rain is falling very softly on the window. it's a light bubbling, crackly sound. i'm cleaning up my papers and piling all the europe ephemera in preparation to file it away in the box under my knitting bag. the house feels very cozy and right tonight, with all of us wandering back and forth on our business, intersecting and moving apart. a conversation with ryn online felt more normal than any i can bring to recent memory. we are all mentally battening down for winter. my first thought when i heard the ticking of the rain on the window was that it was sleet. i'm itching to knit again: fingerless gloves and long thick scarves and socks for padding around the house in. the snake bobs his head. even in his artificial environment, the heating pad on for weeks now, i'm sure he notices a dryness in the air.
i want there to be snow, but i don't want it here. every change of season brings new reasons to wish i was back upstate. kevin from work tells me the trees are in full autumn blast up at bard. i miss it. i miss the way the leaves smell wet and plastered to the pavement.

count to ten
count to ten
count to ten
count to ten
count to ten

count to ten
count to ten
count to ten
count to ten
count to ten

coming home to new york was like slipping back into my skin. as soon as i stepped on to the subway at howard beach. back where i belong, but with this cloud of sweet memories. the two glass marbles that i made and j made clicking together in my pocket and the little glass jars with raspberry preserves and thyme-scented honey and chestnut paste and ginger cream packed in among my clothes. i rubbed the 50 pence piece to give to m with my thumb and listened to the rude noises of new yorkers. it felt like they were staring at me because no one who lives here would be so glowing and patient on the stifling subway platform, but it felt good to be deliriously tired and look at familiar subway lines that would march me home to bed-stuy. i watched the clock and thought about j settling back into his home with me flown away and no longer taking up space there, and s tying things up at work so she can cross that now unreachable distance to be close to me again but on a different continent where neither us will be foreigners. everything here looks freshly scrubbed, even though the kitchen has been taken over by fruit flies and everyone at the museum is wan and underslept.

the eiffel tower actually is cooler than i thought. and larger. i saw it all lit up and sparking while the france/new zealand rugby game was on. we watched the game from my aunt's place later. i wanted to go out and join the fun once they won, but jet lag shut me off like a light till the next morning. worlds collided when i brought my aunt to my friend sarah's for brunch the next day. she's the same as always. lots of friends, lots of stories, sharing food. a friend of hers who wandered in offered to take me on a motercycle trip around paris later this week. why not? so we had wonderful vegan brunch and heard about sarah and her roommate's adventures getting their work permits and sarah's crazy job as a pastry maker in a big parisian department store. my aunt said it was the best vegan meal she'd ever had. on our way over we walked by a fruit market and i selected fresh figs. i've never even touched fresh figs before. they were ripe to bursting, some already had crystallized syrup oozing out. those were for sarah and i'm dying to get my own. oh, and so far my french has proven sufficient to:
get minutes on my borrowed cell phone
ask where the bathrooms are
order drinks and dinner
ask for (and receive) directions
woohoo!

oh, and we went to the centre pompidou, a modern and contemporary art museum. it's a real monstrosity: 6 floors, boxy, with esclators on the outside and all the ductwork and framework exposed, like a borg cube. even in the galleries you look up and see all the ducts and pipes and electrical wiring. i find it spectacularly ugly, although riding in the escalators was fun. they are in big plastic tubes, like they have in hampster cages, and you look down on an enormous plaza where people gather to watch street musicians.

nervous.
my suitcase on the floor, containing camera, passport, and two wineglasses.
shopping list for tomorrow:
unpopped popcorn
rodent
nervous, can't sleep.
the skateboarders are practicing on the street again. it's still closed for paving.
finish the book, then go to bed.

hummmmm. thomas gave me a datebook ages ago and it went right into my purse because it was pleasing to me, all slim and black and understated. i just began using it as a diary of sorts. each day has just enough space for a few sentences, and i have just enough time in the mornings to sum up the previous day while waiting for my train. i lose so much of what i do because of carelessness and poor memory. it is good to see the days marching back, and it is interesting to see what i pick out of each day as most memorable...
9/10
watched terrible russian vampire movie
9/12
j and s fighting about $. broccoli and tomato omlette. flirting with the subway surfer.
9/15
GIRLTALK sweaty crowded pushing people. enjoyed myself immensely. toenail coming off?

and then i opened it and saw five empty days. spending lots of time with people that you love and hardly ever see is exhausting and all the little necessities fall aside. when i came home tonight after lisa's reading i threw out loads of disgusting rotted veggies and made a dinner of a small head of red lettuce with ginger carrot dressing. work goes by in a daze of heat and stuffle-headedness, i go out, i stumble home, i give sam's cat food and snuggles. clothing piles up on my floor and my perishables melt away in the kitchen. my roommates, when i am around to observe, are entranced by their simms games, watching the little lives of their fictional families, herding them through daily duties or allowing them to be visited by calamities.
at the tediously thorough (but yes, joyful and beautiful) catholic wedding i attended on saturday i was reminded of my favorite part of the lord's prayer. the forgive us our trespasses part creeps me out, but i am always moved and shaken by "and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil." it's the plea of the powerless, a clearly futile hope. it's asking if life could be a little bit easier, even though we know there's no reason to expect it.

who's got health insurance?
that's right, bitches. yours truly.
they stalled and strung me along for months, but now i have those plastic cards with my name ons.
not that i entirely know what it means. they sent the cards, and a short list of covered medications (birth control, bitches!) and notices of privacy practices, but no information about whether i can use them at the dentist's (let's assume no) or if there are only certain doctors i can go to. i've never had my very own health insurance before.
now that i have it, what next? who knows how to find a doctor? i don't terribly want to find one in bed-stuy, but is it worth trekking to manhattan every time i get sick? do i stick with the clinic where i've been going? there's a certain convenience factor there in that they have doctors, ob-gyn, dentist, optician, and radiology all rolled into one building, but there's an inconvenience factor in that they're located in alphabet city and when i went for my physical i was stuck there for four hours. that was four hours of sitting in a waiting room listening to babies crying.
well, the most important thing is that if i slip on the stairs or my appendix bursts i won't be in debt for the rest of my life. we'll sort out the little details okay.

an anthology of new (american) poets
edited by lisa jarnot, leonard schwartz, and chris stroffolino

the book of illusions
paul auster

memoria de mis putas tristes
gabriel garcia marquez

i am a strange loop
douglas hofstadter

whoa. if we established one thing in our house discussion on i am a strange loop last night, it was that book club is run on beer. we must've had four or five apiece.
so last night i had another work nightmare. i showed up on opening day with a book in which i was stupidly engrossed, probably one of those george r.r. martin fantasy novels i've been borrowing from sam. anyway, i felt that things were under control, so i could read my book for a bit. when i looked up again i realized none of my staff knew they had to come in, because openings are held on sundays and they're all used to working on saturdays. and the registers had been set up in the wrong place, but the public was already coming in so it was too late to change them. so i set the intern at one of the registers while i went into the computer to start calling people and begging them to come in and work at the last minute. at that time, i realized a few things: i don't have the contact information for the people who have worked for me most recently entered into the computer, i can't find the document on the computer anyway, and the beer guys never came in to hook up the bars. time kept changing in a weird way, as well. i looked at the clock and it was 8, the day nearly over. then i looked and it was 3 again.
whew! que disastre! my brain is flipping out because the last saturday event is this week and after that i won't have constant stress to live off of.

the whole room looks different now that i've discarded my box of papers to be filed. the papers to be filed are now jammed haphazardly into their respective file folders and the envelopes in which they arrived are in a trash bag on the landing. i fed the rest into the shredder. now i need more file folders.
the snake is satiated, temporarily, and no longer noses at the glass.
tomorrow i go back to work and into my daily disasters.
the rain on my days off was endlessly satisfying. tuesday morning when we were almost fighting i curled up on the bed and watched the rain drip off the grapevines and the sour green bunches of grapes and the leaves of the apricot tree that the grapevines are attempting to choke. he came into the room with a handrolled cigarette and shared it with me and we watched the rain, blowing smoke out through the screen.
all the struggling and fussing that i do, all i want are moments like that, when i'm sleepy and scared and a little angry, but if i stop to look out the window i can see that the rain is beautiful on the leaves and i can hear this harmonious dripping sound everywhere and someone that i don't really want to fight with who doesn't really want to fight with me will come and share a cigarette and enjoy the view before we have coffee and eggs.
can't it always be raining?
can't i forever be coming or going?
the time one spends somewhere is so much sweeter when one has to leave sooner... or later...
anyway, when i left it was a little sunnier. i went to pick up the organic veggies. we had lovely beets, little squiggly pink and purple potatoes, wax beans, pattypan squashes, basil, cucumber, half-ripe tomatoes, broccoli, cauliflower, a perfect cabbage, and the last few stalks of kale and colored swiss chard.
i'm listening to the offenbach opera that thomas let me dump onto the shuffle. he describes it as being cabaret-like; the music is more sudden and uptempo, none of this fussing and beating around the bush you normally get with opera. it pleases me immensely. looking up the plot on wikipedia, it turns out to be about a man who falls in love with and loses three women in quick succession. he keeps getting tricked, there is someone who is determined that no one else shall have him. ach, but it's beautiful.