so delicate these things
Feb. 7th, 2009 03:30 pmI've just got back from the library, and it is the first time in months that I have walked, not run, there and back, braced and bundled against fierce cold. Yes: we're having a warm spot! I am giddy with it! I have worn skirts two days in the row, almost the first skirts I've worn in two months! My dresses have been hanging forlornly in the closet feeling lonely and abandoned, and I find that months of trousers leave me feeling not entirely like myself (and the combined efforts of work and winter have forced upon me a self not only perpetually trouser-clad, but in flat shoes).
The air doesn't quite smell like spring -- it's mostly only the warm-ness of it, and the smell of mud, because spring has a sharp green growing-things edge to it, and of course it is February, a dead month if there ever was one. But the scent is heady enough that I was taking great hungry gulps of it, walking through mud and slush to the library in my favourite high-heeled boots. If only it would last!
Today is a nice respite, or I hope it is, because lately I have been a mess, in every way I don't like, and I am tired of being kept up late with existensial angst, and brooding over failures both real and imagined, and having to bully myself out of bed in the morning, and all sorts of other things which do not belong in this entry.
Hmm. Have just woken up from mostly intentional short nap after forgetting to post this. Interesting experience: listening to NPR while drifting in and out of wakefulness. This is not really a new experience, because for the last year and a half I have been switching on the radio on waking in the morning, whether or not I am actually awake. However, this morning waking and dreaming understandings created a strange, fey conconction of story. A man was being interviewed -- was he actually Asian, or was that my dream? No, I think he was, though his voice wasn't, and his name wasn't; I'm fairly certain the anecdote about his great-great grandfather (or close to) choosing an English name upon reaching America was real. Beyond that, I don't know which of the things I remember actually has any counterpart in reality: he lived in a strange house-restaurant on the shore of a beach, there was something about not wanting anyone to recognise anything as coming from the Old Country (Japan? was this the 1940s?), and having to leave one's home very quickly, with a minute's warning in which to gather your things, which seemed to be more of a bizarre custom than anything else. There was some odd imagery of the house-restaurant on the beach, curiously open -- doors, windows, outlay -- full of shells and odd things, standing there abandoned on the shore. Eventually I swam upwards out of the sleep-waves, and whoever-was-the-interviewer was telling everyone that they had just interviewed Someone Or Other, novelist. How very curious.
The air doesn't quite smell like spring -- it's mostly only the warm-ness of it, and the smell of mud, because spring has a sharp green growing-things edge to it, and of course it is February, a dead month if there ever was one. But the scent is heady enough that I was taking great hungry gulps of it, walking through mud and slush to the library in my favourite high-heeled boots. If only it would last!
Today is a nice respite, or I hope it is, because lately I have been a mess, in every way I don't like, and I am tired of being kept up late with existensial angst, and brooding over failures both real and imagined, and having to bully myself out of bed in the morning, and all sorts of other things which do not belong in this entry.
Hmm. Have just woken up from mostly intentional short nap after forgetting to post this. Interesting experience: listening to NPR while drifting in and out of wakefulness. This is not really a new experience, because for the last year and a half I have been switching on the radio on waking in the morning, whether or not I am actually awake. However, this morning waking and dreaming understandings created a strange, fey conconction of story. A man was being interviewed -- was he actually Asian, or was that my dream? No, I think he was, though his voice wasn't, and his name wasn't; I'm fairly certain the anecdote about his great-great grandfather (or close to) choosing an English name upon reaching America was real. Beyond that, I don't know which of the things I remember actually has any counterpart in reality: he lived in a strange house-restaurant on the shore of a beach, there was something about not wanting anyone to recognise anything as coming from the Old Country (Japan? was this the 1940s?), and having to leave one's home very quickly, with a minute's warning in which to gather your things, which seemed to be more of a bizarre custom than anything else. There was some odd imagery of the house-restaurant on the beach, curiously open -- doors, windows, outlay -- full of shells and odd things, standing there abandoned on the shore. Eventually I swam upwards out of the sleep-waves, and whoever-was-the-interviewer was telling everyone that they had just interviewed Someone Or Other, novelist. How very curious.