshole in their blog.

self-medication, or, "why a hypochondriac should not keep a blog when she actually gets sick"

After much discussion amongst my roommates and many consultations regarding the nature of the subject, I have come to the conclusion that alcohol does have some medicinal properties. Other than the obvious Civil War-esque cleansing of wounds, I will remain staunch in the belief that whiskey is a practical and better-tasting cough medicine than, say, Robitussin or NyQuil. ('Practical' because I have it on hand, of course.)

Honestly, though, after more than a month of rib-bruising coughs and this past weekend of sounding like Typhoid Mary as I lay doubled over and hacking in the corner, I decided to investigate the muscle-relaxing powers of a stiff drink.

Children, it works. It works, I tell you. After gulp upon gulp from brown bottles of nasty free clinic cough syrup--which had little to no affect--I disavowed the stuff and am trying out a jack & coke.

I'll keep you posted. So far, so good.

turning over a new leaf

I have, historically, touted myself as sort of an evangelical existentialist. I knowingly accept certain Fundamentals but, at the same time, recognize life as something far too precious and too exciting to be bound up in guilt and/or legalism. Existentialism works well for someone like me, fascinated as I am by the minute beauty of the day-to-day. It's a justification for chronic navel-gazing or for afternoons spent staring at an anthill. Decadent and self-serving? Perhaps. Still, I embrace it without shame or reservation.

This school of thinking, while something I practice in theory, has never extended to my worklife, where I have found myself striving to accumulate more and more jobs with the idea that I'm never working as hard as I can be, never earning enough money to be thought "successful." (That measure of success, by the way, is an imbalanced product of comparing myself--and being compared--to my older brother, whose skills are far more marketable in the job world.)

As of last week, I was juggling three jobs and failing to keep track of simple and important things, such as phone bills and parking tickets. The quality of my work in all three jobs started dipping, and I woke up stressed every morning, not only from a chronic cough but also because I began each day with a mental run-down of everything required of me that day. It was too much to handle, running back and forth between jobs and trying to balance social requirements. The cough, which started with a possibly-punctured lung a little over a month ago, has given me pause--with winter coming, I (as a nominal hypochondriac) fear the onset of pneumonia--and running on a consistent 5 hours' worth of sleep is not enough in the struggle back to wellness.

With these things in mind, this past Friday I quit my job at the publishing company. Yes, it was the job that sent me a substantial paycheck. Yes, it was the job that could get me connections in the world of grad school and viable careers and "success." But it was the job that stressed me out, that made writing so scientific that I couldn't recognize it for something that I loved. So I quit.

As far as I can see it, I'm in a unique position: as a young person living with friends in a city, I have no real financial responsibilities outside myself. There are no children to think about, no outstanding loans or upcoming burdens that I can see; I am my own fiscal unit and can exist on very, very little. I have the energy to cope with a tight budget. I can get away with shoddy clothes and partial malnutrition and cheap taste. This seems to be pretty much my ONE chance to have a part-time job that, while not a fast-track to wealth and admiration, I happen to love.

Today, as the bakery is closed, I'm eating chocolate mousse, sending out medical bills, and finishing up some copyediting for the journal I still work for. It's the beginning of my favorite month, I had a phenomenal breakfast made for me this morning, and I'm happier than I've been in years.

New leaf turnover. Quality of life decisions, from here on out.

a telling moment, brought to you by the 'A' Sisters.

I'm comfortable with my body. When I was a chubster--really, my whole life--humor has been a defense mechanism against insecurities of any sort. But when I say that I have a good self-image, believe it. Enough people have expressed their preference for the skinny, quirky type that I'm pretty happy to NOT have a rockin' stripper body. (Also, my life is made exponentially better by children's t-shirts and if I wasn't one of the former types, I'd be unable to purchase said t-shirts at Village Discount every other week.) This level of comfort and acceptance is certainly not going to keep me from making jokes about Hooters, from which, as the story goes, "I was fired because the other waitresses were jealous of MY MASSIVE BREASTS."

This guy came into the bakery today, mid-30s maybe, clear ex-rugby or football player from some bland Midwestern Big Ten school. Very Wrigleyville.

He had a particular way of addressing me. Let's just say that we didn't make eye contact the whole time because his eyes never traveled north of my shoulders.

"Umm... I'll have a large coffee, please," he told my breasts. As I gave him his coffee and change and told him to have a good day, he gravely thanked them and said goodbye.

Again, I'm not trying to sell myself short here, but someone with my particular build--wearing an apron, no less--just isn't going to register on the radars of too many boob-starers. If I do, it's more ridiculous; this afternoon, I started actually giggling in the guy's face. Fortunately, he didn't notice.

Maybe it's because my boobs weren't laughing.

Leaving problems where they belong

I came into work in a nominally-foul mood due to extenuating circumstances on the homefront. No cause for alarm, nothing earth-shaking, just a missed connection the night before that rankled enough for the blue skies and the cold wind to have no positive effect on me.

The morning girl packed up her stuff as I arrived and she chose to take a brioche tart rather than a meal at the end of her shift.

"Now where's the nutritional value in that?" my boss asked her, exasperated because she's only a freshman in college and, bless her heart, doesn't know how to take care of herself.

"Ummm, flour?" the girl said, shrugging.

"Well, no value in the brioche as such," I jumped in, "but bullshit has a lot of protein and apparently she's already had some of THAT." There was a general outcry of "Oh! Zing! Ouch!" and with the laughter, my mood dissipated. At least for a while.

the Garden at dawn

One of the stories in John Biguenet's book, The Torturer's Apprentice--which I've written about before and last week, for the first time in several years, felt enough of an aesthetic connection to someone to muster up the confidence to recommend it--is about a man who shares a meal with his secret daughter. ('Secret' because her mother is married to a friend of his and no one has ever guessed that the girl is actually his.)

He offers his daughter a taste of the duck that he ordered and realizes that the girl--16--has not only never tasted duck before, but that she has an entire life of new experiences lined up ahead of her.

"It's the Garden at dawn, for her, and everything is waiting for a name."

Reading that, I was reminded of earlier this week when I saw a small girl toddling down the sidewalk in front of her mother. It was a perfect Fall day and the girl was wearing a tiny corduroy jacket; her arms were outstretched and she nearly fell over with enthusiasm about the wonderment of walking.

I found myself pitying the girl because, at her age, there is so much pain and so much heartache that she can't even imagine yet. While still only in my 20s, I have the knowledge that at least I've experienced grief before. It's real and it's familiar, and no longer lurking in the shadows of the Unknown. I slip into that mindset a lot in the presence of children; I don't see them as having the excitement of the first day in the Garden but rather, of the tears that they'll shed and the pain that they'll endure in the years to come.

Blah. What a non-autumnal thought. So melodramatic, so overwraught. So very NOT worth dwelling on.

Today has been a continuous assault on my nostrils.

I don't consider my olfactory sense to be the keenest of the five, but smell conjures up such strong associations in me, and my nostrils will be among the first to flare at the smallest sign of trouble.

A woman came in this afternoon wearing a particularly noxious scent; of course she decided to order grand portions of food and loll indolently at a table for nearly two hours. At the same time, a peculiar smell began to waft around the place. I can't say for sure that it was this woman or her companion producing the smell, as the majority of the tables were full, but I'll tell you this: standing up at the counter being pounded on one side by the noxious perfume and on the other with what I can only describe as the combination of old eggs, rancid beef, and a severe case of constipation, my eyes began to water and I was eventually forced to beat a hasty and inglorious retreat into the kitchen.

Forever finding ways to get out of copyediting

My deadline is looming but have I begun this month's worth of copyediting? Well, yes. But my progress has been dreadfully slow and characterized almost fully by two frustrated hours of staring at incorrect citations and then a week and a half of ignoring them completely.

This, my friends, is poor time management for a freelancer.

I spent the majority of this morning in a daze, shuffling around the apartment with the knowledge that I could be doing something productive but that who am I kidding--I can't concentrate right now.

Deciding to drive to the bakery as a precaution against colds and flus (I pick and choose these precautions, clearly, but not walking two miles through the newly-arrived autumnal winds seems like a logical choice to make) gave me an extra half-hour. Not a half-hour in which to do some work. Oh no. A half-hour in which I make myself a second cup of yerba mate (precaution #2) and inform my blogdom that last Friday's posting on Dooce nearly made me choke on my tea.

Quotes and books and autumnal thoughts

"It is bitter for the young to see what awful innocence adults grow into, that terrible vulnerability that must be sheltered from the rodent mire of childhood.

Can we blame the child for resenting the fantasy of largeness? Big, soft arms and deep voices in the dark saying, 'Tell Papa, tell Mama, and we'll make it right.' the child, screaming for refuge, senses how feeble a shelter the twig hut of grown-up awareness is. They claim strength, these parents, and complete sanctuary. The weeping earth itself knows how desperate is the child's need for exactly that sanctuary. How deep and sticky is the darkness of childhood, how rigid the blades of infant evil, which is unadulterated, unrestrained by the convenient cushions of age and its civilizing anesthesia.

Grownups can deal with scraped knees, dropped ice-cream cones, and lost dollies, but if they suspected the real reasons we cry they would fling us out of their arms in horrified revulsion. Yet we are as small and as terrified as we are terrifying in our ferocious appetites.

We need that warm adult stupidity. Even knowing the illusion, we cry and hide in their laps, speaking only of defiled lollipops or lost bears, and getting a lollipop or a toy bear's worth of comfort. We make do with it rather than face alone the cavernous reaches of our skulls for which there is no remedy, no safety, no comfort at all. We survive until, by sheer stamina, we escape into the dim innocence of our own adulthood and its forgetfulness."
--Katherine Dunn, in Geek Love

Many books have been read recently, read perhaps more than they should have--it's terribly difficult to acknowledge that something makes me too introspective, too frustrated, taps too sharply into my own insecurities, when I'm caught up in the beauty of the writing itself.

It's like watching a movie that you know will haunt you for weeks to come but you, so caught up in the story and the moment, are frozen to your chair. Sitting paralyzed as I have in front of books like Geek Love or Henry & June has made me realize what a sucker I am for good writing, but how very much what I read affects my reality.

The weather is getting colder and jackets have been brought out, yet sitting in front of an open window--writing as a cold breeze and light from the clear sky invades the room--I do feel a sort of frustration. It's probably mostly to do with the book and how broken all of the characters are, but there is, nonetheless, a nearly-constant frown on my face.

I always have such high expectations for the Fall. Such high expectations for any season, for any part of my life, really. By this time I know that I should accept the fact that reality never plays itself out the way that I expect it to. I should be prepared that my own concept of the future will be drastically different from how it ends up. Don't get me wrong--many times in recent weeks, I have found that the chaotic surprise of reality is much more gratifying, an unexpected blessing, yet it's disconcerting to see myself as utterly incapable of predicting each turn of events that lead to the next.

Last night I had a long talk about Providence. At the end of the day, that's all I've got to rely on. Not as a blind trust or a cop-out from making my own decisions, but as a nearly-tangible comfort that I can't fuck up my life as much as I think I can. That Providence has its fingers tangled in my life and in the lives of those around me is supremely relaxing.

It's probably time to go read a children's book. You know, to regain my equilibrium.

Back to school

The bakery reopened today after a two-week haitus. Walking in the door was like the first day back at school; all of us hugging each other and laughing and catching up on the past weeks' gossip (of which there was a lot, believe you me). It's utterly ridiculous, how fond the employees of the bakery are of each other. I felt as though I should be opening up a fresh pack of pens and putting up posters of teen idols in my locker.

The afternoon--while long and somewhat surreal because I was out of my mind on non-drowsy Sudafed (which apparently my system is no longer able to handle)--was a veritable montage of familiar faces, made cheesily dear by their recent absence. Nate, the Intelligencia coffee delivery man (who we refer to as Hunky Coffee Guy because, well, he's hunky) came in and accepted his usual snack, given to him surreptitiously because none of us acknowledge that we all come to the counter and hang on his every word when he comes around. Late in the afternoon, Stephie and I were kibbutzing in the front when Reader Guy appeared; we saw him coming and raised our fists in the air and shouted, "Reader Guy! Reader Guy! It's Reader Guy!" as he stepped in the doorway. He got a large coffee and left with a sloppy smile on his face because really, where else does one get cheering and triumphant applause when one delivers the weekly paper?

I rediscovered the little things that give me pause and a bit of a grin in the day-to-day of the bakery: looking out the window at one point, I saw a large delivery van pulling to a stop at the intersection. It was yellow and windowless, and painted on the side were the words "Purple Heart Veterans" and it made me smile for the next few minutes as I pictured a vanload of veterans piled in cages to be dropped off at various locations throughout the city.

It's good to be back in the swing of things, back to some semblance of normalcy. I'll take as much of that as I can get.

it's a tricky business, trying to recreate something wonderful.

Never so clearly seen, obviously, as in the movie business; I'll not attempt to touch the subtleties that mark the successes and falls of trilogies in the film world. It's moments in time that I'm talking about: intense conversations with people who you gather together again and again in hopes that the former connection will spark again, over and over; reunions with age-old friends who, if you all were to be entirely honest with yourselves, you appreciate more for the memories they conjure up than for them as people... nothing ever stays the same, and no second or third experience is going to capture exactly the same feelings that you felt with the first.

This, I think, gives me a wistful pause--but only slightly, because if I'm feeling at all existential (and there's usually a bit of existentialism that I can find somewhere in myself), I'll be the first to admit that the changefulness of life is one of the things I most appreciate about it--that I can embrace my memories wholeheartedly, but that around the corner are new ones that even I, with my wild imagination, have yet to even consider.

That said, I was given a bit of pause when the subject of midnight kickball came up in the middle of last week. The first game was unbelievable; I haven't gone into details about it here, but thinking back on it at this moment, I am at a loss to point to any one thing that made it great. It was the relative spontaneity of the thing that we gloried in--we'd never done anything like it, and I came away from there with a montage of experiences in my head: the absurdly grandiose posturing of myself and the other captain; the Fat Kid Run being called up and demonstrated in a big way; the impromptu national anthem that everyone suddenly pulled themselves together halfway soberly to enact; an unnecessary slide into home that resulted in my left leg being scraped up and hard to shave for the next three days; a group spooning in the outfield--not a sexual way as much as an inebriated "spooning is a legitimate way to provide cover in the outfield, right?" decision--and a nasty cigarette burn that came within millimeters of my tattoo and will, despite dedicated ministrations of neosporin, undoubtedly leave a scar. A reminder of the first midnight kickball.

It was so absurd, such utter chaos, that going into it last night, I felt a moment of pause and a touch of concern that this time would somehow not add up--that everyone felt so strongly about the first experience that they'd try to do the exact same things so as to live it all over again and it would, then, as most re-creations do, fall anticlimactically to the dirt.

Miraculously, it did not. The national anthem gathering was the only thing that, I believe, remained standard between this and last weekend. Another girl and I set up a bit of a roadblock on the way to third base--we were losing and decided to try and even up the score a little bit, prison-style--a decision which has resulted in scraped and bleeding knees, a bit of a ripped-up side, and a massive bruise on my ribs. Children, let this be a lesson to you: no matter how grandly you swagger and how vigorously you shout to bolster your confidence, 120 pounds is not going to stop 300-some pounds, if the latter is charging resolutely to third base and the former winds up face-down in the dirt. Not gonna happen.

More sliding, more base-stealing, MUCH more of being picked up and thrown over shoulders like a potato sack (albeit a very spiffy-looking potato sack who has "O Cap'n, my Cap'n" sewed on the back of her shirt--I may be a Captain in name only, but damn it--I will reference my Whitman), and more than a bit of kickball trash-talk. Unlike the first time, the cops showed up (technically I believe it was a combination of the park closing at 11:00pm and the participation of last week's naysayers who somehow brought some negative energy to the game) as I had just stepped up to the plate, a cigarette in one hand and a Pabst in the other. Someone stage-whispered, "Elaine, HIDE YOUR BEER" and I could think of nothing more natural in the world than to stick the entire bottle in the waistband of my pants and pretend that nothing had happened. This would have worked splendidly if I'd only just stayed in one place--no no, I had to actually continue with the game, and let me tell you: old thrift store baseball pants whose elastic is giving out around the waist are in no position to hold up a full bottle of beer when the wearer is kicking a ball and tearing around the bases. While the bottle did promptly slide down my pants, the elastic around the knees stayed put and as a result, I stood on first base with one half of my lower body completely soaked in beer. The cops, while effectively cutting off our game, issued no tickets and allowed us to gather for team photos before leaving. A large chunk of our team headed back to Maplewood to continue the party, which lasted until nearly 5:00am and gave us a chance to shovel hot dogs into our mouths and participate in lengthy conversations whose slightly drunken nature in no way detracted from their sincerity and value.

Which brings me up to this morning: lying in bed after 4 hours of sleep, bruised and battered, and a smile that keeps stealing over my face at the memory of last night's events and how fantastically, how very very well, experience number two lived up to the standard set by experience number one.

In other news,

My hair has, I feel, reached the apex of its largeness. At least the apex of what is acceptable to me.

Come on, Craigslist free section; hook me up with a haircut NOW.

"...what with all the shenanigans and goings-on"

I've reached the midpoint in my vacation and have realized a grave error: I should have either found some other job to occupy me during these 2 1/2 weeks, or I should have traveled somewhere (i.e. the farm) to break up the days and give myself some perspective of elapsed time. Not only has each day blended into the next, but my own sense of productivity--given the activities with which I choose to occupy myself--has plummeted dramatically.

Sure, it's fun in a way that my days are filled with reading, sewing stuff onto shirts, sitting on the porch, and watching movies. Fun for maybe a week. Now I just feel like a slob. That may have something to do with the cold that's taken over my body (my one summer cold, smack dab in the middle of my vacation, which I'm treating oh-so-ethnically with matzo-ball soup) but is, I suspect, due more to the inactivity of my days. It's both depressing and very telling that, as I tried to recount things I've accomplished in the past week, "keeping my room clean" was the thing that stood out most strongly in my mind.

Nights, of course, are a different story--I could write about midnight kickball games and drunken bowling and late-night diner runs and horror movie watching parties (I watched both Jaws AND Poltergeist this week, making me feel strong and brave) and 2 a.m. porch talks--but, as has been recently pointed out to me, there's much less motivation to write about and internalize these things when you're surrounded by people to talk about them with. I find myself caught up with planning thrift store trips to make team t-shirts for future kickball games as opposed to sitting by myself in front of this laptop and mulling over the past, laughing silently as I write about lying down in the middle of the outfield, group hugs wherein I get badly burned by a cigarette, and how kickball turned into a massive contact sport for some involved.

And so here I sit, stuffy-nosed on the back porch, with grand plans for a cup of tea and some copyediting in the immediate future; at this point, I'm trying not to think more than two hours ahead of me.