When I go to my parents’ house I kind of just want to lie on the couch all day and veg out in front of the Food Network, reading or nodding off when it fails to hold my attention or someone turns the channel to sports or Modern Marvels. Today I was bribed to venture out “for lunch,” which turned into “the honey store and then lunch,” which turned into “be ambushed by chat with high school friend’s mom at the honey store and then eat lunch at a place where I used to work and where a high school classmate’s sister is now waiting tables.” All of this is merely to say that I wish I’d put on makeup and maybe not ventured out with such disastrous hair (due to the hard water, I think). But whatever, at least when they ask, “Is there anyone special?” and I answer, “No. Lots of false starts,” they can attribute it to my lack of makeup and my fluffy hair in need of product and my general state of going downhill and perhaps lack of trying instead of whatever other reasons there really are. Well, in addition to those other reasons, maybe.
I don’t know why it bothered me so much today, but it really did. I feel like my education doesn’t matter down there, nor do my great friends or good job or nice little apartment — it all comes down to “significant others” and “little ones,” and that’s just not a game I’m hoping to win (or really even play). It’s okay. I’ve got mascara on now, and my hair is almost good, even, and I’m headed out to set the record straight.
Movies You Would Appreciate With a Slightly Higher Capacity For Critical Reasoning
Movies That Your Peer Group Loved Fifteen Years Ago, But Which You Missed Viewing at a Developmentally Appropriate Age, Preventing You From Ever Truly Feeling Part of Your Generation
…
What to read next?
or
I have The Collected Works of T.S. Spivet from the library. And Madame Bovary in my old bedroom. Compared to this time last year, I’ve read about 2/7 the number of books, which is a little depressing, but just makes last year’s goal more exciting, maybe.
My extracurricular writing energy is directed elsewhere at the moment. Drafting and re-drafting personal statements…
What makes a home? Why is it that when someone asks where I’m from, I say “Del Norte,” where I lived full-time from 1994 to 1999, and not “Flagstaff,” where I lived for the thirteen years preceding? Or “Denver,” where I’ve been for ten years?
Holidays, specifically parking lots and shopping centers around holidays make me misanthropic.
The Wire (season 3, disks 4-6 have been renewed twice (which is the limit!))
Blockbuster account: closing it tonight; haven’t watched the single disk of Flight of the Conchords, which I believe arrived like 6 weeks ago
Dishes
eMusic (should I cancel this again? It’s kind of stressful when I can’t keep up with the music I already have. Plus I kind of love Lala.com)
Facebook (so if you made any big announcements I probably don’t know about them)
Podcasts
Reading the one periodical I subscribe to (Artforum). Even looking at the gallery ads (which is really the only thing I ever hold myself to, anyway, when it comes to that journal).
However:
New functioning windshield wiper, check
Oil change, check
Lots of other things very much in progress (namely grad school applications)
Most fun birthday party of all time last night including magic and music and cupcakes and lots and lots of friends (oh, and drink). Happy birthday to Christopher and Joshua!
Other things…
Tattered Cover was mantastic on Friday night. Seriously, it was like all of the state’s men descended on the bookstore for some sports book signing. I mostly avoided eye contact.
The Denver Film Festival ends today. I saw Fish Tank, which is maybe the saddest movie I’ve ever seen, ever, but also good. It’s a desolate portrayal of east London (I think), and this poor girl and her crappy life. The saddest thing is that I think the story is pretty realistic. I also saw several shorts: Adelaide (sort of Wes Anderson pathological character-ish), A Day Late in Oakland (a documentary), StereoLife (sort of campy sci-fi), and Gaining Ground (a German film about Ukrainian immigrants; my favorite of the bunch). And the mayor. I also saw the mayor, as in the beloved, real guy.
Can you believe I’ve gone over a year without parking tickets? Considering I live and work in locations with pesky “street sweeping” days, I think this is a real feat, requiring vigilance the first and second Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday of every month, April through November. No meter tickets, either!
Did you hear the choirs of angels singing ca. 5:59 p.m.? This was why:
Now completed (by me). I thought that by page 981 (not counting the 100-or-so pages of footnotes) I would know something more about the characters and storylines. I can’t say I do. It wasn’t a bad way to spend months of my reading life, but it also doesn’t quite seem worth the effort I expended… I get that DFW is smart and entertaining and tricky. But as a story I can’t say I loved it. I wanted to love it, too. Sigh.
When did my exercise aversion begin? I’m thinking elementary school. My feet point outward, and I am a terrible runner, and this didn’t go unnoticed by my fellow first-graders. As a sensitive kid, it got to me. P.E. was always a dreaded subject. I was terrible at most aspects of the Presidential Fitness Test. Luckily I was good at school all the while, so I just sort of focused on that.
I got into walking for a while. Like long-distance walking, which feels good, but isn’t that challenging anymore. And a couple summers ago there was the hiking phase, which was really fun and challenging, but hard to sustain past summer. Occasionally I sign up for a one-month “beginners” course at a yoga studio. I go for the month and then quit. I tell myself I can do it at home, but never do. I feel good about exercising when I’m in the habit of doing it (however rarely that is). It’s just a matter of getting there.
Even as an undergrad I avoided the gym at DU. Mostly because I compared myself to the other people there — people who were in better shape than I was, plus there was this element of feeling bad about myself and also judging people around me. I told myself that if I really wanted to exercise, I would do it on my own, at home or outside, without the aid of equipment. It’s a nice idea, but one that doesn’t really work for me (yet?).
So last week I signed up for a membership at the gym at work. It’s cheap for employees. I think I could have saved a couple of bucks at a 24-hour Fitness, but I literally work steps away from this one, and the convenience of it is unbeatable. Of course I didn’t use said membership for the first ten days… I guess I had to think about it more, or something? Apparently merely paying for it isn’t motivational enough.
Another perk to being staff is that we get three free sessions with a trainer. Not one to give up something free, I signed up. The girl I’m working with is pretty fantastic — into nutrition and holistic stuff. It’s one of those roles (personal training) where you (I, anyway) expect to encounter someone totally fake, so it’s nice to find someone real and frank and funny (I feel the same way about my hairdresser). But yesterday OMG did she kick my ass! With these little tiny weights! And little tiny exercises!
Anyway. I’m sore today. But being sore feels good.
Even though the creepy factor is high, I really liked this article in the New York Times about innocent city voyeurism… I love that part of cities — sort of but not really knowing strangers, the bits of others’ lives that lightly graze your own. It’s lonely sometimes, but then so is living in a small town. Mostly it’s fascinating.
Today I cataloged a drawing by Gustaf Fjaestad called The Boy Who Sees with His Heart. A detail is on the cover of this book:
The actual work is irregularly shaped and set into a really pretty wooden frame. It was commissioned by the Swedish Association for the Blind, and I think it’s so lovely. I also cataloged an image from the 2007 Venice Biennale guide, which is titled “Think with the Senses, Feel with the Mind.” These two titles (of the book and of the painting) got me thinking about where we place our abstract feelings. Thoughts are in our heads, love is in our hearts. It’s much more romantic not to place everything in the head. I’m thinking that we miss out on a lot by doing that. I’m pretty guilty of paying too much attention to my head, and not enough to my gut or my nose or my eyes or my heart.
I feel full. I feel like I’ve felt full for days and days, even though I distinctly remember being stomach-growling-hungry today at 11, yesterday at 4, etc., etc. Ugh.
Also: sluggish. And in a fog. Just sort of bleh. And I have three pimples around my mouth like punishment for eating fries or something. Plus it’s one of those holidays where I have to work but the mail doesn’t come. And that makes me feel like I should say something about being thankful for my freedom. I don’t know how to say that. It’s hard to be genuinely thankful for something you’ve always had, isn’t it? It’s hard to even imagine what a lack of it would be, or, if there is a freedom-enslavement continuum, what each shade looks like. Is “enslavement” even the opposite? Or, rather, the only opposite?
On the plane back from Portland a few weeks ago I didn’t check in ahead of time, and was rewarded with the back row. There was the usual seating fiasco that we can now expect on full flights when people carry on their bags — wrong seats, double booking, split up families, etc., etc. I thought for a while that my row partner and I had the row to ourselves, which almost makes up for the fact that the rear row seats don’t recline, when the attendant seated another guy in the empty middle seat. “Thanks for switching seats. I’ll get your free TV set up after takeoff.”
He had “Jacqueline” tattooed on his arm and looked about 22. His eyes were a shade of blue-green I’ve come to think of as sad because that’s pretty much the color my eyes turn if I cry a lot. We took off, he got his TV, but it turned out the sound didn’t work. He told me he would have gotten the TV for free anyway because he was military, but he didn’t like to insist on it. He was in the army, had just been home for a few weeks, and was headed back — where, I didn’t ask. I traded him my aisle seat with working sound for his middle seat (I was just planning to sleep). I thought about how little I think about the military, how disconnected I am from it, where he was going, what he had seen and might see. There’s a lot I don’t understand about the world.
