Thinking of You

Today's photo is in your honor.

I definitely grabbed Jeff by the lapel this evening (then recoiled in embarrassment).

Molly's Modern Baby

I know what someone's future child is getting for Christmas.

Our Horoscope Poems

Blacked out horoscopes make poems. For Aries:

grow into
the challenge
simply not to ruin it.

Nice morning

A. couldn't sleep, so he got up and made maple cranberry scones this morning. Coffee for him, tea for me. We watched the final 15 minutes of 'A Serious Man' and cuddled in our undies.

Pay Attention

From Susan Sontag's essay “The Novelist and Moral Reasoning”:

By presenting us with a limitless number of nonstopped stories, the narratives that the media relate—the consumption of which has so dramatically cut into the time the educated public once devoted to reading—offer a lesson in amorality and detachment that is antithetical to the one embodied by the enterprise of the novel.

In storytelling as practiced by the novelist, there is always—as I have argued—an ethical component. This ethical component is not the truth, as opposed to the falsity of the chronicle. It is the model of completeness, of felt intensity, of enlightenment supplied by the story, and its resolution—which is the opposite of the model of obtuseness, of non-understanding, of passive dismay, and the consequent numbing of feeling, offered by our media-disseminated glut of unending stories…. (“Time exists in order that it doesn’t happen all at once … space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.”)

To tell a story is to say: this is the important story. It is to reduce the spread and simultaneity of everything to something linear, a path.

To be a moral human being is to pay, be obliged to pay, certain kinds of attention.

Notes From The Watergate

The internets are making me happy today, full of funny things like this.

I brought back a real camera, with real film, so I'm ready for you to be my real model (outdoors).

I want to see you in all your new clothes. When shall you and I celebrate the holiday? W. doesn't have gall bladder problems. More tests this week... And yet, we fought it out once over break over him not wanting to come out and I felt like I really spoke my mind, and now I feel much, much better, and then, so in love with him again...

Let's make art projects.

A. says sometimes I am too touchy and kiss him too much. He told me this when i was on top of him on the kitchen floor this morning.

W. not coming tonight to clothing exchange and I'm both hurt and pissed and tired of this.

suffer, suffer, suffer more

Shooting from zarteknoepft on Vimeo.

Baby Dream #1

I dreamt last night W and I had a baby, specifically me breast feeding in public and him being slightly embarassed, until I explain that I just need him to toss me a baby blanket. I show him "This is a baby blanket" so that he'll do it right the next time. All in all, it is a good baby and I think we're happy in the dream.

This all stems from him kissing my chest last night before we made love and me thinking -- he looks like a baby doing this.

On Repeat

I am thinking about how many times over the course of a weekend ODB told us that cottage cheese makes him nauseated.

Emotional Photoshop

It's weird to finally see photos of your ex-boyfriend with his new girlfriend, even though they've been together for over a year. Vacation photos particularly, it's so easy to imagine yourself in the same pose with him in some earlier vacation, summers ago. That new photographic classic, the "put your two heads together and hold the camera out at arm's length", is particularly haunting to me for some reason. I have those photos with him, now he has those photos with her, and now I have those photos with my new man. It's like looking into a mirror into a mirror into a mirror, an exponential visual explosion where every face is exchangeable and interchangeable. No doubt it's a trope that will occur in every new facebook album in every new relationship we experience from here on out.

"Career Girls"

We watched Mike Leigh's Career Girls last night and it reminded me of me and you in all the best ways...This is what it'll be like when we return to Trash Cat Manor years later, and find Dave on the steps...

Travel Is Useful

This is what I want your trip to be like: you are the tall beautiful woman dressed in autumn's best, leading the little girl of your unconscious on an adventure.

Youthful Ambitions

I am living the life I dreamed about when I was 15.

Basically that entails having a record player and having my own apartment where I can use it.

Success!

Talking About Versus Doing

Last night I finally fixed my sewing machine and finished hemming that pretty yellow dress Megin gave me, right when it's out of season. But it made me so happy to accomplish and finish something.

Re: Hard To Watch

Vindication! Emotional growth!

I'm moved for you more than I can adequately articulate. The future will be better tomorrow and the past is already better today.

Speaking of the future:














The goal for me is to try and have some kind of flexible work where it doesn't matter where I land.

Hard To Watch

the biggest thing that happened this weekend was me drunkenly telling odb i thought he hated women. i think this goes back to college and me resenting him for not loving me for being smart, and being with people whom i thought weren't as smart as me.

here's part of the email he sent me today:

the last night i was in town hearing you talk about my 'relationship' with q made me worry that i may have taken my relationship with you for granted - hadn't really considered those side-effects - i can see how it could be "hard to watch" and i just want you to know that i've eventually comprehended that, slow on the uptake as i may be

weird how life works.

"The future will be better tomorrow"

I very much want that life. Can we do that? I think we can. What city would it be in? And we could work in our garden together, while the boys could watch sports. It will look like this. ODB is going to send some mixes for you.


w beat me in scrabble last night and ran around gloating like a child. the scrabble was fun; the puerilization of the boyfriend, not so much.

Wouldn't it be nice?

Coming up the stairs to work this morning, after a talk with my dad about trying to stick it out here a bit longer, I imagined how nice it would be if we could go in together on a house and build/modify two different nice apartments for our two families. Our kids could grow up together like siblings. It would be civilized urban commune living, though mostly we'd live separate lives and get to be together when we wanted.

Spent the weekend doing things to satisfy men. There were times I felt like I was walking around like a zombie, feeling kind of empty.

You Can't Pick Your Co-workers

All new people in my area which should make me happy but instead makes me realize I can't pick my nose in peace anymore.

Puddles of Everlasting Now

I love rainy days when I'm inside...

The Best Thing

In the world is sometimes Lewis Lapham, I think:

By the time I read White’s essay “Here Is New York”, I was a city-side reporter for the New York Herald Tribune and beginning to suspect what he meant by the city’s capacity to bestow “queer prizes,” among them “the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy” that place the inhabitant in “the happy position of being able to choose his spectacle and so conserve his soul.” The meaning of the remark came clear on a cloudy afternoon in Central Park when I came across two men seated on a bench, each with a fanciful parrot resting on his shoulder, engaged in intense discussion accompanied by decisive gestures and rapid changes of expression. The parrots were identical; the two men were as unlike one another as a ferret and a panda—on the near end of the bench a small and heavily damaged white man in a threadbare raincoat, early seventies, not many teeth, sunken chest, furtive demeanor; at the far end of the bench a handsome and handsomely tailored black man, gold jewelry, stylish hat and brocade vest, broad-gauged grin, majestic presence.

In answer to my questions, I was told that the parrots were the only two of their particular species ever to have made it north of the Panama Canal, that the two men had met by accident while out walking their birds on 125th Street, that each had come to regard the other as the only man in America with whom it was possible to hold an important conversation. E. B. White had attributed New York’s “poetical deportment” to the fortunate meeting of minds among people come to town in search of “some greater or lesser grail.” Here then, seated with parrots on a bench in Central Park, was the transfer of energy that is the source of the city light. “The metropolis,” as per the observation of Ezra Pound, as “that which accepts all gifts and all heights of excellence, usually the excellence that is tabu in its own village.”

The Worst Sound in the World

The weird skin flatulence emitted when the fleshy part of my forearm, resting on a table, shifts against the hard surface.

Hi Sally

Film editor Sally Menke died on Tuesday. She worked on all of Tarantino's films and he called her his greatest collaborator.

I like this clip a lot. It's like the cast is saying hi to Sally in her editor's heaven:

Rocky Picnic Dream #1

Last night I dreamt Micah's party wasn't at his apartment but at a beautiful grey, windy rocky beach. We all arrived, food and drink in tow, gathered on this deserted beach, ready to lay our blankets out when we realized we were all standing ankle deep in the cool water.

We should have been upset, but it was so pretty, and so quiet we all just stood there, looking at each other and decided we'd have to climb higher.

Badbucks

The garbage man asked me if I liked Starbucks and then if I wanted to go on a Starbucks date and then, as I was walking away, called after me again and again asking what my favorite Starbucks drink is.

No thank you, I know how dates with garbage men end:

Advice in an email from B

Drawings can be relentlessly perfect in their execution, and weight, and composition, and be a total virtuoso experience, and you get double meaning -- you have the meaning of the subject matter, the imagery, and how it relates to you, or what you meant it to be, but then you have the other meaning -- whatever it is you're drawing, if you draw it beautifully and lovingly and caringly, then you have the really simple meaning that this is important enough to distill, to crystalize and to spend time on, which is such an elemental meaning.

The whole uniqueness thing is a grey area, on one level everyone shares so much visual info, life experiences, yada yada, that to an extent we all can have similar visual output, but on another level the system through which those influences are being filtered (your brain) is such a ridiculously complex, complicated, intricate, and utterly unique system that I have no patience for anyone to second-guess their own obvious individuality, and by extension the uniqueness of a product of that individuality, you know?

Autumnal

I can't stop looking at my Fbook photos. I miss living with you and what will Christmas be without the coziness of our life together.

Win Some, Lose Some

Last night we saw a friend of mine from high school whom I hadn't seen in 10 years. Then I went home and dreamt that he and his entire family were killed in a car crash.

Film Will Be Our Baby

Yesterday W. decided to buy three years of a subscription to Film Comment. I asked him if he would love me as long as he loved film. I don't recall his exact response (vanity trumps all) but believe it involved a nod or a nuzzle and a kiss.

This is the best thing I've read all day, and probably will all week:

HOUELLEBECQ

I think that there is a sharp contrast for most people between life at university, where they meet lots of people, and the moment when they enter the workforce, when they basically no longer meet anyone. Life becomes dull. So as a result people get married to have a personal life. I could elaborate but I think everyone understands.

Fashion Statement

As I awoke this morning, it occurred to me that we ought to make t-shirts with little kittens in hardhats that say: Cats in Progress.

Dead Trees

Yes, travel is useful (even if it's metaphorical). I started reading The Year of Magical Thinking and it's all about death and grief and it seems appropriate for fall because all the trees are dying. I like when nature and my reading patterns coordinate with each other.

For whatever reason, an evening with the Brits re-energized my sense of yearning for a real love affair.

#Separation Is Hard

I WANT A TEA BREAK.

Life Without (Heads of) Horses

Can you please change the name of today's Art Notes to "Life Without Headless Horses, I don't think so"?

I put my computer on top of two pretty yellow bound books that are histories of Lee and Patton that I will never read, but their spines are nice and clean.

Here is a list of animals I've seen outside my window:
Crickets
Pigeons (both copulating and just hanging)
Crows (both cawing for hours and just hanging)
Primordial bugs that have learned to blend in with the Watergate's stucco

More on men later, but A2's Facebook escapade took him down two notches in my book, and he's already pretty short, so he needs all the notches he can get.

Also last night I dreamt I was planning a party for Samina which just happened to be in the cornfield next to a certain ex-boyfriend of mine's wedding. They were hacking down corn rows to create an altar or a path, and as I passed by to get to my own party, I made a demeaning remark that wifey heard. I believe I ran but I don't remember.

Cleaning out the archives

I have a tendency of going back to read the emails where I poured my heart out to someone. Though it's always disappointing to find that I defensively and preemptively deleted the emails to protect myself from further pining, I am also proud of my occasional effort of self-preservation.

Physics of Friends

I have an equal and opposite matter of gratitude for you: I have been so grateful that, when I needed it, you told me why I shouldn't love A. The other A, I mean.

You stoked my ego (mostly what I remember is you telling me how he wasn't hot or fun enough for me) and you helped push me away from an unhealthy, one-sided love.

And I traded up for the very reciprocal, healthy (if obsessive) true love I have for you.

That experience has sometimes made me wonder if I should (or maybe should have, past tense) push back on you more the way you did for me. Not because I don't think W is worthy, or that your love isn't real/enduring, or because I want you entirely to myself (we're both a mess without cock, let's not even try it).

But since I needed you to do that for me, I have this kind of knee-jerk mental reaction where I wondered if you needed it, too. It sometimes made me feel like a bad friend for not being harder or more dismissive or critical, particularly through the harder times.

But really, what could I say? The essential truth is that I'm not sure I'll ever think that there is someone out there who is really actually good enough for you. And so I have to put my trust in the real love that I see between you, and all the rat babies to come.

It's burning

I just ate said soup for lunch at work.

And then unfortunately I put my finger in my nose.

Rest Coast

You asked me this Friday night while we made spicy butternut apple soup whether you were right to love A, and to have told him so. It's the kind of question I love to answer because I am conceited and think I know everything, but you asking me that made me remember I am a liar and a thief who doesn't know anything and I talked cryptically and made jokes to get out of it...

Walking home on Saturday night I realized why. When I thought I loved W and was going to upend my life (worth it) but wasn't sure if it was just a passing infatuation (it wasn't and isn't), you were the only one to tell me you thought it was real. I can't tell you how important that was to me. I think about it all the time, mostly because it let me love W and that has proved lasting, but also because it made me trust you, emotionally, and to realize in so many ways our souls are aligned and that you and I understand each other in ways I've never had with anyone before. I want to give you a similar gift, but I guess I still only feel confident telling you how much I love you, not telling you how much you love A.

Maybe you were lying to me that fall day 3 years ago, or just telling me what you thought I wanted to hear (also true), but I think even to do that, I'd need to know how you really feel about A.

My instinct is you love him, not forever, but for now. And since our life here still feels very now, and not forever, I think you were right to say it.

But I'll ask you again in three years.

Blue Is True

I meant to tell you this yesterday, but in my dream two nights ago I committed suicide, unsuccessfully. I know we're really supposed to die when we die in dreams, but since I jumped off a zeppelin (can we agree to not care about spelling here?) fell through the sky and landed on the roof of a hotel, dazed but ok, unsure how to tell people I'd failed at dying.

I suppose it's a metaphor for fears of failure, or falling, but I woke up in a really good mood.

Every time I see two pigeons (not having sex) on the stoop outside my window I think of us.

Adult Disasters

After awaking to find my kitchen floor covered in worms, I later heard a Modest Mouse song on Pandora that was popular when I was in college. It made me feel maudlin.

the night pool in the winter, via anais nin, via Z

The place was barred to any loud frivolity but open for secret assignations after dancing...It was also _____'s favorite place before going to sleep. The gentleness of the water, its warmth, was the lulling atmosphere she had missed when she had passed from childhood to womanhood.

She felt an unconfessed need of receiving from some gentle source the reassurance that the world was gentle and warm, and not, as it may have seemed during the day, cold and cruel. This reassurance was never granted to the mature...

Others who came to the pool were of the fraternity who like to break laws, who like to steal their pleasures...In the darkness one became even more aware of the softness of the night, of pulsating life in the muscles, of the pleasure of motion.