I thought it was time for a redesign, and I figured New Year's Eve would be an appropriate day for it. I'm still working on getting the interior pages to match the home page, and I think I'm going to leave the archives alone, at least for now. I would love to get feedback, if you'd like to share your opinion.
Time to get ready to do something for New Year's, though I still have no idea what that's going to be yet. I think I'm getting sick...with each hour that passes, my body deteriorates into a weak, germy mass of unhappiness. By midnight I should be the life of the party.
Anyway, Happy New Year, und ein gutes Sylvester.
It's unlike me to leave things behind, but right now my keys are sitting in the back of Nate's car, and my toboggan is at the movie theater, probably either stuck to the dark floor or on the head of a theater employee. I'm not going to turn into someone who locks her keys in her car or has to regularly collect things she left behind, having to cancel ATM cards, get her driver's license reissued, or call AAA to help her break into her car. I'm not going to start showing up at concerts with left-behind tickets, donating layers of my wardrobe to backs of chairs at restaurants, or driving away from the gas station without my gas cap in place, my signal light perpetually blinking as I drive straight down the highway. OK? No left-on ovens or headlights, no taking pictures with my lens cap on. It's not time for that yet.
Is there a point in adulthood when you stop exploring the side streets and alleyways of your hometown? Is there a time when you no longer climb off your bike so that you can access a new perspective of your surroundings, ducking underneath low branches and crunching through leaves to get to the train tracks? Do old, boarded-up buildings ever stop being mysterious? Today's bike ride was good, because I got lost only a short distance from my house, and because it countered some of the less healthy things holidays and old friends encourage.
Nate, Kathy, and Justin are visiting from Portland; Christy, Staffan, and Stefan are here from Sweden; Eric's leaving tomorrow to go back to Chicago. Having them here all at once makes Raleigh seem much more alive, but it's exhausting and makes me feel less alive, edgy, tired. Tonight I took something of a break and came home before 2 a.m. (after finally seeing Amélie), but tomorrow I'm expecting sequels of previous days. Not that I'm ready for everyone to leave...I just wish my days weren't so bloated, and that I could enjoy events as they happen, rather than just enjoying recollections.
I meant to walk through the door and write down the words that surfaced in my brain on the way home from work, but, instead, I climbed into bed and stared at my computer until my eyes fell shut, letting those thoughts race over my brain's surface until they seeped back in and reemerged as dreamy nonsense. There's not enough time to do everything I plan to do this weekend, even if it is twice as long. It would be easier if all of the normally out-of-town friends that are here knew each other, so that there'd be a convenient bird-to-stone ratio, like 8 to 1.
He's in town, and even though he's not calling or coming by and it shouldn't feel much different than if he were five hundred miles away, it does.
He didn't know that I don't eat pork anymore, and he made an egg and sausage dish (souffle?) for breakfast, a jiggly brown-speckled unit, spread thinly in the bottom of a glass dish. It smelled really good, and I was tempted to eat it, not because I was so hungry (which I was), but because of his obvious effort and because of the satisfaction that consumed his face when he set it on the table.
But I didn't. Instead, he said he'd make me some eggs to complement my toast—scrambled, oh, you decided to boil them, that's fine. But maybe you shouldn't do it—POP!—in the microwave. White bits of egg in steaming water poured out of the microwave door and spread underneath the box and off the curved counter and onto the floor and suddenly, everyone was talking at once—explaining, directing, defending, and blaming. That's okay, toast will be plenty.
We rebounded quickly and Christmas continued. Later, I set up a bed for a stray cat my parents have been feeding by lining an old, split wooden crate with a warm blue towel. The cat climbed right in and stayed until after I left. It purred like a diesel engine.
It's difficult to care right now whether a word should be in ALL CAPS and boldfaced, or just in ALL CAPS, although, as a copy editor, it's my job to care. There are books to read, naps to take, blue skies to enjoy, presents to unwrap, and people to see. I can't help asking for a little self-pity today, stuck in an office with no heat and a stack of science items to edit, while friends and family are visiting museums, relaxing, eating, and socializing. (Of course my imagination tells me they're only doing things that are pleasant.) I'm wondering if my stand-in boss is planning to dismiss class early, or whether I'm doomed to sit here for another three hours, glancing at the clock periodically in cranky amazement.
It was a strange day, one that surged and waned like deep breaths, like North Carolina weather. Today's weather, by the way, was perfect for bike riding. I neither shivered nor broke a sweat as I pedaled through a nearby neighborhood of old, restored houses with big glass windows like fish tanks—perfect, dustless insides on display for those who pass by. Part of today I was stuck under the covers, breathing out of a crack at the top, eyes open, eyes closed. I ate a string of strange things that don't go together, none of it substantial, and therefore I never knew whether I was supposed to feel hungry or full. Involuntarily copy-edited a Christmas letter. (Successfully) avoided the phone. Played Scattergories. Straightened the house. Did lots of unconnected things that made me feel rather goalless. Wondered about how I feel, how I'm supposed to feel, and whether those are the same. It's raining now, and my bed is beckoning. I have to work tomorrow, and I absolutely dread it.
This morning my niece had a party in honor of her first birthday; she was naturally oblivious and continued the cycle of smiling-crying-smiling-crying, just as if it were any other day. After eating part of an icing-covered bear and building a Lego tower with my nephew, I went to Chapel Hill to take pictures of a crowded bus stop (which was unusually difficult, with few students around). The brightly-dressed woman who sold flowers in old cans made a better subject, sqatting among the cans on the Franklin Street sidewalk, drifting off to sleep in the late afternoon sun. I bought a pair of cheap sunglasses to replace the latest broken pair, and I visited the kitten for the first time since she left, since she gained two of her three pounds. Family, polite chatting, dodging questions, errands, duties, polite chatting...I have a break now, but not for long. I wonder what the next couple weeks will be like.
The woman in the kitchen (who kept insisting she wasn't the main chef) was from the Czech Republic, probably in her early twenties. She wore lots of blue eye shadow that rimmed her eyes above and below, and she had a healthy, rounded build and a soft, distinct accent, the vowels in her mouth stretching like rubberbands. She didn't want her picture taken, but she humored me, behaving unnaturally natural, relaxed, occasionally flashing me a warm, shy smile.
Her blond hair was pinned up haphazardly, revealing that the end of her shift was near, falling into her face as she chopped and kneaded and swirled the pan over the flames. Her coworkers gave her friendly jabs as they passed by, telling her she was a movie star, that she was going to become famous, that this was her night. They watched with mischievous grins from their corners, hiding and giggling when I turned the camera on them.
Even the managers were a little giddy when they noticed they were being watched through the lens of my camera. He was also from the Czech Republic, she was from Sweden, and they followed each other around trying to act natural, but most certainly acting—opening the cash register needlessly, grabbing a bottle of wine and setting it back again, pretending to pour mixed drinks and setting up a ghost table of peaked cloth napkins, half-empty wine glasses and a basket of bread. All the while they were trying to conceal their smiles, trying to whisk past the camera before my flash froze them on paper.
Are you sure you don't want something to eat? Can I get you something to drink? You must try something. Finally I accepted their offer of wine, which was poured liberally into a shiny, stemmed glass. While I took generous sips, my camera and flash still on and ready, we talked about America and Europe, perceptions, traveling, work. Work. It didn't occur to me until after I left that I had been working.
It's so late again...impossible for me to go to bed early, despite how I feel. I stayed home sick today, slept in with the cat on my bed until I had to kick her off because she began to get sick, too, literally. I was semi-productive with glue and paint and vitamin C, and tonight I felt well enough to play Pictionary, stressing out over all-plays, my under-pressure drawings turning into a tangled mess of boxy lines that only make sense to me. Nodding and pointing and drawing arrows, making lines darker and darker, none of it helps an impossible shape. What am I doing anyway? I should be sleeping or producing or thinking. I didn't get enough done, I never do, but I always know how to find a good distraction.
Thirty-six filled photo albums, each marked with beginning and ending dates, are lined up like stiff-backed soldiers on the bottom of my bookshelf. The three most recent albums are at ease, leaning against the shelf from their home on the floor, waiting to get a shelf of their own, propped next to a box of new pictures waiting to get an album. Collectively, the albums form a seamed chronicle of my life since August 1993. Seamed, of course, because there are countless moments not pictured, there are numerous pictures not included, and there isn't a single album large enough to smooth the break from book to book.
The first album begins the day I moved out of my parents house and into my first apartment, days before starting college, the day I looked forward to far longer than I looked back at. Opening it makes me cringe a little, looking at the hair and make-up and clothing, my naïveté and insecurities almost concretely visible. Many of the people inside, once familiar and comfortable, are now fuzzy and alien, many of them living their lives in unknown places, connected to me now by only a thread of memory, or maybe not connected to me at all. I once confided in them and showed them my weaknesses and what happens when I get tired and silly. They showed me.
Last night I looked through all of my albums, systematically, overwhelmed and hollow. This time I paid strict attention, almost forgoing the main subject for the details—the items on the table, the articles of clothing on the floor, the people in the background, street signs and buildings, the features on faces, eyes, chin, eyebrows, hair. I want to crawl into those pictures like an a-ha video and relive and see and rethink with the brain I have now, years later. Appreciate, and reconsider my perceptions. To make life stand still while I take a leisurely look around. I want to make the people stay.
I took a tour through a gutted house that is now not much more than a frame, yet inside there are already the beginnings of a trap door covering a wine cellar, a hidden entrance to a tower (which I'm told will be concealed with fake books and maybe have a skull knob that activates it), a cement Jacuzzi, and a laundry chute. (And there's talk of a sliding board that connects the back deck with the ground.) I met friends of friends and talked until late; I watched an endangered parrot be tossed from palm to palm, with its crest raised on high alert; I browsed in an old comic shop while a bluegrass band played in the back room, the $10 musical notes seeping through the doorway; I took pictures of protesters and bus stops; I slept beneath a mounted deer head; I curled up and watched cable TV for the first time in months.
No matter how many lists I make, no matter how many things I check off, there will be more lists and more tasks and more obligations. I keep revising and adding with each subtraction, ensuring that my list is a live creature that will overwhelm and eat me whole if I don't feed it a little bit each day.
Tomorrow I'm driving to Shelby, NC, to spend the weekend with my old friend Alison, to get out of town for a few days, to forget about lists and everything else. Or maybe I'm going so that I remember. Which was it?
There's an amusing article in Saturday's paper about my street, the mystery white rabbits, and my bizarre neighbors. Hmm.
Goopy white face mask. Two cats are sitting on my bed, both relaxed, but each still aware of the other, eyes half-open, ears half-back. Kraftwerk. My room's clean, except for a small pyramid of discarded clothing pushed to one side. Beads of rain on the window. The roar of the heater stopped prematurely; I'm still cold. Dried glue on my fingers, left over from making homemade Christmas presents earlier tonight. All of my heavy thoughts have left my brain and have crept into my shoulders. Bluish glow from the Y parking lot across the street. Appealing projects are scattered around me, and I don't know which to begin. Melt Banana t-shirt. I am perfectly alone; rarely do they come together, or at all. Dim lighting. I wish it weren't so late. Dry white face mask.
Sometimes I worry that I'm selfish. That I expect things and emotions and time from others, and that I don't give enough of myself...that I'm incapable of doing so. That I'm not the basically good person I always thought I was, that I'm nowhere as good as some of the people in my life. But no one ever gets what s/he deserves. Always more or less, but never the amount that's due. I at least know my intentions are good and that my heart feels big, but sometimes (I'm certain) that isn't enough.
Today it's cold and rainy. I'd half-forgotten—a moment ago I walked out of the building in hopes of rearranging the puzzle in my head into a shape less chaotic, walking, feeling the warmth of the sun, shedding distraction. But the warmth, rather than hugging me, slipped out of my body in mere seconds with an unconcerned gust of wind. I tightly wrapped my thin jacket around me, clutching my arms with opposite hands, but the weather beat me back inside before I even began to push the pieces around, one thought at a time.
***
The pin that holds the wiper blade to the metal hooked arm of my passenger-side wiper has disappeared, which means after about thirty swipes at the windshield, the rubber part detaches itself and flails wildly as the decapitated wiper moves back and forth, carving a semi-circle in my windshield. The noise and the carving don't bother me nearly as much as the hindered visibility, since I am forced to turn off the wipers completely and peer through streaks and beads of water until I can maneuver the car to the side of the road and force the parts together again. I know, get a new pair of wipers. Tomorrow.
I missed the Cars by about 15 minutes, but I got to see Mission to Burma, Blondie, Aerosmith, Run DMC, and the Ramones Friday night, as local bands mocked the voices and appearances of more famous acts. The Great Cover Up—I think it was called—went on for three consecutive nights, but I only made it to Friday's show. On Saturday, another "last day of good weather," I hiked through the woods, dodged large, fragrant onions at a Chinese restaurant for a belated birthday dinner, and went to the final party at a house that's being completely vacated for the first time in thirteen years. It was a sort of reunion for a group of friends whom I'd only met years after the house's apparent heyday, though there were plenty of people (besides myself) there for the first time.
Inside the house, photocopies and pictures from the late eighties were taped to the walls, revealing different hairstyles and younger faces; a video in high contrast yellow-and-white played in loops on a lonely TV in an otherwise empty back room, showing footage of former parties and the ceremonious removal of a dead mouse from the fridge. The quality of the video—the yellowed whites and the muffled voices—made it seem like it was from a time much further away, from some forgotten place with forgotten people. But no, that wasn't the case at all—those people were standing around me, and I was standing in rooms I recognized from the tape. It felt as if I was being let in on a big secret, skeletons in full view—taped to the walls, in fact. The four of us left on somewhat of a somber note, because we knew we wouldn't be coming back. (Well, except maybe to help clean.)
Five minutes before walking out the door yesterday morning, I put my hand in a box of waffles in the freezer and was surprised to find soft, soggy bread instead of a cold, hard grid. I pushed down on a few other newly-soft items before really noticing how warm it was in there, and then came the faint stench of decaying food. It's possible that the yellow metal beast had died a day or two before, but because of dinners out and kitchen neglect, no one noticed her rotting corpse until almost all of the food inside her had withered and spoiled.
Martin's proximity to home awarded him the lunch hour duty of putting salvageable food in coolers with ice, peeling all of the refrigerator poetry off the freezer door, and dealing with our eccentric landlord.
The movers didn't come until after I got home from work. There were just two of them to handle one giant appliance, and they moaned when they saw the second set of stairs just past the front door. It was funny listening to them talk as they worked, full of slang and swears and confidence. When they brought up the white beauty (which has been painted white), one of the guys started to peel off the $200 price tag on the front. "That's okay, I've got it," I said, but he insisted. "The landlord didn't want you to see how much he paid for it," he said, smiling.
They left promptly, and Martin and I began sweeping out the leaves and peanut shells and scraping the yellowed crust from the drawers and shelves. We've since thrown out most of the food from the coolers and dressed the new roommate with a few scattered magnets, to help tone down her bright aura. Oh, and there's already a picture of her predecessor held squarely on her middle. And she's already leaking.
I don't consider myself much of a sports fan. I understand why people like playing sports, but I don't quite comprehend the way some people choose to identify with a particular team: to clad your body in a single color with someone else's last name ironed across the back; to have competitive debates with classmates or coworkers my daddy team can beat up your daddy team; to memorize stats and who's traded whom; to toilet paper the streets and turn over random cars and scream at TV cameras when your team wins.
Maybe I need to relax a little bit and stop analyzing it so much. I'll admit there's a rise in my chest when someone scores, and I watch with interest as the players interact and perform under so much pressure. Sometimes watching a particular sport makes me want to play it myself, to make my muscles respond to the physics of moving balls and racquets and to feel the slow burn of work, the fluidity of grace, the exhale of relief after a good play.
Last night I took advantage of some free tickets from the company I work for and got my first taste of ice hockey from the stands. I enjoyed the game itself—the puck racing along on its edge, the large, sweaty players smashing each other into the walls with a pleasing grunt, the splash of shaved ice being kicked up by moving silver blades, the graceful movements of the players skating in forward and backward loops with noticeable ease.
It was the rest of the spectacle that overwhelmed me. There was an onslaught of stimulation from the four-headed partitioned screen hanging in the center of the room, advertising, showing fans dance and yell, advertising, showing fans become bashful, advertising, indicating that it's now time to clap, mentioning that Britney Spears is coming soon to this very arena. In the 10-second breaks between plays, music faded in and out, the lyrics mirroring the supposed emotions of home team supporters. When the home team scored, a loud horn sounded, red lights flashed, and Nature Boy Rick Flair appeared on screen to yell "whoo!" amidst a medley of movie clips.
At the end of the first two periods, people bolted up and poured out the exits and into lines to buy t-shirts, hats, jerseys, pretzels, beer, nachos, pizza, Pepsi, and cotton candy in a 15-minute consumption festival. At the end of the third period, the same people bolted up and poured out the exits and into their oversized vehicles, leaving behind them pyramids of crumpled paper plates, smashed plastic cups and popcorn boxes.
So now I'm wondering, does hockey ever come solo to games, or is it forever married to the spectacle?
Tonight I went to my first hockey game ever, but I'm too tired to go into the details as to how that came about and what I thought of it, so I'll leave that for tomorrow. Instead, I'll just link to an article that I've been wanting to link to for months, but haven't, because either it wasn't yet posted online or I felt it was overshadowed by news of September 11th and its aftermath. Even though it was written prior to this recent shift in world events, I think it's still fully relevant, and, in ways, overshadowing.
I've never been to a professional masseuse before, but if I ever plan to go, today would be the day to do it. Muscles that I never noticed before are making themselves known, screaming at me in sharp stabs of ache, and I don't even know why, because I haven't exercised for weeks. Maybe I'm getting sick, which is entirely possible, since I sleep as little as my cat is awake, and since, on Saturday, I dusted and scrubbed and held my face inches away from growing muck and I shook out rugs that showered me with tiny particles of something that's probably bad for me. Or maybe it's my outlook on world events, spilling over from my brain and manifesting itself in my muscle tissue.
The sky is still blue, but the plug that was holding the warmth in has been pulled, causing the warmth to seep down through an invisible drain in the earth, collecting in the bottom half of the globe until we're turned upside down again and it rushes back over us.
I've been making lists lately: simple to-do lists and Christmas lists, lists of what I think I'm looking for, lists like this. Today I started to make a list of news items that made me feel hopeful (rather than depressed), but then I realized that that's just too bloody difficult.
This morning I thought I would wake up to a house much more haphazard, with pieces of last night's party stamped in all corners like ugly stains. But that wasn't the case at all; in fact, there are few physical reminders of the thirty-or-so people that were scattered throughout the house—a few extra chairs unfolded and positioned opposite the couch; a new batch of recycling in the kitchen; a deck of playing cards on the table; and, in the kitchen closet, a box containing items from a last-minute sweep of the top of the fridge. The place is still clean. I'm told people enjoyed themselves, but you never really know, when you're the host.
Today I drove to Buies Creek to help my parents cover a tree in their living room with glass balls, stained-glass snowmen, tiny beaded wreaths strung together by young hands, and plastic icicle daggers. We ate lasagna and talked about politics (until Mom requested that we talk about something slightly less depressing), then we talked about how my uncle beheaded chickens when he was younger and about growing up. I crept through the attic, sifting through dusty pieces of my childhood, and I saw for the first time just how much crap I've asked my parents to store for me over the years. I think I'm ready to part with some of it; the real test will come when I actually try to do it.
Despite the fact that it's possibly the most beautiful day of the year, with cloudless blue skies and at 86 degrees, it is, in fact, December, and I am getting the message that Christmas is coming, even though it feels like I'm spending it in the wrong hemisphere.
