new york is a rainforest this week. everything has been misty and steamy, sweaty weather but cool. i sleep under the lightest blanket clutching my down comforter, the inane blather of my neighbors on their patio drifting through my dreaminess.

the new roommate is practically absent. she comes home late at night from the bakery and i'll see her only occasionally in the kitchen, but she often leaves fresh flowers in a bottle on the table. before it was roses, but tonight it is fresh peonies. my mother had enormous peony plants in the yard. they smell like roses, and to me like summer.

work was slow slow slow until this week. i'd sit at my desk inventing and completing unimportant projects, reading art and publishing blogs, and thinking about sex. it reminds me of the picasso seminar i took sophomore year. halfway through the semester i stopped listening to the lectures. i'd watch the slides--his etchings of nubile women being gazed upon by minotaurs, paintings of women fractured into body parts--eyes, breasts, hands. i thought of it as some spell i was sending out, the best return you can get from the threefold rule. and there was a very bittersweet return. one wonders what will come of it this time. i'm desperately weary of sex for sex's sake.

maybe i wrote about it before. this obscure movie keeps coming up in one way or another called bell book and candle. jimmy stewart and kim novak, 1958. kim novak is a foxy witch and the owner of a successful gallery of african art, but what she really wants is a steady guy and a normal life. it's a very strange and contradictory film. from what i can see, novak's character gives up everything that makes her appealing to me--the art gallery, her magic, going to the spooky bohemian witch's nightclub, never wearing shoes indoors--to be the kind of woman she thinks jimmy stewart wants, even though he loved her already. but i still love the movie.

i don't worry like i used to that one day i'll wake up and be a normal boring person, doing things the way everyone else does because that's the way everyone else does them. i'm more worried now that i'll stay the same always, repeating the same mistakes and mulling over the same regrets.