"Scents and the City."

Awesomeness.

What the F.

What the F

Please let me find a way to use this in casual conversation: "hotter than a fresh-fucked fox in a forest fire."

My hypothetical book choices for the tattoo I won't be getting.

I'm finally going to attempt to answer my own question about the five book titles I would hypothetically have tattooed on my skin, were I to have a bookish tattoo.

Facebook yielded some awesomely interesting responses from others. One friend has Auryn from The Neverending Story and her wife has Pippi Longstocking. A friend of theirs has a depiction of Great Gatsby on his forearm. Another friend listed the following as her five: The Great Gatsby, Distinction, Encyclopedia of the City of New York, The Year of Magical Thinking, and "something fluffy as a joke ... Like maybe The Nanny Diaries or The Devil Wears Prada." Yet another friend listed: Pretty, Style Deficit Disorder, Panic, 2666, and either Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina. Then again, she added, "it would be kind of funny to have Me Talk Pretty One Day and/or How Fiction Works running up your arm."

First off, let me just say, I tried really hard to follow my own directions. BUT. After mulling it over for weeks, I could not get the number below six books, so six it is. My criteria was initially to be cognizant of "aesthetics, pragmatics, flesh," but in the end I threw it all to the wind and chose books that I felt had literally changed my life or worldview, books that touched and moved me, books that inspired me, books that made me want to write, books I could read over and over again without ever tiring of them. Here they are (in no particular order):

1. When the Shark Bites (Rodney Morales)

2. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Diaz)

3. Let the Great World Spin (Colum McCann)

4. Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell)

5. Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers (Lois-Ann Yamanaka)

6. Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurston)

As in life, and writing, and conversation, notice how longwinded are my choices. Quite appropos. Since we're going down that path, in fact, I stand by these choices as tattoos with full covers, too!

Portrait of a creative workspace.

This about sums it up, I think.

In fact, that photo is my desk on a good day.

"Happy-Go-Lucky."

Watched Happy-Go-Lucky last night. Am not exactly sure how I feel about it. The first thing that comes to mind is "offended," because I had more than one person tell me that Poppy reminded them of me. Having now seen the film, I do not take that as a compliment.

But again the film was interesting--as we say in anthropology--to "think with." Poppy is an eternally cup brimming to full kind of gal, and there is only the briefest moment where she is shown feeling something other than utter optimism. She can always find the silver lining, she can always explain away distress, anger, etc., and frankly it's a bit obnoxious. Holy shit, I wanted to smack her in the face a few times. I mean, sure, 24/7 happiness is all good, but it can also be irritating if you're wielding it against someone who doesn't want to face it (e.g., driving teacher, angry student, flamenco teacher).

Just for the record: I am so not like that. If you think that's what I'm like, wow, we better hang out more often. So you can grasp the whole picture.

Anyway. I've been thinking a lot about arcs: What is enough of one to constitute a story? What is the bare minimum of enough to show progression in the character such that, in Dave's high-falutin' words, "something happens" in the plot?

There was a lot of potential throughout the movie to knit the thing more tightly together, with that lovely parallel of "teaching" running through Poppy's classroom, Poppy's driving lessons, and Poppy's flamenco lessons. But what were the writer(s) and director trying to say about teaching, and how does it fit with what they are trying to show us about Poppy? Frankly I don't think it was pulled off. The flamenco classes were some of the most enjoyable scenes, but they ended up just being a device to show how Poppy again was able to explain away someone else's distress or rude behavior. And what the heck was with the scene with the bum? I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, for Poppy to encounter something that would shake her up enough to have a real emotion, but it never happened. I thought perhaps she'd accidently kill someone during her driving lesson, or get mugged by the bum, or get date-raped by her social worker manfriend. Even in the scene at her pregnant suburban youngest sister's house had real potential: her sister seems bothered by Poppy's carefree acceptance of a nonlinear life and verbally attacks her for it, telling her she needs to be a responsible grown-up basically. Poppy defuses the situation, which is believable, btw, because who wants to upset a pregnant woman who already is hormonally imbalanced, BUT I was waiting for her to actually process her feelings regarding this event.

BUT NOTHING EVER HAPPENED. GOD, THIS WAS FRUSTRATING.

To me, the moment the story got interesting and stopped being just a loose collage of a person's life was the final car ride with Poppy and her driving instructor, during which said instructor really "breaks." Poppy's joy at leaving her boyfriend turns into a confrontation with the instructor, wherein he lays all of her shit bare, and she seems to lose her usual bouncy come-backs. She manages to calm him down enough for him to drive away, and she walks away and sits solo on a stairway, seemingly subdued. As if perhaps finally something got through to her--in a way that even her own pregnant sister's indictment of her life didn't.

And then, in the next and final scene, she is in a rowboat with her best friend/roommate dismissing the situation and explaining it away, as usual.

What did you think of Poppy's "arc"? Did you believe it? Was there a moment of change, and if so, what was it and was it enough?

Wes Anderson, I heart you.

I just finally got around to watching The Darjeeling Limited, and I was really impressed. Maybe it's because I'm in the thick middle of my MFA program and I can't help but view everything through the lens of craft (both a blessing and a curse). I liked the conceit of a train ride keeping the story literally moving; I was wild about the dialogue; I admired the ways the film depicted feelings without words--I guess the way it showed, not told. ;) And most of all, I am yearning to learn how to depict such complicated, strange individuals with such complicated, strange, and yet real relationships. And Wes Anderson, man, he just nails it for me every single time. I mean, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The Royal Tenenbaums, just to name the films preceding this one that he directed and/or wrote for, they're his, it's clear as if his fingerprints were on them. Loveloveloved The Darjeeling Limited and kind of want to watch it again right now because I was so inspired by his craft. But if I'm feeling so inspired, I should probably just pick up my own pen and let this all go to the compost of the mind.

R.I.P. Ted Kennedy.

“He was the survivor,” Mr. Ornstein continued. “He was not a shining star that burned brightly and faded away. He had a long, steady glow. When you survey the impact of the Kennedys on American life and politics and policy, he will end up by far being the most significant.”

See The New York Times obituary (August 26, 2009) in full here.

Cell of books.

These image of a "cell" at the Modern Art Center in Portugal remind me of A House of Paper, by Carlos Maria Dominguez--a book I love love love love loved. BUT if you read the book, or really if you just THINK about it at all, you'll understand that such an exhibit shows a love of art, not one of books. Still, the idea of loving something so much that you want to cement it into your life, even if doing so destroys the thing itself, is a human impulse. Blah blah blah impermanence and beauty and I'm really deep.

Summer reads: "Lost Cat."

Mary Gaitskill's very long and very good essay is up at Granta.

And, finally, in case you forgot ...

Our dog is a pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty girl.

Summer food: supereasy and fresh dessert.

This barely requires the linking to a recipe, it barely even is a recipe, that's how easy it is: Real Simple again, Caramelized pineapple with coconut sorbet. Also, that picture there didn't turn out that well, sorry. Would've been cuter if we had done the pineapple rings like RS suggests, but chunks was what we had in the cupboard. We used Ciao Bella coconut sorbet.

It tastes like a sultry night on a tropical island, one where the heat keeps building all day, but then finally the breeze kicks in at night, and you're laying in a hammock strung up between two coconut trees, still in your bikini because it was too damn hot to bother showering and changing, and a golden-skinned manboy who is very handsome and wayyyy too young for you is at the top of one of the trees looking down at you, and he's leering a little, but it's okay because it makes you feel appreciated, exposed as you are in your nonclothing, and now he's looking down at his friend to whom he is throwing coconuts, and you think about the way he climbed the tree, because it was nothing to be believed, it wasn't squirrel-like as you thought it would be, somehow he really made that climbing so manly and actually embarassingly sexual and you wonder if you could be arrested for your thoughts because truly could he possibly even be older than 17?

Umm. Ok. I really want to go on vacation now. Fuck dessert.

Summer food: spiced mini burgers with couscous salad.

This recipe comes to you out of the Hall of Fame: Real Simple's Spiced Mini Burgers with Couscous Salad, served with storebought hummus and Dave Lieberman's Minted Parsley Yogurt. Oh, also we fuss with the couscous a bit: when we add the hot water, we also add a touch of olive oil, golden raisins, slivered almonds, and pinenuts (when we have 'em); then we follow the directions, covering the couscous for 5 minutes before fork-fluffing.

I could live on this stuff, I truly could. It has to do maybe with the summeryness of a salad, the pleasing contrast in textures with the couscous/salad/meat, the cool slipperyness of two sauces down one's throat, or maybe simply the incredible ease with which this dinner is pieced together.* I don't really care what it is, but this recipe is damn fricken good, and you should eat it.

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* The recipe is so quick and easy. So much so that I hesitated sharing it because if I were, say, to have you over for dinner and I whipped out this meal, I'd kind of want you to be touched that I made some kind of effort, but now that you know it's easy, you might think I love you less. But it isn't true, and I had to share because you, too, should get to eat this deliciousness.

Variations on a theme: salmon.

Ahhh, the paradoxes of summer "cooking." One wants food to be light, cool, and quick and easy to make, so as to avoid spending time near hot appliances. But one also does not want to end up eating a bowl of cereal for dinner. (No judgment: been there.)

Well, the hubby and I have been on a kick of trying to actually cook again, and mostly it's resulted in a lot of salads and weirdly enough a nearly month-long craving for chili. That aside, we've been hunting down new recipes to try out of our cookbook collection and off the Internet.

First, we followed directions and made this Real Simple Salmon and Watercress Salad to the letter, substituting only wasabi for "prepared horseradish" (anyway, wasabi is a kind of horseradish, I think). It was pretty delish, but the way the salmon is cooked does not lend a lot of flavor to the fish. We had four fish fillets prepared because we can't read, evidently, or weren't paying attention to the fact that (a) the recipe feeds four and (b) that's a lot of fricken fish, so we had two already cooked salmon fillets for the next night, which we refridgerated nude (that is, cooked but not dressed/marinated/etc.).

The second night, we stuck with the salmon and watercress salad, but this time Dave improvised the sauce into a concoction of mayonnaise, sriracha, sesame oil, sugar, a touch of lemon juice, salt, and freshly ground pepper. And his sauce was definitely the winner! Here's a not-quite-food-porn photo of the second night of dinner:

Because of the challenge of summer cooking, I hope to continue posting our favorite summer food recipes, and I hope you will send me or link me to your favorites as well!

A permanent love of books.

I love love love this tattoo. But I couldn't help but wonder if it would've been even cooler with some titles on the spines/covers. Here's the thing, though: the individual books would have had to been made much bigger so that the font of the titles could be big enough to not blur with age. Which would have meant a smaller book pile, which would have undermined the general awesomeness of the sprawl of books here.

That said, I got really interested in thinking about the permanence of art on flesh and the way that tattoos become like a flag to fly high. In some cases, a freak flag; in other cases, a proud flag, a flag of love, a flag of allegiance. I mean, sure, you can always get tattoos very painfully lasered off later. But it would kind of defeat the purpose. I think the whole point of a tattoo is commitment: going into the tattoo shop and having the artist ink you up is tacit agreement that no matter what else changes--and the whos you'll later become--you still will care about this particular thing. I think there's something very beautiful there.

Of course, there's another possibility: using skin as more of a map of a road trip, the flesh dotted with the pinpoints of the places and people you've been. Not to reveal myself too much as a Jolie fan, but think of her body, the way she has treated her skin like a collage, or a diary of sorts, really, marking milestones: boyfriends, girlfriends, (ex)husbands, births of children, death of a mother, values, beliefs, reminders. Mostly she leaves them be, even if she's moved on, or builds upon them: crossing out a tribal dragon with a thick cross, lasering off Billy Bob in favor of the coordinates of the birth places of her children, etc.

Anyway. Got off track there. Not surprising. I find Angie Jolie ... distracting. :)

Moving along, I am completely fascinated by this subject right now, and so what else to do put post my fascination everywhere on the Internet, including Facebook where I've asked:

"So, of course, now the nagging question(s): If you were the kind of person who got tattoos, and if you were inclined to get a tattoo of books, and were you to decide to depict five of those books with titles on their spines or covers, WHAT WOULD THE BOOKS BE? This is an endlessly important question, people. This is not just about your five favorite books ever, this is about aesthetics, pragmatics, flesh."

But of course Facebook wasn't enough. I had to post similar questions on Twitter, and Google Reader, and my blog, too. So, how about it, Internet? What would your five books be? (I hope to post the results at a later date.)

Another post from my inner dork.

If I had a nice chunk of free time, I would seriously consider this book arrangement.

Because IT IS AWESOME!

Brilliant! vending machine.

@ The Book Bench's recent post, "1,000 WORDS: FEED YOUR MIND."

This vending machine lives in Seattle, Washington! And I thought Japan had a monopoly on awesome vending machines.

Sporty & posh spice.

Thursday was Dave's Sunday, and I was determined to treat it as such. After subliminal prompts from friends (Krissa; Seiko/Sean), we finally unearthed our bicycles from their perch in the bedroom, where they've spent almost two years gazing longingly at the outside world and accumulating a visible strata of dust.

And then we even rode them!

But first we had to maneuver them through the skinny hallway, out the front door, into the small elevators, and down a few flights of stairs. A workout in and of itself. But then we got up and on them and rode we did. I was a little shaky at first: it has been two years or more since I've ridden, I forgot all about the handbrakes, and the handshifting to different speeds; add to that my discomfort with riding in car traffic and our (so far!) lack of helmets. Yet I can say this with confidence: riding a bike is like ... well, riding a bike. Truly. Whether its mental or muscle memory, it all floods back in through your veins thick as instinct.

We ended up going a roundabout way down to Grand Army Plaza (~1 mile), then following the main bicycle loop around Prospect Park (~3.35 miles), and then home again (~1 mile). And despite the completely oppressive heat, it was so! much! fun!!

Once home, we inhaled subway sandwiches that we'd picked up on the ride home and took another lovely afternoon nap. Then Dave parked himself in front of the TV, while I tried to quickly gussy up to meet my friend C. at Chris Habana + A.OK's launch of their Legends of Pop (80s-90s) jewelry line. Pretty fun line--especially the necklaces with the following charms: Madonna cone boobs and Michael Jackson white glove--but of all things I ended up buying a dress. Let me add: without having intended to buy a single thing at all. I mean, geez, self, that's why you go to these things: to look at the pretty people and drink the free champagne--NOT to spend your money. What can I say, though? The champagne kind of loosened me up. Also, C. is a fellow starting member of the Varsity Shopping Team that cleared out Ljubljana in July; with her along enabling me, I didn't stand a chance. And then, finally, it was a pretty fricken great dress, all black and white stripes, curve hugging, with a silver zipper in front. I was especially vulnerable because the dress's style reminded me mightily of a beloved swimsuit I had when I was, like, eight: hot pink with a black plastic zipper down its front. I wore that thing till it was threadbare. I even had a scar for a few years between my nonexistent boobs because I accidently zipped my skin in there--and even after that accident, I still had love for that suit. Having spent money I meant to hold onto, there was nothing to do but spend some more, so C. and I went out to dinner and her husband joined us, whereupon the drinking continued--after which I righteously stuck my arm out into oncoming traffic and hailed my tipsy ass a cab ride home.

Required reading for workshop settings.

I'm about halfway through Robert Olen Butler's craft book, From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction. The book is in parts infuriating and in other parts pretty fricken smart; sometimes it makes me laugh and sometimes it makes me want to throw up.

But I will say that his chapter, "Reading, Lit Crit, and the Workshop," should be required reading for any writer entering a workshop setting, especially this passage:

When you read that work [any piece under workshop consideration], the first time through especially, it's just as if it's been written by Leo Tolstoy or Flannery O'Connor. You read it as a work of art, and you go thrum thrum thrum, and then perhaps you hit a twang. The seond time through you have a pen handy: thrum thrum thrum, twang; you mark the passage and you keep thrumming on or twanging on. [p. 114; Butler's italics, my boldfaced emphasis]

LA Times on the art of reading.

It's a subject that's become very popular in this information age, but here's another reminder to stop and smell the . . . pages of your book. Mixed metaphor. Whatever.

Writers and airports.

If the experience didn't have to yield a nonfiction book actually about the airport itself, this writer-in-residence position would be my dream gig.

I find airports endlessly fascinating. All that intersection of humanity. All those emotional hellos and goodbye. All that strange protocol and language. And all that strangely sterile public space. It's like another country, or even another planet.

I guess I could make my own writer-in-residency gig by just going to work with Dave. Probably not, however, on the shifts where he has to be at JFK by 5am.

Writing books and falling in/out of love.

This analogy of writing a book being like having a love affair is spot-on and dead funny.

Quote of the day: the psychology* behind why we love vampire stories.

"Herein lies an important clue: in contrast to timeless creatures like the dragon, the vampire does not seek to obliterate us, but instead offers a peculiar brand of blood alchemy. For as his contagion bestows its nocturnal gift, the vampire transforms our vile, mortal selves into the gold of eternal youth, and instills in us something that every social construct seeks to quash: primal lust. If youth is desire married with unending possibility, then vampire lust creates within us a delicious void, one we long to fulfill."

--NY Times Op-Ed, "Why Vampires Never Die," July 30, 2009

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* And by psychology, I mean "psychology according to GUILLERMO del TORO and CHUCK HOGAN."

Quote of the day: Stolen from a friend's facebook page.

"It is difficult to get news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there." ~ William Carlos Williams

Nike+: Happy f*cking sunday.

Today I hate you, Nike+. You had the audacity to freeze up and erase my 4+-mile-long run just as I was ending my workout, dripping in sweat and dragging a tired puppy behind me.

If you think I run in this kind of heat for fun or my health, you are dead wrong.

I do it so my Nike+ goals don't yell at me. I do it so my Nike+ run graph looks pretty and filled in, without any gaps. I do it to reach the green level in Nike+.

So go f*ck yourself today, Nike+.

Incidentally, to the rest of you, is there any way to "cheat" the system and manually input the run I just did into Nike+? I mean, I doubt there would be, as an ability to "cheat" would kind of defeat the purpose, but I still thought I'd ask since I am SO MAD.

"Death by Pufferfish": the aftermath.

Roughly one year, nine months, and fourteen long hours after I began, I think I may have (nearly almost almost) finished.

I would like to mark the occasion.

This is Officially the First Short Story I Have Written That I Believe to Be an Actually Short Short Story, and Furthermore the First Nearing a Sense of Denouement Such That Even I Think It Could Possibly Be Nearly Almost Almost Finished.*

Marking the occasion and using lots of Capital Letters not only felt good but were a necessary kind of pomp and circumstance for the occasion. It didn't even take leaving my environment (though I did kind of give up on the home office and opt for the air-conditioned bedroom for my fourteen hours of revision today), or the dangling of prizes in front of my nose (e.g., if you finish this story, you can get a Bliss facial), or even cheap bribes (e.g., though the tallest, icyest iced cappuccino from Tillie's would have been a very nice cheap bribe). In fact, I didn't even get in a run today, due mostly to the fact that my sore muscles needed a day off.

All it took was me allowing for some stretches of time during which I procrastinated by reading Don Lee's "Domo Arigato" for the eighth time in about a week, this time for structure, or Haruki Murakami, for what he could teach me about the absurdist literary tradition, or Naming the World... for its chapters on revision. It took me blogging once to procrastinate, and leaning on Facebook like the co-dependent fiend I am, sure that revision was not actually occuring unless I updated my status four times to prove it. It took long moments (sometimes hours of them) of despair, of telling myself I was full of shit, and I had no idea how to write a short story, nay, no idea how to write at all, and how much easier was life when I just had a day job, why the f*ck did I have to get the bright idea to get a MFA when I could be watching NCIS marathons every night. Which I do anyway but which I could be doing minus this guilty sense that I should be trying to write, or revise, or read about writing and revising. It took some stabs in the dark, some writing stuff I was pretty sure was complete bullshit but it didn't matter because I just needed to fill some pages here, and some very very painful but necessary deletion--like, of pages and pages of material; entire sections with roman numerals, requiring me to then go through and renumber I-V instead of I-VIII. The pain hurt ... painful bad. It took some note taking, and some off-into-space staring, a dog walk or two to clear my head, and some blathering on and on and on to my poor husband, who was trying to nap after a long workday.

Now, note well that it is nearly half past midnight, so perhaps I am on an unnatural high, and I will wake in the morning and realize all these changes--some additions but like I said mostly subtractions--were bullshit and the whole thing still sucks.

But for the first time, I don't get that sense. Instead, I feel these senses: one of possibility ... and one of completion.

And them senses feel good, yo.

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* DISCLAIMER: Of course, it still needs polishing. Neurotic word choice changes, proofing for punctuation, a few tweaks here and there, you know how it is, we're never truly done with it, even once it's published.

"To die for."

Nearly two years ago, I was in the beginning stages of shaping a story that came to be called "Death by Pufferfish," and in those early sculpting stages, I was of course doing a lot of Internet procrastination--I mean, research--on pufferfish, tetrodotoxin, and airplanes.

I know. Weird. Don't ask, because someday I'll get the story in enough of a shape that it can be published at least obscurely somewhere in the world, and then you know I'll link the shit out of it and torture you all until you read it.

Anyhoo. It is rather too bad that Mr. Adam Platt didn't get around to writing this article for New York Magazine till the following spring. Would have saved me a lot of time in initial "research." His article synthesized the information I had to obtain from no fewer than 15 other sources.

All of this is only pertinent because I've been banging my head against the walls of this story all. day. long. trying to revise it. And being on the Internet and suggesting you read this article (you, who may have zero interest in pufferfish, or any sushi, or any fish, or anything Japanese at all) ... well, it's clearly just more "research."

(Thanks to Miss Caitlin L. for the tip last summer.)

On "Into the Wild."

Into the Wild, the film, made me wild.

It's not that I don't find Christopher Johnson McCandless's story moving. Theoretically I understand and empathize with the sentiment of simplifying, of reverting to a more bare-bones hand-to-the-earth lifestyle. And who hasn't, at some point, fantasized about cutting up their credit cards, social security card (no SSN = no taxes, right?), and so forth, and turning over a new day in which one considers eating when necessary, sleeping when desired, and owing no one anything and required to do nothing? (My version included moving to Tahiti and apprenticing a black pearl farmer.) I emphathize, too, with the itchy feet, the adventurous passion within him, that led him to venture into a place untamed and seemingly undiscovered.

But what pissed me off was:

(a) writing off this adventurous vein using the justification of a rocky home life

and

(b) Christopher dying at the end.

Regarding (a): People have rocky home lives all over the place, but this does not lead most of them to mostly eschew human contact and die alone in the wilds of Alaska. This may very well have been a determining factor in why Christopher was the way he was, but I would have almost preferred it, or found it more noble, or more interesting, at very least, if he just was the way he was because that's who he was. Did that make any sense? I guess that's not fair, though. We're all who we are because of what we've gone through. Still. It pissed me off. It was like the time a guy I knew got a Pulitzer nomination, and someone said he made great art because he grew up without a father, and I was like, Fuck, I didn't have a dad either, but you don't see me getting any Pulitzers. Same kind of thing here. Do you see me or the rest of the 50+% of America (just America, not even the world!) with rocky home lives heading out into the wilds without a compass? I don't think so.

Regarding (b): It was like Christopher had lost his sense of adventure, his determination, his innate stubbornness. What a time to lose it, too! I mean, I know, I know, supposedly he ate some poisoned berries and then began to slowly starve to death. But before that, he wasn't starving, he was trying to cross the river. But the river was rougher than when he's first crossed it earlier in the spring, and so we're to believe that this man, this stubborn stubborn wildly adventuring man, just gave up trying to cross it? DUDE. C'MON! Where's the sense of adventure, the prospecting spirit of things? Wouldn't an earlier version of himself have thought: Gee, it's hard to cross the river here. I don't have a map. Maybe I should go explore and see if the river is different either up or down its banks? I mean, what if the river got more narrow or more trickly just a half a mile away? What if there were a place for safe crossing near? Or what if there were "a hand-operated tram ... 1/4 [of a] mile from where he attempted to cross ... [and] cabins stocked with emergency supplies a few miles of the bus"? Just, simply, dude: Why die, if you don't have to?

Piggybacking on both of those points is a nagging sense of waste. I understand the adventurous, wandering spirit ... but did Christopher have to wander without a compass or a map, without money, ID, or canned food, without any sort of contingency plan? Is an adventure not adventurous any more if undertaken safely?

On another, unrelated note, it was very weird to see Bella Swan--I MEAN, KRISTEN STEWART--living in a hippie trailer park (Slab City). Also? Nice singing voice there, Kristen.

Redeeming "He's Just Not That into You" (or at least trying to).

The only thing that redeemed He's Just Not That into You in my eyes was the scene in which Justin Long's character first counsels Ginnifer Goodwin's, telling her, basically, what her "problem" is: she likes drama. She denies it sputteringly and with some vehemence. And then he says something along the lines of: But you like to leave things to the last minute, don't you? You feed off of that drama. (Something to that effect, I couldn't find the exact quote even on the memorable quotes for the movie on imdb.com.)

That was the one moment in the film where I hung my head in shameful recognition. As drama-free as I try to keep my life these days, on this account I am guilty as charged.

Well, now I know.

Here's a goal, then, which could easily tack onto my single 2009 New Year's Resolution of not being so hard on myself all the time: Instead of being an Artiste, with that persona of suffering, bearing the weight and the drama of periods of intense artistry followed by periods of extreme creative drought, I am going to endeavor to be a productive worker ... at/of art.

Word to your mother, yo.

Sharing is caring.

When texting Wife for synonyms for those lines on a man's torso that lead to ... ahem ... netherlands inside the pants, I could only come up with "cum gutters." Yes, because we lived with Frank for two years, I don't even know a heterosexual term for those torso lines.

So. Focus, people, focus. I swear, this is for a good cause: writerly research. What the heck are those things called--in a more polite and less graphic way?

Wife came up with the following brilliant text: "Bodybuilders say: apollo's belt. Other names: devil's shoulders. In art history: lilac's furrow. Medical: external obliques & abdominus rectus."

What say the rest of you?

"The Land of Invention."

Also, go read this entire entry, "Can Do," about Benjamin Franklin and invention and creativity and inspiration ... and featuring some really bad-ass illustration, too.

(Thanks to my friend Suzie-Q--okay, wait, she'll hate that--that is, Suzanne for the tipperoo!)

Other quote of the day: Wife's entire blog entry yesterday.

Oh, trust me. Just go read it.

Quote of the day: Dawes on "no fear."

"My personal goal ... is to fake it like I mean it." --Adrienne @ Oh, the Joys ...

(In context, this makes specific sense ... but I like it as a general modus operandi as well.)

It's hot, part 2: corollary.

It's especially okay to wallow if gorging yourself on Eclipse and Breaking Dawn ... in under 48 hours. I know. SICK.

It's hot, part 2.

Wow, I was really whiny in July. ;)

Remind me the next time I get like that that no matter how hot it is in the morning, I should throw a cold slightly wet towel around my neck and go running. It makes the whole day seem brighter and more buoyant. Today, my cup was half-full again. Today, I ran 3 miles, wrote more in two hours than I've written all summer, ran an hour's worth of errands, ate breakfast and lunch, remembered to feed the dog, actually read the current issue of the New Yorker for the first time all summer, tidied the house, did a sinkload of dishes, contacted some friends I've been missing, and balanced my checkbook. I'm like the freakin' tasmanian devil.

Lesson learned: It's okay to wallow, for a little bit, as long as I pick myself back up. Also? I should go running at the very start of the day, preferably before it gets hot: it's more effective than coffee in putting the pep back in my step.

It's hot, part 1.

What I wrote on the morning of July 31, 2009:

I hate July in New York. I hate August, too. Sometimes I even hate May, June, and September. I'm not very keen on December through March, either. I like April, October, and November--three months of the twelve, a sorry quarter of the year and not even in a single chunk, and yet here I find myself living, again.

July in New York is hot, very hot, uncomfortably so. I go outside in a tank top and short shorts to walk the dog for barely 30 minutes and come home, no kidding, dripping in sweat. I splash water on my face and scurry back into the bedroom, currently the only one with A/C. And there I stay, barely leaving except to get more food or water until Dave surprises Nahe and I by opening the bedroom door, proving once again that it's 4:30-5ish pm.

And then I know another day has escaped me as I sit here sweltering in a New York summer, not doing any of the things that make it legendary: hanging out in a bikini at some ultraexclusive hotel lounge with a pool; partying into the wee hours on a friend's rooftop drinking Grey Goose and wearing sequins; dancing my heart out at the pier so at least the sweat has been earned and staying hydrated by the means of many beers; having picnics at dusk with contraband wine while watching an old movie broadcast on a huge outdoor screen, all of us picnicers packed in so close our blankets overlap.

I do absolutely none of these things. I walk the Nahe beast when I have to, I eat when I remember to, and I wallow. Wallow in the heat, wallow in my distaste for leaving even this room nevermind the house, wallow in my disability as of late to write, wallow in the scaryness of a critical thesis being due in five short months, wallow in my faltering sense of purpose in my life, wallow in my unhappiness again for where I've landed, wallow in my itchy feet, my desire to pack up again and move, my dream of just hurrying up and getting on with it all: the graduating, the moving away, the writing career, and the having of babies in multiple.

July in New York reduces me mainly to this: a protracted painful wallowing. No doubt I wallow in and about things I've even forgotten to list here.

For now all I can do is take a great many showers, drink bottle after bottle of cold water, and try harder. Try to remember what is good about being here and do those things. Try to zero in on my current purpose in life and do those things. Try, on occasion, to leave the house and be social without excessively melting or throwing a hissyfit.

Just try. That's all and that's enough.