I was reading about Kinesics (the study of body movement) this morning in response to the black eye I narrowly missed when a woman tried to take out my eye with her computer bag.
This is not the first time I've nearly or been slightly injured by random carried belongings of women who ride the subway. I was slammed in the head once with a purse - although I shared quite a laugh with the guy sitting across from me in that instance. But what is it with people being so completely ignorant of body space? I know exactly where my fingers are and the exact dimensions of my bags and toes. This morning was sort of hell. I was sat on - sat on! - by two different people (on the N and the 2). I'm sorry, but not knowing the dimensions of your ass is inexcusable.
Thankfully my irreverence came to the rescue and created this mantra in my head:
your body speaks a grammar i brush off your skin with my fingers collecting sighs and syllables as if i spoke your language
but words bodies are only glamours
yours, specifically, are full and empty
and i am empty, too
This might actually be the opening salvo of a poem. Apparently, even when I'm happy, I can't foresee happy endings. Probably because that part of me was sat on this morning.
Today was a wonderful day! And that has nothing to do whatsoever with the fact that Amaretto+Melissa=Warmandfuzziness (and a liquor-painted blush)! (Although, it probably has something to do with exclamation point quantities...)
After waking up around eight-ish, I picked up the Melepad and then bought foodstuffs. Glorious foodstuffs to the accompaniment of my friendly butcher (who recognized me this time!). Turkey and ham and swiss and tomatoes and orange juice and eggs and turkey bacon and English muffins. Queenmob showed up at 12ish with donuts and I made English muffins with eggs and turkey bacon, tomatoes and swiss cheese under the broiler. Delicious. After showing off my new comix (I am a comic acolyte in the truest sense): Harold Sipe's Screamland and Alan Moore/Melinda Gebbie's Lost Girls, we discussed Queenmob's own comic while I worked on the quandary of a baguette while working on cups of loose assam black tea and a Sharon van Etten playlist (lots of new music to follow in another post).
I make my own bread. But I have never made a baguette before. I cheated slightly by using my bread machine for the dough. The recipe was remarkably easy: high gluten flour, hot water, white sugar, kosher salt and yeast.
Music interlude ***~~******~~******~~******~~******~~******
The finished product was surprisingly awesome - although a lack of a pastry brush made the yolk application a little awkward. And apparently I was supposed to cut perpendicular slashes rather than a crevasse down the center ;) The texture was dense and chewy - the way I love bread with a really nice flavor. The judicious application of Amaretto in my beloved Star Trek glasses (of course, I used Spock!) set the tone. The following are random shots of the baguette in its native environment:
And the orangey glow of my apartment is no fiction. Apparently when Mr. Smith was apartment sitting, the bulbs were mysteriously transplanted for orange party bulbs. I can't decide if I like it or not - but as I'm too short to reach the light and sufficiently lacking in a ladder - that is a moot issue altogether. As it lends a sort of hot-house, lady of easy virtue feel to the apartment, I'm not surprised I've been working mentally through Neruda of late:
Tengo hambre de tu boca, de tu voz, de tu pelo y por las calles voy sin nutrirme, callado, no me sostiene el pan, el alba me desquicia, busco el sonido líquido de tus pies en el día.
Estoy hambriento de tu risa resbalada, de tus manos color de furioso granero, tengo hambre de la pálida piedra de tus uñas, quiero comer tu piel como una intacta almendra.
Quiero comer el rayo quemado en tu hermosura, la nariz soberana del arrogante rostro, quiero comer la sombra fugaz de tus pestañas
y hambriento vengo y voy olfateando el crepúsculo buscándote, buscando tu corazón caliente como un puma en la soledad de Quitratúe
Or in translation...
I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair. Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets. Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.
I hunger for your sleek laugh, your hands the color of a savage harvest, hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails, I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.
I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body, the sovereign nose of your arrogant face, I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,
and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight, hunting for you, for your hot heart, like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.
I am writing this post while I am at ... work! (Actually waiting for tech correspondence on exporting catalog into a hard copy when the web version is down and importing MARC records).
Yes, I now have a full time job (along with my private cataloging gig in Manhattan) with a small medical academic college in New Jersey*. And like magic (really, it's real magic) new, strange, amazing, crazy and just plain unusual things have started to happen as my weirdness magnet kicks into drive. It was only sleeping for a while, I think. So many new experiences lately that I still need time to absorb and understand them. And a few hours of sleep here and there would be nice, too.
So I started my new position on January 4 (after much date finagling). My coworkers are awesome and I scored an Audubon Society calendar for volunteering to keep the library open an extra 15-20 minutes yesterday. I also had to teach my co-librarian how to Copy+Paste. I don't think I will comment publicly about that particulary when I was wading through library statistics and pivot charts as a lark. I inherited a lot of paper. I hate paper. Paper is not searchable. It has no connectivity. It gets dusty and makes me sneeze. I get paper cuts. So in my free time, I started imputting all the stats into Excel (because I am a notable Excel junkie) and making beautiful graphics. I had a breakdown of 2008 by average length of visits, users by program, etc for my first staff meeting.
I also dive bombed an adjunct faculty meeting and introduced myself. Despite a head cold that has me sounding like a phone sex operator at the moment, I got lots of accolades for taking initiative. I am full of initiative and live on accolades, so I am very happy!
I like Jersey City so far, too. I have learned that Jersey City has a lower sales tax than the rest of New Jersey - which is half of New York on clothes and shoes! Shoes! Also, many people don't know where they're going. I have been asked at least twice everyday this week for locations. And random people talk to me all the time - despite my surgically attached iPod. I have never been referred to as "Mama" so much, even when I worked in the Bronx.
Suffice it to say, I am extremely happy. Work makes me happy. Productivity makes me happy. Finding books, answering reference questions, helping students with their resumes and running around in my Docs makes me happy.
But I have to go back to work, now. More blogging updates (and music!) later.
* I would give the name but, well, I *am* writing this from work!
I am so tired this morning. I can't decide whether it's a serious lack of willpower or the inability to stop having a good time in the midst of having it (because you have to wake up early to take the train and bus to Queens for your car). It's probably a little of both.
Pictures from New Year's Eve with the Nerd New York crew. I had so much fun I didn't get home until the wee hours of the morning. Further pictorial evidence suggest that there are people still at the unassuming "Fortress Astoria" playing Jungle Speed. If they can retain all their fingers, I applaud them. As I have all of mine! Losing = Win.
Ok. Shower. Toast. Train. Maybe coffee in there somewhere, which is crazy 'cause I dislike coffee but am as Harriett Low would say "stupid" today: caught in a fug of tiredness and ... oh my god, my cat is licking my arm! Shower!
Because I have been snowed out today - even before the snow came down - with a gallon of hot assam black and sushi I walked ten blocks for, I thought I would update my blog.
Firstly, I am going to make a shirt that plays lip-service to the doomsayers of NYC:
It is cold, though. And I've been warming up with Farscape - wondering what I was smoking in 1998 when I forsook that spectacular series for Lexx on Friday nights (outside of how incredibly good looking Michael McManus as Kai is) - and some more new musics. And my very first naughty phone call! When I figure out how to get it off my cell phone voice mail box and into a format I can share with the world, I will do so. This is even better than the three foot menorah car and the spaceship I thought I saw last night. And unlike either of the aforemention, far far more portable.
On Thursday and Friday, my associate in cataloging crime, Miss L and I were busy shifting books and recompiling databases and drinking earl grey tea while listening to Pandora. Miss L has, by means accessible to the world at large, created two really awesome playlists. But one of them based on Say Hello to Your Mother (who I thought was Bright Eyes for a while) spawned the song "Photograph" by Adam Payne. I love this song. I can't find it in any sort of shareable media. I finally found it on Reverbnation and highly, highly recommend listening to it.
I liked the lyrics (as in really feeling for the plight of Adam Payne's protagonist): I don't want to hear about the guy you met last night, how you believe this has got to be the one. You don't want to hear about the dream I had last night. About the two of us, you know I'll have another one.
Miss L and I discussed Kierkegaard (the philosopher) and how weird it is to be involved with people we like like (i.e. love, or some sort of thing we think is love) despite there being no reciprocal liking. It was very interesting as apparently Kierkegaard was a victim to this same complaint (loving someone who had married someone else - but continued to have a pseudo-relationship with) and created a whole philosophical system on it! I am not nearly that ambitious. Mostly 'cause if someone told me they didn't like me (by word or deed) I would move out of their lives posthaste (ironically, this is my theme of 2009!).
I am also pondering whether I can morally buy this shirt from Threadless despite my one person boycott until they print something by queenmob. I think if I just think about John Crichton, I should be ok, despite the fact that the shirt inspired this guy to wield a chainsaw!!!
And festively here is one of my favorite Xmas songs:
I like this version because she is the only one who sings the line, "until then, we'll have to muddle through somehow." I've always thought it was more true than other Christmas songs - if that means anything.
Ever since finishing NaNo on November 30th, I have been having inspirational deliriums that are seriously waking me up from a sound sleep! Or keeping me from sleeping at all. Dreams about a Fae named Arsar and souls caught to bodies and Restoration astrologers and Rune-Earls – seriously, I have no idea where this shit comes from. Probably the same place where Vamperace, the Vampire Liberace, came from and some plans for a Dungeons & Dragons 4.0 0-Level series of games I hope to run early next year featuring Yuan-Ti and spice and Girth Bi'ttoms and his daughter, Maythee.
But mostly I keep dreaming about Arsar and his human foil, Rhys. For NaNoWriMo, the character of Anne sort of haunted me for a few months. Since my mind ticks and purrs all the time, I sort of have to trick it into letting me go to sleep, so I make up stories before going to bed. One night, a blonde woman in a black mid-Victorian dress (probably based on Irene Forsyth) turned around in a room lit by sunlight, only slowly revealing her face as I waited for her to turn. She was being introduced to someone – but I had no idea who it was. She turned into Anne Edwardes – who is currently lost until I can scare up a USB harddrive enclosure to rescue her.
I am officially an idiot. Seriously.
The harddrive on my newish (6 months old) laptop blew up on me Saturday morning – as in the blue screen of death and all that heart wrenching madness. As a measure of my insane priorities, all of my music is on my external harddrive and fine... but not my NaNo novel! Or my FanFix Chapter 16 – and seriously I don't know if I have the stamina to rewrite that. Or the notes I had made about my very slowly evolving zombie love story and a couple pages of notes I had taken after waking up from my dream about Arsar. I was sort of frantic – particularly as I don't think I can function as a human being without internet access (I think I was born to exist in the world of Shadowrun) – and after trying to boot XP off the disc and running diagnostics realized it was pretty much a lost cause. Thankfully, I spent a pleasant two hours on the phone with Dell, only fifteen of those minutes with a gentleman who kept calling me 'Mum,' who was extraordinarily impressed that I hadn't threatened to climb through the phone and rip his head off. So they're sending me a new harddrive and after scouring listservs and forums, realized that I might be able to rescue Anne Edwardes and other things. For now, she is doubling as the Lady of Shalott – behind some faulty electronic circuitry, plastic casing and a polyethelene bag.
Thankfully my older laptop – a Latitude 110L that had been taking up space in my dresser – had been completely reformatted after an unfortunate and lingering malady was able to serve in my newer computer's stead. Although the Latitude doesn't have a DVD drive and weighs at least four-hundred pounds. And didn't have a LAN driver or updates that took two days to complete. But with the aid of Lena, I was able to get that taken care of. I get a big golden star for solving my own networking problems almost completely on my own – although I may have ripped out some hair in the process.
Because I can't stop thinking about Arsar and apparently have completely lost the ability to write in longhand, I have started putting thoughts and thoughts and more thoughts down in bytes. That I am backing up in at least four places. Four places not on this computer.
I also started re-reading the Harry Potter series, although I'm currently obsessed with Kristin Cashore's Graceling. I want Kristin Cashore to write me 2,000 pages of just Po and Katsa together beating up people and living and doing things that they would do – there doesn't even have to be a plot, just lots of pages of the characters doing normal life things. Since I am in love with Po (of Graceling), I would give anything to be able to write a character that I actually lost myself to in reading it. When I write things, I have a hard time dropping into the prose without having to fix it or just seeing words and sentences. I think it's because I already know what is going to happen and I love to be completely surprised (although, understandably, in good ways rather than bad) when reading a story. Now if only Patrick Rothfuss would finish the sequel to The Name of the Wind. I also love Kvothe – and I am dying, literally dying to know more about Kvothe's life before becoming an “evil” magician.
That and getting my hands on a physical copy of Piers Anthony's On a Pale Horse without having to buy it. Simple things, really. But important to me.
Recuperating from NaNoWriMo (and having actually written 5K more words on a project I was on the fence about completing, *oh well*) and listening to lots of Pandora.
Because I'm inundated with new music all the time, I thought I would throw up three of my latest finds so I don't forget about them (and hope to get an iTunes gift card for Xmas although I don't deserve one).
Firstly, Toto-incarnate: The Republic Tigers. Like the Kooks, I'm not keen on all of their stuff, but I was listening to Buildings and Mountains and got this whole Toto Africa vibe from them. As Toto's Africa is my absolute favorite song in the history of songs, they didn't need to do much else to win me over. Listen for yourself:
And Toto:
Next is San Diego's The Stereotypes. Particularly the amazing, amazing song All My Life. I can't find it on YouTube, but their MySpace has the song. Apparently, they are singlehandedly fronting all the music for TV - if their page is to be believed. Ironically, however, when seeking it out, I found a song I used to listen to in Japan (Japanese MTV was a crazy and awesome thing - particularly as it was filtered via Australia to my ADSL box at the time):
And lastly Rocky Votolato - who I was pretty sure was going to end up being from New York with a surname like Votolato. Instead, a Seattle institute of sorts. A very nice voice. And apparently every song I end up liking on Pandora is his.
For example:
This is probably the most fragmented blog entry ever, but I'm a little typing-ed out. I promise to do better at an undefined point in the future.
