my heart is a glorious machine;

I don't know where the past month has gone. I don't really know where I've been. I'm a little more awake just now than I have been lately, I think, but not much, and I don't know if it's going to last very long, if spring is going to finally strike a spark in me.

I used to have so many emotions. I don't know why I don't have them anymore; I've nearly forgotten what it's like to go up as high and giddy as I used to. Oh, I felt silly lots of times, raised to dizzying heights over the littlest things, but I don't get dizzy at all anymore, and I miss it incredibly. I had a twinge of the old trembling excitement I used to get -- it was strange, because I wasn't excited about anything; it felt like when you catch a scent you haven't smelled in years and suddenly you're five again or in the Salem library or a side-street of New Bedford and it's all in vivid Technicolour. It was the essence of excitement. And it's been, oh, longer than I can even reach back for, since I felt like that. I used to hate having to wait for things; the anticipation was agony, but rather splendid in its own way. I wish I couldn't wait for things. I feel like I'm shutting down: one by one, the things that have always meant me are slipping away.


On the good news front, Dad won a pair of tickets to Merlefest, which is one of the biggest folk music festivals in the country: everyone is there (at some point, at least). Most importantly, this year SOLAS IS THERE. WITH KARAN CASEY AND JOHN DOYLE. Also Abigail Washburn and the Sparrow Quartet, which I would be more excited about if we weren't going to see them at Grey Fox later this summer, but as they are one of the best live acts I have ever seen in my life, I'm hardly complaining about seeing them twice. And Ollabelle, and Tim O'Brien (if he nabs Karan Casey to do "Demon Lover" and/or "What Does the Deep Sea Say" with him I will die of squee, though this is fairly unlikely), and Claire Lynch, and Alison Brown, and Jerry Douglas, and a host of people with whom I am not very familiar, but the fun of music festivals is discovering new people (I was utterly unfamiliar with Abigail Washburn and Crooked Still until last year's Grey Fox). I love every part of the sum of music festivals (with the possible exception of Obnoxious Drunks, and portable toilets) -- the crowds, the energy, the musician-swapping (everybody seems to be friends with everybody else, and they grab people from this band and that band and jam, or the workshops throw a lot of people together who may not know each other at all, and by the end it tends to get magical), the sometimes-intimacy, the organic nature of music played outdoors, dancing barefoot on the grass, meeting people, the odd little booths and the greasy food and the sheer joy of people loving music. ALSO DID I MENTION THAT THERE WILL BE SOLAS? Solas has been my favourite band since I was eleven, and while I have seen them live five or six times when we lived in Massachusetts (folk music territory, really), I also have not seen them in over three years, and certainly never with Karan Casey (their original lead singer) and John Doyle (their original guitarist -- their line-up has changed dramatically over the past ten years).

Also also said festival is in North Carolina, where it will be very warm. Furthermore it is in nine days (er, yes, this was all very sudden, mainly on account of us not planning to go at all because it is expensive, and then Dad winning tickets calling into our local NPR station). We shall have to rush back on Sunday evening because Dad is being ordained in Ohio and kind of needs to be there. Mum and the siblings are going with him; I am staying home all alone for three days, an event to which I am rather looking forward. I'd like to see Dad ordained, but he doesn't mind very much and offered to let me stay home. Me locked up in a hotel room with siblings for long periods of time will not result in anything good where anyone is concerned. And I've never stayed home completely alone before, not for longer than a few hours, so I am looking forward to quiet, and perhaps time to write if the muse behaves, and watching films without anybody getting in the way (I shall have to see if I can rent or borrow some not-appropriate-for-the-siblings ones; I've had a hankering to watch Pan's Labyrinth again recently, for one).

On the iPod front, I was utterly unable to resuscitate him and sent in a service request to Apple. The box for return came today, and I've packed him up very carefully, but gorram it! -- the box can only be sent to Apple via DHL. The closest DHL drop-off centre is in Clearfield, which is some ways away. Which means I will probably be iPod-less on the eight-hour drive to Merlefest, as it will likely be several days before we can get out to Clearfield, and supposedly it takes about ten days to engrave a new iPod and send it off (why, I don't know). I miss him terribly, especially when doing dishes or waiting for the computer to stop overheating or having difficulty sleeping. (Also, I AM ANGELLESS ARGH. AND HAVING TO WATCH DOCTOR WHO ON THE COMPUTER AGAIN WHERE I CANNOT TALK TO THE SCREEN OR MAKE SQUEAKY NOISES AS OFTEN.)

Well then. I've got my first evaluation in about -- well, I'm leaving for it in a minute. Pray for me, yeah?

I had two intelligent posts compsed in my head (I won't tell you what they are about lest I jinx them and never actually write them up, which is what always seems to happen when I say that I am going to post something) but my mind is taking its habitual leave of absence (really, haven't been feeling very right in the head for a while), so there is nothing especially scintillating forthcoming. Wallace & Gromit is a nice diversion, though; the siblings and I had a marathon of all three short films and Curse of the Were-Rabbit tonight. With popcorn. 

(And, um. Are you lot sure you haven't got any really angry songs about what ghastly trouble the ocean is? No-one? *droop* Because, yeah. I'm trying to sort out the tracks I've got for the Mariner's Wife mix, and it's not--it's got holes, you know. I'm sort of shocked that I've managed to get nine tracks at all, though. lady_moriel's suggestion of Emiliana Torrini's 'Sea People' was a good one, except it's a really difficult song to fit in naturally. It feels as though it ought to begin or end something, but it can't, thematically. Agh. Still looking for my drowning song, too. Charlotte Martin's 'The Flood' is v. lovely, but it's--not quite angry enough; it makes a nice sad reflective end to the whole thing, but not a climax. ...Egad, I'm going on and on about my odd little projects again and not doing anything productive. Aaagh. *goes to bed*) 

Also, PBS, will you please stop playing weird stuff like Elvis concerts instead of Monty Python? *woe* I miss it terribly. I mean, really. Elvis concerts. It's St. Patrick's Day; can't you at least get, I don't know, that Van Morrison concert from last December or something? Or, I don't know, LOREENA MCKENNITT? If WGBH were here...! The large important cities have got it so much better in public television. *is totally not digging out a Mary Black album for an absurdly late Irish music mix, NEVERRR*

Yeah, I know. Go to bed.

i. With regards to the urgent question posed by the last post: I'm currently torn between litalicious's suggestion of Nox and lady_moriel's Grey(e) (I'm dithering over the extra e; my addition). Aaand I found this really spiffing name site which someone ought to remind me to link to later, because I'm feeling a bit poorly and need to go to bed anyway.

Um. Mostly I have been rather horrid lately, which explains the general not-posting, but today I have succeeded in watching Monty Python and Doctor Who, so...that equals lots of yay. British television is a splendid momentary cure-all for a bad day (or a bad few weeks, really; I tend to try not to go emotastic on you lot, but my Xanga is absolutely dismal).

Still haven't written anything except a line here and there heavily scratched out. Will resist urge to wax morose on this, or on any other segment of life in which I am feeling rather as though I am failing spectacularly.

Drat it. This was not supposed to be an emo post. I could have a go at cancelling that out with a description of the somewhat entertaining dream I had last night, which involved David Tennant being my best friend (???) and having long hair. Actually, the long-hair bit was part of the bit where the Doctor was marrying Rose (?!?! yeah, I have no idea what that was about, and there isn't any subconscious shippy bit of my brain to draw it from), except somebody stabbed him, and...then it gets really foggy and sort of melds into the other dream, which was really scary and involved a lot of bloodshed and an interesting lack of complete barminess. (There was this king, see? And he was a really unpleasant bloke, going round killing people, and there was this woman, who I really didn't like, even when I was playing her part of the dream, and her husband was a guard or something, and the king was decimating the whole palace, and it was rather gruesome, and I was terrified, and...I seem to remember something about being outside, and a cake. Never mind what I said earlier about 'lack of barminess'. It was a lot scarier than it sounds. Really.)

Now that I have thoroughly succeeded in distressing and/or perplexing you...

Won't someone come and spend Thanksgiving with me? It's so awfully lonely...

you come over unannounced
the silence broken by your voice in the dark
I need you here tonight
just like the ocean needs the waves

I am not feeling overtly brilliant tonight. My mind feels sort of--squishy. And before I go into anything, let me reassure you that I am absolutely all right, undoubtedly; so if you panic, I will hit you with heavy books. (Er. Telepathically. Yes.)

Er. This is my day, mad as it's been, and I'm sure I've left plenty of important bits out, and I miss my computer like mad and want iTunes back, and I have just realised that just now, as it is a bit past midnight, it is the first of October, my very favourite month, and my camera still isn't fixed, and...I really do not need to dredge up any more angst, hang it all.

I didn't update for days because I had nothing to say, except I do have things to say, loads of them, and yet I can never seem to untangle them into words clear enough to type. And I don't know, exactly, if what I want to say is lovely or dreary, or rain-grey tired, which seems to be what my life is, once again, descending into. I feel tired, and though I have a compulsion to write in my pretty new hardback notebook every night, there doesn't seem to be much life to it, and when I read it over in the morning I'm always dissatisfied. 

I miss being on holiday and having things and people and the city. Egad, I miss the city. Sometimes I feel so compressed in this little town that I feel as if I may go mad, and yet there are too many things that tie me to it: the Meholicks, the Peaceable Kingdom, my backyard, the shop where I take my guitar lessons, Dad's music friends (who I shadow admiringly). I suppose that wherever one goes, almost, one leaves a part of oneself behind, and while one may have one true home, one still feels spread about, with a bit of an anchor here, a longing for there. I miss Boston sometimes so much that it almost hurts, and it's not just the city-feeling, it's Boston (and the Boston area in general), even with the mad traffic and the madder politics; it's the flavour and the places: Louisa May Alcott's home, creaky floors and furniture preserved in frozen antiquity; New Bedford with its still-cobblestone streets; the jammed-together tumbledown houses, a hundred, two hundred years old, divided into apartments; the history, Paul Revere's tiny house gasping for breath amidst city traffic and skyscrapers; the subways with their grimy windows and graffitti and strange people, and the subway stations full of vendors and noise and advertisements and people. It's the culture: the sheer number of writers who were born in or who lived in Massachusetts for a significant time is staggering. The museums, the subway musicians, the free concerts, the way you walk into a shop and hear five different languages at once, or look across the cityscape and find a mosque, a Catholic church, and assorted temples--Jewish, Buddhist, and who knows what else.

You know? It wasn't the same in Virginia Beach, and it won't be the same in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles (although I would never move to California: no winter, and too much pop culture!). 

I don't know what any of this has to do with anything, actually. I'm feeling tired and nostalgic and tired, trying not to be depressed and failing. I watched television today, tried to read, ate a little too much, played the same song three times on my guitar. I'm so sick of this house, and yet the idea that we may have to leave it abruptly frightens and disconcerts me. And I hate, hate, hate this not-knowing, this not-planning, this too-familiar uncertainty: I don't know what I'm doing in a month, or two, or three; if we'll be getting back to our feet, or if Dad will still be looking for something. I'm counting on college as an escape: no matter what happens, I will get out in two, maybe three years. I hope it doesn't take that long, but I never know anything. It took five years to get out of New England. (And here I am, wanting so badly to go back. That's how I know there was something amazing about it: even after how awful most of my time there was, I still love it like mad.) 

I don't know what I'm saying, now.