incidents and accidents

So ... 1983.

Ok. So ... I met a guy yesterday. So far, he's texted me twice and phoned once. And I am too damn chicken to call him back feeling skeptical. Does this abundance of communication in the first 24 hours make him desperate? Is he a stalker? Or am I actually that afraid to pick up the phone and go out and live my life?

**UPDATE!! : I called him back. He's phoned oh, about 10 times in the past 2 days. He seems to be a stalker, but nice. A nice stalker. I am still skeptical, and wary of pathological telephoners. But we may have a drink tomorrow, or Friday.

In other news, Les Experts, which I think is called C.S.I. in 'Murrica, rocked last night. It also completely freaked me out. Hello, kids on PCP eating other kids' intestines? Dude, say no to drugs. Televised evisceration is quite possibly the best support for that recommendation.

Book'em.

Sometimes I think all I have ever done is read.

Then I remember working in roadside assistance, and I feel a little better.

Then I think about the logic of that, and I feel worse again.

And get out a book.

1984, George Orwell
The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
Animal Farm, George Orwell
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
Anne Of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer
The BFG, Roald Dahl
Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
Black Beauty, Anna Sewell
Bleak House, Charles Dickens
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
Bridget Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
Catch 22, Joseph Heller
The Catcher In The Rye, JD Salinger
Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
The Clan Of The Cave Bear, Jean M Auel
Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
The Colour Of Magic, Terry Pratchett
The Count Of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky
David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
Double Act, Jacqueline Wilson
Dune, Frank Herbert
Emma, Jane Austen
Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
Girls In Love, Jacqueline Wilson
The God Of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
The Godfather, Mario Puzo
Gone With The Wind, Margaret Mitchell
Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
Goodnight Mister Tom, Michelle Magorian
Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett
Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, JK Rowling
Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire, JK Rowling
Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone, JK Rowling
Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban, JK Rowling
His Dark Materials trilogy, Philip Pullman
The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, Douglas Adams
The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
Holes, Louis Sachar
I Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
Kane And Abel, Jeffrey Archer
Katherine, Anya Seton
The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, CS Lewis
Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
Lord Of The Flies, William Golding
The Lord Of The Rings, JRR Tolkien
Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blighton
Magician, Raymond E Feist
The Magus, John Fowles
Matilda, Roald Dahl
Memoirs Of A Geisha, Arthur Golden
Middlemarch, George Eliot
Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie
Mort, Terry Pratchett
Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
Noughts And Crosses, Malorie Blackman
Of Mice And Men, John Steinbeck
On The Road, Jack Kerouac
One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Perfume, Patrick Suskind
Persuasion, Jane Austen
The Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follett
A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving
Pride And Prejudice, Jane Austen
The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot
The Ragged Trousered Philantrhopists, Robert Tressell
Rebecca, Daphne Du Maurier
The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
The Secret History, Donna Tartt
The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher
The Stand, Stephen King
The Story Of Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
Swallows And Amazons, Arthur Ransome
A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
Tess Of The D’urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough
To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee
A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
The Twits, Roald Dahl
Ulysses, James Joyce
Vicky Angel, Jacqueline Wilson
War And Peace, Leo Tolstoy
Watership Down, Richard Adams
The Wind In The Willows, Kenneth Grahame
Winnie-the-Pooh, AA Milne
The Woman In White, Wilkie Collins
Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte

P.S. : Does this list feel a bit fantasy-heavy to anyone else? And where is Jeanette Winterson? Simone de Beauvoir? David Sedaris? Angela Carter? Elizabeth von Arnim? Gustave Flaubert? Marge Piercy? Ursula K. Leguin? Samuel Johnson? John Knowles? Ann-Marie Macdonald? Wally Lamb? Alice Sebold? William Horwood? Alice Walker? Victor Hugo? Laurence Sterne? Sylvia Nasar? Emile Zola? Mona Simpson?

Duh.

Harvard medical researchers have discovered a link between the MRI procedure and an elevated mood in bipolar sufferers, as spelled out in this article.

A sentence from the first paragraph of the article reads : Manic-depressives undergoing brain scans, not a really pleasant experience, came out of the machine happier than when they went in.

Let me make something very clear before I whip through this article like Zorro. I am not a medical researcher. The medical research I've done consists in that one time in 1993 when I was part of a drug trial. A research unit in a local psych hospital was testing the efficiency of a drug - typically used to help stop smoking - in people diagnosed with chronic depression. I got to take a taxi in the freezing pre-dawn hours out to Belmont, have my blood drawn once a week, and stand in line for free drugs. Oh. And there was one slight hitch. I had to pee into bright orange jugs four times a day. (Bright orange jugs. Four. Times. A. Day.) I swaddled them in opaque plastic carrier bags from the Harvard Coop and trundled them from seminar to seminar. It was a joyous time. A happy time. I was a first-year graduate student peeing for drugs. Carrying around jugs of medicated pee. At least it was my own pee.

Anyway. Now that we've established my lack of medical-research credentials, I'd like to give free reign to my picking-apart-other-people's-language ones. Aside from calling the MRI not a really pleasant experience, an incisive description probably penned by the journalist's seventh-grade daughter, it strikes me that the subject here is brain science. BRAIN SCIENCE. And the article appears to have been written by someone lacking in at least one of those two words. Perhaps this MRI thing really is a newsworthy breakthrough. I mean, who truly understands magnets? We can't even define electricity. And, it's true, the human brain is a mystery. For me, though? The key to understanding this radical step forward in understanding bipolar disthymia lies in the wording came out of the machine.

Imagine with me, if you will, the two moments that define the MRI : before, and after.

Before: you're miserable in your paper robe that barely covers the cottage cheese on your thighs. Which you're pretty sure the cute intern with the big brown eyes, who is probably, like, 14, won't ever want to see again now that he's seen them shivering as you're strapped onto the guerney-like device that will pulsate wildly and shoot bright light around your muscle tissue and contours. You can't move. All around you is this white conical machine like a something the aliens used when they abducted Scully for reproductive experimentation, doing Lord knows what with electrons and radiation and probably in another 15 years they'll discover that anyone who ever had an MRI will die of some special torturous kind of toxin from the aftereffects of the machine. You are an immobile, miserable sod. Your life is crap.

After:: you're done! You can get out of the paper robe! Cute intern is happy for you! The world is a playground.

Okay, Harvard, you've convinced me : being done with an MRI makes people happy. You know, I wonder if that could extend to other - equally scientific - areas of research. Last year, for example, I finished a Harvard Ph.D. Guess what? Being done with a Ph.D. makes people happy, too. Way better than drugs.

Now, bring me that journalist. No, not his head on a plate. I want him to carry my pee.

In other news ...

Researchers at Harvard Medical School and elsewhere are experimenting with another technique that uses electromagnetic pulses to treat depression. Called transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS, it involves holding a figure-of-eight-shaped wand near a person's head. Two coils of wire on the wand generate a strong magnetic field that induces electric currents in brain cells.

Now that's just alarming. Keep your wand to yourself, Doogie. What is this, 1781?

Rule #6.

Don't piss off Sour Bob.

A Little Bit of Something Me.

About once a decade, a band comes along that I know has read my diary and made something actually worthwhile, even poetic and rather brilliant, out of it. In fact, they haven't read my diary, because I don't keep one with any regularity. They've read my mind. They sing of phenomena I can't even identify with lucidity and compassion, righteousness and eloquence and rage where necessary. The effect is uncanny. Usually, when I hear one of these "decade band"'s songs, it feels like that moment when you hear the first elevator hum, and realize too late you're heading down, fast, when you meant to go up. The bottom drops right away.

The group's songs are not unequivocal. Often, it's a hit-and-miss situation where one song from an album will move me to tears while another makes me want to scratch the disc right there so I never have to listen to it again. (Practical.) The song that grabs me and swings me around, in an inner Roethke waltz, doesn't have to be in a minor key (though it frequently is). It doesn't have to be a poem of laurel-worthy proportions. It doesn't even have to be very complex. It will however contain certain unfailing elements : *Orchestration in which the voice becomes part of a larger whole. *Self-penetratingly, unflinchingly honest writing in which realization is met by responsibility, and/or *a nuance of tragedy survived by inner strength alone. *At least one musical innovation, whether a surprising harmony or a background lyric in syncopation to the main voice.

I'm not going to talk about the 1970s, because group choices were limited by my father's domestic Mostly Mozart to the L.A. Philharmonic or the Academy of Saint Martin in the Fields. And while ASMF's Barber Adagio for Strings still tugs at my throat in the elevator-way, the principle is just not the same.

So. In the 1980s, that band was A-ha, though in all fairness there was a pretty even tie between the boys from Norway and Tears for Fears. "Take on Me" was an excellent example of pop-music that transcended not only vocal registers but artistic genres as well - the video was a black-and-white cartoon at least half the time! But other songs from Hunting High and Low, like "Living a Boy's Adventure Tale," "Dream Myself Alive," and the title song of course, touched a chord in me, resonating at the same pitch as some adolescent piece of my soul. The album combined naïveté and sophistication, hope and darkness. (Who can forget the tearstained heartbreak of the "Take on Me" video? Compare that to the sustained optimism in "Love is Reason" and you can feel the delicate balance.) Then there was Scoundrel Days, the second album, with its haunting melodies and hint of something savage emerging from the fjords. "Swing of Things" still makes me shudder. "What have I done - What lies I have told - I've played games with the ones that rescued my soul - Have I come to the point where I'm losing the grip..." The second album dealt with violence and emotional dissociation, pain, the heartache of separation - yet still kept some trace of childlike eagerness that made possible a song like "Looking for the Whales," not even so much for its lyrics, which are simultaneously hopeful and painful, but for its music, its trilling synthesized descant and lilting melody in which somewhere, despite devastation and irresponsibility, it remains spring on a beach untarnished by human cruelty and pollution, and there is a mythical creature nearby.

In the 1990s, the band was Toad the Wet Sprocket. Yes, to all you bandwagon-jumpers who bought the 100 millionth gold copy of the single "Fall Down," TTWS was around for years before that radio breakthrough. They were, in fact, around in 1989 when they released Bread and Circus, whose "When We Recovered" and "One Little Girl" were not only radio-worthy music back in the days when alternative meant you didn't hear it 4 times an hour on mainstream stations programmed en masse from some high-tech basement cubicle in Texas, but also simply damn good writing. 1990 brought Pale, with highlights "Torn" and "Come Back Down," which exposed with clarity and melodic insight the life of an addict. "I've come here a thousand times, some things never change - 'yes I will, anything you say' - I've quit this a million times, can't quite stay away - just one more time ... I'll be ok - but I'm so damn tired ..." The sophomore album also began TTWS's trend of one-word album titles, a trend that continued with fear (1991), Dulcinea (1994), and Coil (1997). Glen Philips, erstwhile lead singer of TTWS, may well possess a "moody-cool voice," but he also possesses true songwriting genius, the sort that doesn't stop with a nice rhyme but goes on to work with it, even alter it, until it fits in its musical shell like a jigsaw puzzle, the old kind made of polished wood so you can see the seams and scars under the gloss. (Also, he is hot. With as many Ts as you want to add on the end there.) Three songs from Toad's mostly-1990s career have especially marked me, to the extent that something in me freezes and takes notice even now if by chance I hear them : "Hold Her Down" from fear, "Windmills" from Dulcinea, and "Whatever I Fear" from Coil. "Whatever I fear the most is whatever I see before me - whenever I let my guard down, whatever I was ignoring - whatever I fear the most is whatever I see before me - whatever I have been given, whatever I have been."

The latest group to top my list of heart-wrenchers is Matchbox 20. Matchbox 20 appeals to me. Me, and every other twenty- and thirty-something female of Occidental descent who has ever (a) been disappointed in love, (b) felt ugly, (c) done something cruel and not regretted it enough to try to repair the situation, and (optional) (d) taken Prozac for any length of time. Again, we have the marriage-of-true-minds poetry-and-melody thing going on. Again, the lead singer is hot-with-multiple-labiodental-voiceless-consonants. Unlike my other bands, I don't know the full history of the Matchbox men. I wasn't grabbed around the viscera by "3 a.m." I would rock out in my car - alone - to "Smooth," but what happened in the car stayed in the car. It was "If You're Gone" that finally got me, and the night it got me, it got me, hard. The velvet-blue opening arpeggios. The way the same words come back, and back, and back again, like dark waves with silver crests, and sound different in each bridge's development. The tender uncertainty. The way something gleams in the vocals and the celestina when he sings the word "shine" at the end of the second verse. The risky chorus with backing English horns. "I thought this place was an empire - But now I'm relaxed - I can't be sure." I sat up nearly until dawn when I first really heard this song - you know, not just it-was-on-in-the-background-and-I-was-doing-other-stuff, but heard it - and typed the lyrics out, line by gasping line. I emailed them to a friend, hoping he would have heard the song and get it. (Bless him. He did.) It still makes me weepy.

Matchbox 20's latest, "Unwell," is the song so far that gives me new serenity on the whole prospect of getting through the decade. You've probably heard it. (I had a chance to learn the lyrics whilst in California, because I heard the song roughly 800 times a day.)

"All night, hearing voices telling me that I should
get some sleep because tomorrow might be good, something ...
I hold on, feeling like I'm heading for a breakdown,
and I don't know why ...
I'm not crazy, I'm just a little unwell
I know, right now you can't tell
But stay a while and maybe then you'll see
a different side of me.
I'm not crazy, I'm just a little impaired
I know, right now you don't care
Well soon enough you're gonna think of me
and how I used to be
me."

I don't have anything really deep to say about this song. It inspires me. Encourages me. What caught and held me in the other songs I've mentioned was a darkness that connected to some darkness in me. A melancholy, on-the-edge feeling that risked skidding right off that emotional cliff at any second. It was a feeling I treasured, somehow, a feeling I cultivated. Even craved. I suppose because, when you're depressed, the world is such a numb place that any sensation feels like a good one, even when it quite patently is not. (As the GooGoo Dolls sang, "when everything feels like the movies, you bleed just to know you're alive.") This song, though, marks a departure : It's not about darkness but about waiting, through insomnia and anxiety and medication and loneliness and even despair, for light. About having faith in yourself.

Unlike those codependent songs from my past, I don't want to wound myself with "Unwell." I want to hold onto it for some rougher day. I want to wear it on my skin, underneath my clothes, like a Braille tattoo, so I will remember how it feels. And I like it a whole damn lot. Because if Rob Thomas - remember, people, the voice behind "Smooth" - has fragile nights like this, then I guess I know my own small life is, in Alanis's words, gonna be quite all right. In fact, someday, even if I haven't got it all figured out just yet, it's gonna be fine, fine, fine.

Inénarrable.

The wind is blowing outside with such force that pieces of ceramic shingle, those pieces that have come lightly detached over the past four hundred years, are rattling and scuttling along the planes of the roof, sometimes unloosed completely. Every now and then a crash means that one of them, or some other debris from the rooftop, has leapt up against the outside wall. A more distant crash, more like a shattering boom, means something has slid off the roof altogether and hit the cobbled stones of the street below.

My neighbors have fastened their outside shutters, to keep the flying detritus from shattering its way through their window glass. The wind and its prodigies should be tolerated, but not admitted into the home.

My cat has climbed up into my lap and sits purring, eyes closed but ears kept at an alert angle, her grey side pulsing with the rhythm of her breath. From time to time she looks up at me, blinks. A small, feline “I just wanted to be sure of you.” When truly content, she reaches a paw up and touches my chest. I can feel her claws through my shirt. Holding on.

A story has been growing inside me but I’m not ready to tell it, not ready to write it. I don’t know what’s brought it back tonight. Pieces of it are still falling into place, like ceramic shingles in a gracefully dangerous dance four storeys above the ground. It has to do with a night unlike this one, a night with no wind, a humid June night pregnant and grey, the darkness of a feast of martyrs and a series of unanswered phone calls. It ends, or doesn't, with a broken window and a bloodstained carpet.

A four-day blank.

I taped notebook paper over the jagged shards, bought a throw-rug to cover the carpeting. Put band-aids on the places where the seams wouldn’t knit back together properly. The story has many heroes, but I am not one of them. I’m just the narrator, the one who lost the cat.

A friend emailed once and asked "Who gets to be your Lewis?" Lewis: The practical cynic with the straightforward ethics who talks you down from the ledge. I don't have one, don't deserve one. Most of the time, these days, I don't feel I need one.

Only ... sometimes, like tonight, a night that has nothing to do with that night except that it’s once again a Sunday, the story comes rushing back in. The tape and lined paper are long gone, the window repaired. But it seems to me that, if I put a band-aid on my wrist and lifted a corner of it even the tiniest bit, instead of skin I would see a river, and it would rush over me. That the things crashing and scuttling outside are fearsome creatures I can only keep at bay for a while. That I am the fierce and terrible wind.

It’s over now, most of the time at least. Unforgotten but over. The cat was found, forgiveness forged. The world didn't stop on its axis. In eighteen months I have found better balance on the tightrope. Kindness everywhere, sometimes hard to receive. Projects accomplished and promise surprisingly close. Nothing has come crashing in through the window. Why isn’t that enough?

Lists.

(Subtitle for today's post : Stolen from the Internet, part 2.)

So, I'm reading Sarah B.'s and Patricia's recent posts, and they started me thinking about my own list.

This is somewhat of an issue, as I don't technically have a list. I mean, I don't walk around with an inventory of one-nighters lined up in the back of my brain. So my list basically consists of a series of random people - mostly men, mostly non-fictional - I wouldn't kick out of bed.

- Lieutenant Wiegand, played by Mathias Freihof, on the German series Siska.

- Johnny Depp. (Mr. Depp has been on my non-list since around 1988, as evidenced by this photo selection. I'm not kidding, overage undercover cops are hot.)

- My college boyfriend. (I know, nostalgia. Still - I wonder if he's still single?)

- Angelina Jolie. (Seriously. Those lips make me wish I were a man, just so I could fantasize about them better.)

- Viggo Mortensen. (Two drawbacks. Without the Aragorn get-up, he's not nearly as attractive, and that's a true shame. And, well, there's the whole idea of writhing underneath someone, transported by passion, and moaning in ecstasy, "Take me, Viggo.")

- Jeri Ryan. ("Seven of Nine" from Star Trek: Voyager. Here shown at her very boobiest, at the Emmy awards.)

- Kyle Secor. (Best known for his role as Detective Tim Bayliss on Homicide: Life on the Street, which met a tragic end in 2000. The addition of the spectacles was a very good thing. Kyle kept them for his subsequent role on Party of Five, a prop decision that boosted the ratings about 500%.)

- Martin Sheen. (Especially in his "Mr. President" role, but that may be influenced by watching too many reruns of West Wing in California. Plus, he said one of the most enlightened things I've read recently in an interview with David Kupfer. I tried to get the quotation here in a little blue box, but my little blue box script isn't working. Click and scroll down until you reach the question "Do you have hope or do you despair?")

- Morten Harket. (Best remembered as the lead singer of A-ha. Again, a crush that lingers from the 80s. Maybe it was the multiple leather bracelets on each wrist. Or the feathered hair. Or the dazzling variety of blues achieved by washing denim in acid. Or the heartbreaking way he banged around against those cartoon walls in the video. Or the octave jump in his voice at the end of "Take On Me." Those elements may be gone now, but I wouldn't kick him out of bed. That's all I'm saying.)

- Phineas, from John Knowles' novel A Separate Peace. (Yeah, he's eternally 17, hopelessly moral, and probably gay. And, oh yeah, fictional. Details.)

- Michael J. Fox. (A crush that dates back even farther than Johnny Depp. I used to write Michael letters, back when I was a high-school nerd and he played one on TV. I saw Back to the Future five times in the theatre that summer. Ok, so there's someone on my list who is a loving husband, father of four children, and afflicted with a mysterious neurological disorder. Is that wrong? Actually, now that I think about it under that light, Michael's not on my list for hot temporary sex. He's the guy I want to meet for early-morning coffee after a workout and bemoan my single status and how all other guys besides him just suck. Whatever.)

- Lt. Commander Data. (No, you shut up. This is my nonlist.)

- Michael T. Weiss. (Best known for his portrayal of Jarod in The Pretender, Michael has also been a VJ for the Playboy Channel, a personal trainer (oooh), and a regular on Days of Our Lives. He's also a big environmental activist. But when I say "Michael T. Weiss," I think who I really mean to include in my list is Jarod, the Pretender himself. He's honorable, brave, generous, and vulnerable. Plus, hey, only around for a night before the Center starts closing in again. So even if he sucked - and you know I hope he would - but even if he sucked in a badway - he'd be a fugitive again in the morning. I looked for a suitable pic of Michael T., but couldn't find anything that just screamed "brave, vulnerable hot guy, on the run from psychopath scientists." Better luck next time.)

Stolen on the Internet ...

Thanks, Dawn.

P.S. You can't touch this.

End-of-the-Year in Review.

As you may know, I spent the last three weeks in California with family. The time was both very very long and went by very quickly, and probably you can only understand that if you live far from your family and have to have around an 800% saturation level every time you visit.

The trip did provoke some new experiences and thoughts, however, and I thought I would share those with you all, in the form of a list. Because I like lists.

Things I did in California:
- Attend the MLA convention for the first time in my academic career.
- Rewrite my CV.
- Discuss Franco-American politics with my father.
- Have dinner with my sister and all but one of her bridesmaids.
- Empty out a storage unit.

Things I did during the trip that I never thought I'd do:
- Drive past the MLA convention exit by accident and have to do the "U-turn to USA" at the California-Mexico border.
- Walk through Hyde Park alone at 2 a.m.
- Discuss Jason Mraz with my father.
- Get choked up during Starlight Express.
- Leave California without (a) seeing my best friend or (b) buying peanut butter.
- Miss my flight from London back to Lyon and have to buy a whole new ticket (the trip's highlight, as you can imagine).

Things I salvaged from the storage unit:
- 1 portable phone, black.
- My grandmother's table and chairs, now housed chez my sister.
- All my rubber stamps, even the ones covered in mold.
- Roughly 6 reams of card stock in various colors.
- My mother's class ring.
- 1 black ball-point pen with a slim knife blade cleverly concealed in its barrel.
- 2 copies of London: A to Z.
- 1 life-sized cardboard figure of Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation, complete with stand and phaser.
- 5 karate belts in ascending-rank colors (white, yellow, orange, blue, purple).
- A partial set of Delft-blue stoneware I'm pretty sure isn't mine.

Things I threw away from the storage unit (a sampling):
- 4 boxes of notes and papers from high school.
- 4 boxes of notes and papers and things I'd written from college.
- The big blue plastic binder of the ex's music-composition exercises and flute sheet music.
- One answering machine, the kind with the 2 tapes, circa 1990.
- One wicker chair still wrapped in packing paper from the time we had to move from Virginia Beach to Washington, circa 1996.
- 6 boxes of cassette tapes. Sure am glad I was still supporting the cassette industry in, say, 1999 while the rest of the world had moved on to this new medium the young people are calling see-dees. Perhaps you've heard of them?
- My blue suede shoes.
- A medium-sized stiff cotton karate gi, so stained the mold had eaten through the fabric in some places.
- 1 large box of home-recorded video tapes. I believe this box also contained the video of my wedding. I thought of that the day I threw it into the Dumpster and very nearly went back to search through the rubble.
- Approximately 2 liters of nail polish remover, 7 kinds of hair products, 5 half-used tubes of antiperspirant, 30 shades of nail polish, 4 gallons of hand and body lotion, 18 lipsticks in various hues, 9 bars of soap, 60 barrettes/hairpins/hairclips, and 1 gallon body oil in assorted quantities, fragrances, and means of application.
- A collection of Diet Coke cans from around the world (yes, even the Arabic one).
- 1 Rough Guide to Peru.
- One small volume of Rilke, inscribed.

Things I cooked in California:
- Chicken and mushroom soup (three times - it was a hit).
- Salmon papillotes with a maple-based mustard glaze.
- Squash soup with Gruyère and toasted spicy cashews.
- A roasted chicken stuffed with garlic and basted with orange juice, butter and white wine.
- Boeuf bourguignon, marinaded for 4 days and slow-cooked for 4 hours.
- Spicy Thai peanut tofu stir-fry with baby peppers, carrots and green onions.
- Roasted garlic.
- Mixed green salad with blackberries, cranberry goat cheese, red and yellow pepper, and candied pecans.

Things I did not do that I wish I had done:
- Get drunker with former grad students and colleagues at the MLA.
- Actually go to Mexico.
- Spend more time with my father.
- Spend less time watching reruns of Law and Order, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and West Wing.
- Go to the beach.
- Go see friends in the Bay Area.
- Bake cookies.

Why I Was Late for Mass this Morning.

I was listening to a cryptic message on my cell phone. Here is my response:

Dear Guy-Who-Called-at-Midnight-Yesterday-to-Ask-Me-Out,

Romy

Today.

Not Bitter.

Going through a storage unit of all your crap, thrown into boxes by your ex, is one of life's distinct pleasures. What makes it really fun is the occasional trouvaille of things you gave your ex for various birthdays, Christmasses, etc., in the seven or so years you spent together. Also, things you know aren't yours but which ended up in your boxes because your ex doesn't want to have things. So you get all your crap, and all his unwanted crap as well. Sweet!

The true bonus, though, the secret song on the Greatest Hits album of your failed marriage shoved into cardboard and plastic and locked into a cold metal room 10,000 miles from where you live, is when you're sifting through books, making piles (keep, GoodWill, family), and you come across the book you gave your ex as a gift the night you unofficially "got together." What a treat it is to stumble across that slender volume of Rilke, with its tremulous inscription in your neatest handwriting, and suddenly get revisited by memories of how the whole relationship began, and realize how futile and stupid and absurd it must all have been, from the beginning, from before the beginning, because here is your whole hopeful heart, taped into a carton with the dictionaries and home-improvement books. Not rejected, just not given a second glance, probably forgotten, and returned after a detour to you, to make you remember who you were when you gave it and how much you never ever ever wanted it back.

Resume Reprise.

So, the one useful thing I did between Christmas and New Year's was to revise my CV, specially for the ridiculous schmoozing hoo-hah big academic convention in San Diego.

(Actually, if I'm being fair, I also remembered to pack that tailored jacket that's the green of the underside of an umbrella-plant leaf. It's a great color, and a cool jacket, and has the added advantage of fitting my figure without making me look or feel obese. I wore it two days out of three at the convention, once with a black outfit and once with a blue skirt and a little camisole-esque top -that also by the bye fits my figure but does make me both look and feel obese, and therefore requires the torso-ego bolstering addition of the green jacket. Also, may I mention in a moment of consumer pride that I bought the green jacket for $2.50 at a Salvation Army store last January, back when I was flush and the world was young. Good things all around. I packed it before Christmas, though, so in terms of this post it doesn't technically count. But who's counting.)

While at the hoo-hah convention, I met with an academic-job counselor who looked at my resume and helped me improve it. In fact, I believe her exact words were "May I?" as she grabbed my pen from my hand and drew big arrows all over my Color-Stylus masterpiece, giving it the academic's equivalent of the mark of Zorro. I suppose this was Useful Thing #2, but I can't take any credit for it aside from the fact of being present at the meeting. Two quotables from the encounter: 1. "Why isn't it longer?" and 2. "Why don't you sell yourself more?"

Because, see, for me a CV is just that - a curriculum vitae. It resumes your professional life, hence the convenient term "reh-zoo-may." But her point was that it should also explain your professional life. That's what I thought letters of application or -hell, let's be crazy- interviews were for. Silly me.

So today's "to-do" list comprises three items:

1. Go over to the storage unit and continue consolidating and discarding the material effects of my life (great fun. I got through 15 boxes yesterday and haven't even touched the clothes yet).

2. Revise my CV. Make it longer. Sell myself more.

and (the one thing that promises to be fun)

3. Have dinner with my sister's fiance's family. His mom is cooking. Inside sources say she's making paella.

Somewhere in there I will probably add "take a shower" and "write a blog entry" - oh, cool, I can cross something off my list.

Absenteeism.

Hello. I'm in California, in case you were wondering. Verrrrrry busy throwing my life in France into sharp relief against my siblings' salaries, relationships, and experience as newly landed gentry. (I was landed, once. Not sure I was ever gentry.) Not to mention the family's expectations of me as the (non-)resident Ivy League Ph.D., which they seem to think actually means something. It's all very ... hmmm. Humbling, I suppose.

Anyway, I keep thinking I should update my blog, and the thing is, while my (Ivy League ordained) mind is veritably ablaze with ideas and insights, the energy seems to die out somewhere around my wrists whenever I try typing a blog entry. My fingers hover impotent over the keys, and then the whole apparatus collapses into another game of Spider Solitaire (may the creator's name be cursed).

So I hope everyone is enjoying Anno Domini 2004 so far. It feels pretty anticlimactic to me, despite the numerological neatness.

Pax.