listalicious

Things I didn't do last week:
-put away my summer clothes/bring out my winter clothes
-send E and K's birthday presents (now two months overdue)
-go through my box of papers labelled "To Go Through"
-watch either of the amazing tie matches (Spurs v MUtd; Chelsea v Everton - Everton?!?!)
-finish the book TT lent me
-find my drill
-sell or give away my bloody fishtank. Gaaahhh!
-call any of the people I said I would call (Liz S, Liz W-O, K, K, L, L, C, xyz)
-email Rachel -- although I have been reading her blog with great zest
-file my box of papers labelled "To Be Filed"

Things I did do last week:
-work
-sleep
-send Ginger's package (en fin)
-bought birthday present for Cabiya and wedding present for E & E
-bought shoes to fancy up for the wedding
-had qt with Downey and a surprise guest
-read the New Yorker and the Economist and Bon Appetit
-stopped the hannahjideen from an extreme overanalysis of my current Nose (minor victories over the hannahjideen = eventual triumph and vanquishment of them!)
-major qt with SA, including a screening of the best DVD ever (CiM)
-yoga x 2, plus dins with Elis and D
-very briefly partied in Mount Pleasant

I had a lovely moment on TT's balcony after work on Thursday night, snatching a drag and peering out across the rooftops for a midnight glimpse of the cathedral's lights flashing. He'd just poured me a glass of wine and was speaking on the phone to his beloved; it was a perfect early autumn night -- a little bite to the air, but still really pleasant to be outside. I hadn't realized one could see the cathedral from TT's little spot -- so bizarre to be in Columbia Heights looking across the park to Cathedral Heights. I just felt, then, just for a moment, my chest and my energy opening up, a moment of consciousness, of awareness, that I haven't felt very often since being back in DC.

I think it's partly about being in my hometown, so I rarely see things with new eyes -- but it was a blessing, a recall to moments outside of this stagnant maelstrom I've felt myself in -- a hearkening back to the walk across the Corrib and seeing the swans, or passing by the fish market on the way to the Tube at 8 am, or catching my guagua on the 27 de Febrero: a realization of purity. This is my life right now, and I can savor it -- for all my bitching and lack of direction, it is a rich life, full of people I care about and questions worth pondering* and good food and challenging art -- or not. I am sitting outside during my favorite season, about to catch up with someone dear to me (for all his bitching/whining, he IS dear), drinking a lovely glass of wine, I've just sweated an honest sweat. As Dore and I once said under extremely different circumstances, but with no less sincerity: it doesn't get any better than this.




*not that I don't advocate a literate and cultured populace, but come on! You're calling quits on the date so you can go home and read? Gaaahhh!

more syncronicity

As I blog in a last-ditch procrastination binge, having read The Guardian, the Onion, Londonist, DCist, LAist and Chicagoist (why?), memorized the yoga & footy schedules for the weekend, browsed Target.com, and Friendstered as much as I could stand, I now sit with my chocolate-smudged finger in the final-draft dyke (wha..?), and would like to note for the record that one year ago tomorrow was my official last day of work at downtown corporate pukedom, hopefully forever my official last day of work in corporate pukedom at any locale (though the free snacks were quite nice)

This year, the fifteenth of October is a Saturday. It's also the day my application is due (although I am mailing it tomorrow & it'll get there Monday the 17th, that specific date has been the alarm on my internal clock, tick tocking, for the past four weeks). I don't know if that stretches to a full circle, but I certainly do feel a bit more of a person, maybe even more of a person like ... myself, now than I did then. It's been a whirligig twelve months: the Flesh and Candour, Indecision 2004, aventuras en la costa oeste, the Southern Gentleman, nonprofit purgatory, saying goodbye to Granmama Em, the Cup to the Kop, 9 kids/3 acts/5 weeks, birthday panic attacks, asana sanity, learning cyrillic, cuppas & rollies on the seaside, purple mountains majesty, and now a strange calmness.

I don't know how long it will last and I don't know exactly how it came to be here, if next week I will feel a light's gone out and it's back to Blah Blah Freakout Chainsmoke Pessimist Land. I sincerely hope not, but I suppose there's only one way to find out.

I heart Tony Hoagland

Rob D and I went to see him read a few weeks ago at the Folger. He is an elf with a Brain of Pinky and the Brain sort of head, but not in an annoying supersmart way, just in a twinkley sort of way. He read in a wonderful, measured, very precise tone that left lots of room for laughter and reconsideration of what different moments meant or could mean, which I loved. Mostly from What Narcissism Means To Me (which you should either buy or ask for on your next gift-receiving occasion) and then he signed for hours and hours. The food was fabulous (rare roast beef on toast points and carmelized onions in puff pastry -- Downs and I had a bit of a binge) and the wine was my favorite kind of wine, free! When we got to the front of the line I saw he looked exhausted and offered to get him something, so I brought him a fizzy water (he said he needed some fizzy energy) and then he signed my book "For Hannah with thanks." I am smitten with him and his wee red suede waistcoat over black tshirt and jeans.

Here is one of my faves, which he read:

Migration
by Tony Hoagland

This year Marie drives back and forth
from the hospital room of her dying friend
to the office of the adoption agency.

I bet sometimes she doesn't know
what threshold she is waiting at --

the hand of her sick friend, hot with fever;
the theoretical baby just a lot of paperwork so far.

But next year she might be standing by a grave,
wearing black with a splash of
banana vomit on it,

the little girl just starting to say Sesame Street
and Cappuccino latte grande Mommy.
The future ours for a while to hold, with its heaviness --

and hope moving from one location to another
like the holy ghost that it is.


***
(what I just realized is that the title of this poem is the topic of the grant I've been working myself barkers on for the past two weeks, and that gives me shivers -- ah, serendipity)

back with a whimper not a bang

Putting off writing Hi-you-don't-know-me-but emails for this fucking grant has led me first to change my settings on Friendster to re-enable my stalking (mmm mmm, secret Friendster boyfriend Phillippe, how I've missed you when I couldn't view your profile because then you'd see mine) and now to blog. Pa. The. Tic.

Ah, well.

What've I got? Not much except an empty 2.5 gallon fishtank and a long neck High Life, and I don't want to fucking write these fucking emails! Grrrr.

At some point in the past few days (sleep-wake-write emails-revise draft-sling hash-sleep-wake-write-eat-file bills-sleep-wake-revise-eat, ad nauseam) I had the somewhat inappropriate thought that it's not out of the realm of possibility that I could in the distant mists of the future, birth a boy child, and that, as his mother, I would be free to name him, oh, Gerrard Rafael Last Name, or Rafael Gerrard Last Name, and not a soul except SA would know why, and this thought (of the name, not of the hours of gutwrenching labor required to bring said moneypit into the world, nor of the 21 subsequent years of sleepless nights) filled me with far, far too much joy. Ahh.

Slurp, slurp, blog, blog, now I'm tired and it's not as if I can just not write these before going to sleep and it's not as if I don't have almost every hour booked tomorrow. Hrmph. Grrrrr (note the first 2 letters...)