I am a super-classy date

A few of the things I said to Narcissistic String Theory Guy last night on our first date in five years:

1. "You are good-natured, but in an odd and specific way, so maybe not so much good-natured as odd-natured."
2. "I recently found some expired condoms that I think once belonged to you."
3. "You are a ridiculous human being."
4. "What the hell is that supposed to mean?" (In response to his "Well, this is the most fun I have had in a long time.")
5. "Please shut up so that we can make out."

I have to say recycling is pretty fun.

Some things I am thinking of doing that I might need ya'll to talk me out of

Completely unrelated and in no particular order:

1. Recycling, as in going out with someone I dated five years ago
2. Having a kid
3. Going back to eating whatever I want whenever I want, with the idea that I actually eat less and am thinner when I do so
4. Going back on Prozac
5. Learning to play the violin
6. Buying a video camera
7. Finishing my novel
8. Going to a monastery for a weekend
9. Smoking a cigarette (thinking of it but won't do it--check out the sidebar! 800 days tomorrow! 800 days, people!)

Missing my Dickens

I wish this were a euphemism, folks, but I mean this literally. Every bit of my Dickens is missing, as in not a Copperfield, Nickleby, Pip, Tale, or House in the house. Even Drood is nowhere to be found.

I love autumn like no other season but when the air starts to get a little chilly and the light a bit scarce a touch sooner each day, I feel the need to brace myself for the coming winter. For whatever reason, my winter preparations include reading some Dickens. Go figure, but it makes me feel like everything is going to be okay. Henry James can do in a pinch but nothing comforts quite like my Dickens.

How could this have happened? Am I just not seeing them on any of the shelves? Do I have some kind of neurological disorder that makes me blind to the Dickens? Did I decide to take all of my Dickens to my office at school? I tend to hoard my books at home, so this seems unlikely. Did a poor anglophile thief come in the night and make off with my Dickens? Do I have a friend with a very specific cleptomaniacal bent or an odd odd sense of humor? Has the Chalupa distributed all of the Dickens to her secret book group? Did I have some sort of drunken blackout during which I flew into some kind of rage against the Dickens and threw them all away?

I am totally baffled.

Updated to add: Found! They were on the small bookshelf in the hallway with the Children's Lit and the Alexander Pope. Of course!!????????? I may have been drinking when I last reorganized the books. Now. Which should I re-read? Which of the which??

Poetry Friday, Jack Donne

Break of Day

'Tis true, 'tis day; what though it be?
O wilt thou therefore rise from me?
Why should we rise because 'tis light?
Did we lie down because 'twas night?
Love, which in spite of darkness brought us hither,
Should in despite of light keep us together.

Light hath no tongue, but is all eye;
If it could speak as well as spy,
This were the worst that it could say,
That being well, I fain would stay,
And that I loved my heart and honor so
That I would not from him, that had them, go.

Must business thee from hence remove?
O, that's the worst disease of love.
The poor, the foul, the false, love can
Admit, but not the busied man.
He which hath business, and makes love, doth do
Such wrong, as when a married man doth woo.

I feel this way every single time a man** leaves my bed, even though it's usually the case that I need to get up and take care of business just as much or more than he does. That Donne knew something about the woes of TCB when all you really want to do is make out with a bassist (or a front man or a sound man or a gorgeous coach or a narcissistic string theory guy, whatever the case may be).

Business is totally the "worst disease of love" and of blogging and of drinking cocktails and of Septembers of planned fun. At least I had the one glorious weekend in Favorite City. Sigh. It's not over yet though, right? More fun can be had, in spite of the towering pile of work. (I so wish More Fun himself could be had, but alas he's returned to the road with the rock-n-roll circus.)

By the way, I think a married man doth woo me. Except he's not really married, or rather he was technically married but had been separated for two years from his wife when I dated him five years ago. Will keep you posted, on his current marital status as well as the state of the woo.

*Okay, okay, every time a man I like leaves my bed. Let's just assume only men I actually like are in my bed to begin with.

Happy blogiversary to me

Bringing the joys of the single professing gorgon to the masses for three years today!

Head in sand or bite the bullet?

There is something funky going on with the display on my laptop, ranging from weird purple pixel patterns showing up on video to the monitor blinking on and off and going completely black every now and then for a few minutes. The Apple Care dudes think it's the video card.

So I can ship if off for repairs and not have a computer (except for the one in my office, where I can't do work without all manner of humanity interrupting me) for a week or I can hope for the best until I can actually go for a week without a computer, like during December break.

Thoughts?

Another item for the Year of Medusa alternative holiday letter

In mid-September as the air became chill-tinged, as pinpoints of burnished gold and scarlet began to appear in the trees, and I was cleaning out my underwear drawer, I found six packaged condoms that had expired in February of 2004. I ask you: is there anything sadder than an expired condom? Granted, they were of the extra-large variety and we all know those never get used as quickly as your standard sizes. Still, those small bulky silver packages in my hands led to a bittersweet contemplation of six lost opportunities, a sigh of regret for each moment of unquenched passion, and a brief searching meditation on who exactly I might have been sleeping with around the dawn of the new millennium that inspired such a purchase. Ahhh. . . the mixture of melancholy and delight in such memories!

Poetry Friday, four from Richard Brautigan

Star Hole

I sit here
on the perfect end
of a star,

watching light
pour itself toward
me.

The light pours
itself through
a small hole
in the sky.

I'm not very happy,
but I can see
how things are
faraway.

After a weekend in Favorite City with very little sleep but much reveling and adventure and laughter and (more) fun and then a week of good classes and bad classes and a thousand meetings and a trillion different people needing things from me, I am left feeling exhilarated and exhausted. I have Brautigan's "Star Hole" on my refrigerator. I stuck it there almost by accident soon after I moved into the garret, but I have kept it there. I read it everyday, simply because it is in my line of sight as I open and close the fridge door. It's come to act as kind of a gauge for how in or out my life I am feeling that day. Having been in two very different worlds this week, I am feeling like I am viewing everything from a distance. The difference is I am very happy. I like shaking up my perspective. I am thinking it's a very, very good thing for me right now. I am not taking anything too terribly seriously, which is saving me from the terrible seriousness of certain people 'round Foggy C.

Here's three more from Brautigan, who has one of my favorite senses of humor and who died today in 1984. R.I.P. funny profound genius man. Photos are those taken by me from my super secret locations(s) last weekend with More Fun and the rock-n-roll circus.


Karma Repair Kit: Items 1-4

1. Get enough food to eat,
and eat it.

2. Find a place to sleep where it is quiet,
and sleep there.

3. Reduce intellectual and emotional noise
until you arrive at the silence of yourself,
and listen to it.

4.



Boo, Forever

Spinning like a ghost
on the bottom of a
top,
I'm haunted by all
the space that I
will live without
you.

The Ferris Wheel


The world was opening and closing its insane asylums and churches like a forgetful old man buttoning up his pants instead of unbuttoning them.
Are you going to go to the toilet in your pants, old man?
The rain was a dark Ferris wheel bringing us closer to Baudelaire and General Motors.
We were famous and we kicked walnut leaves.

Poetry Friday, Frank O'Hara

Steps

How funny you are today New York
like Ginger Rogers in Swingtime
and St. Bridget’s steeple leaning a little to the left

here I have just jumped out of a bed full of V-days
(I got tired of D-days) and blue you there still
accepts me foolish and free
all I want is a room up there
and you in it
and even the traffic halt so thick is a way
for people to rub up against each other
and when their surgical appliances lock
they stay together
for the rest of the day (what a day)
I go by to check a slide and I say
that painting’s not so blue

where’s Lana Turner
she’s out eating
and Garbo’s backstage at the Met
everyone’s taking their coat off
so they can show a rib-cage to the rib-watchers
and the park’s full of dancers with their tights and shoes
in little bags
who are often mistaken for worker-outers at the West Side Y
why not
the Pittsburgh Pirates shout because they won
and in a sense we’re all winning
we’re alive

the apartment was vacated by a gay couple
who moved to the country for fun
they moved a day too soon
even the stabbings are helping the population explosion
though in the wrong country
and all those liars have left the UN
the Seagram Building’s no longer rivalled in interest
not that we need liquor (we just like it)

and the little box is out on the sidewalk
next to the delicatessen
so the old man can sit on it and drink beer
and get knocked off it by his wife later in the day
while the sun is still shining

oh god it’s wonderful
to get out of bed
and drink too much coffee
and smoke too many cigarettes
and love you so much.

The re-entry

The busyness of the re-entry, combined with a visit from More Fun this week, has left me no time to blog. I am still here, feeling at turns shell-shocked, energized, annoyed, ecstatic. Here's some of what I have been doing during my absence:

1. Attending the heteronormative dinner. Married with Children Colleague Who Refuses to Bring Her Husband to Work Things or to Exist as Half of Coupled Unit attended sans husband. Yay MWCCWRTBHHTWTOTEAGHOCU! (Really going to have to work on a better pseudonym for MWCCWRTBHHTWTOTEAGHOCU.)

2. Dancing with a man with a peg leg and parasol

3. Being cornered in a tiny pub by and very briefly enduring the advances of a Muckity Muck Professor of Fancy Medicine at Terribly Prestigious University who tried to woo me with ridiculous babble about Lear, the "soul," and "human nature"

4. Attending a vast array of meetings, one of which devolved into weirdly heteronormative part-professional, part-personal individual reportage of summer activities, during which I wanted to say something like "Well, there was this one really intense week when the condom broke. Thank god I had some Plan B on hand! I just threw myself into work on the revisions for that article." I also have this impulse at holiday time when I get those family form letters. (Someday I will post a Year of Medusa fantasy version of the holiday family letter.)

5. Drinking a vast array of adult beverages

6. Hanging out with the rock-n-roll circus

7. With More Fun, deciding on names for our children: for a girl, Emmylou Harris Fun, and for a boy, Lionel Richie Fun

The busyness and the More Fun fun will continue into next week. Planning to join More Fun in Favorite City this weekend. Could NOT BE MORE EXCITED about this. Remember how I said September is going to be mine all mine? I am really trying to let myself let that happen.