i can see down this road.

i've been having a hard time with boundaries lately. literal boundaries. not really with setting them - people aren't actually walking around drawing lines in the sand that often, i suppose - but more with, i don't know, perceiving them correctly. putting them in their proper context. i am troubled by the concept, and by the inevitable breakdowns, a lot more than i should be.

two weeks ago, roaches and mice started appearing in our kitchen. seemingly out of nowhere. we've lived here for a year and a half, and never had a problem. and then bam - vermin. for someone who hunts down all the holes in a new place and stuffs them with steel wool the minute she moves in, this was a problem. i'll keep what has felt like a saga to my anxiety-ridden brain to this brief summation: we kept finding small spaces to plug up in the kitchen, they kept coming, then we found a big hole behind the fridge to plug up, then a mouse died somewhere in the fridge. so at the moment, we have a (knock wood) well-fortified apartment and a decomposing mouse somewhere in the kitchen apparatus.

this is not, of course, the end of the world. but it came on the heels of a lot of other odd boundary-related issues that kept cropping up for me. for months, anxieties about that inside/outside divide, and all the ways that it is and can be breached, had been pressing themselves into my consciousness. i worried about bug bites that took too long to go away; i lay awake at night scaring myself with house fire scenarios; i obsessed over whether the hallway smelled like gas; the tip of my tongue went numb. yes, numb. it was either a jalapeno injury or a psychosomatic thing. and honestly, i wouldn't be surprised at the latter. everything, it felt, was encroaching.

encroaching on what, right? the anxiety over the physical piercing of boundaries is, so my pysch major sister informs me, about control. i am not surprised by this, as this is certainly not the first time i've dealt with this particular problem, this irrational and impossible desire to control the uncontrollable. but this is the first time it has manifested itself with this consistent theme. my reactions have not been at all proportional to the situations at hand, and at the very least, i need to try to change that. because i can see down this road and i don't like where it leads. at all.

there's lots to be done. lots of slippery and distorted thinking to wrestle to the ground, expose, interrogate. lots of behaviors to put in check. lots of ghosts to get in line. because really, it's their doing - and while i've lived with them long enough to know that they're not going away, they are going to have to start listening to authority. because i've had enough of this acting up. i've had enough of feeling like i'm being forced to run along a cliff edge with my eyes closed. i've had enough of being held hostage by all the people i used to be.

and i need a decent night's sleep.

other people's lives.

do you ever have the feeling that other people’s lives are so much richer and interesting than your own? even with all rational evidence to the contrary - we are, after all, surrounded by the pedestrian at every moment - do you find yourself imagining that other people are experiencing things in a thoroughly more fulfilling way than you are?

i find myself thinking this way sometimes. it’s such a subtle thought process that i have to catch myself at it red-handed. like the other day, i was reading a novel, and one of the main characters was home alone in his apartment while his wife was away. he got up, wrapped up in a robe, and made a pot of coffee and toast with butter and jam. totally boring, right? and yet, i felt like somehow he was getting more out of coffee and toast than i ever would, or ever do. the mere act of putting together breakfast somehow seemed enviable to me - like it was imbued with some type of pleasure that i’ve never been able to access. this is not restricted to fictional characters either. sometimes i’ll read a blogger’s account of an evening out or see a facebook friend’s photo album, and i’ll feel - loosely and faintly and with this vague, existential incomprehension - that i am missing some critical faculty, some way of living right.

it’s a strange thing, this impulse to overly romanticize other people’s lives and day-to-day experiences. i mean, on a rational level i am aware that the way they experience making a pot of coffee is probably, by and large, the same way that i experience it. so why do i give them more credit? why do i think they have access to some secret, some effortless method for infusing the mundane with meaning that i don’t?

when i see this in other people and not myself, what am i really looking at - what am i looking for? i do wonder about this.

it's settled, then.

i've found the best thing ever, courtesy of yvonne.



i just thought you might like to know.

things i am doing. right now.

i'm watching the baseball game.

i'm drinking chai tea.

i'm refreshing toast's haloscan comments.

i'm talking to chemist about the mitten-shaped state.

i'm feeling remarkably cool air seeping in through the window unit by the couch.

i'm trying to stretch my shins, because they hurt.

i'm also noticing that my head hurts a bit too.

i'm pondering aspirin.

i'm hating this futon cover.

i'm hating the fact that i'm going on 30 and i still technically own a futon.

i'm hearing the downstairs neighbor's tv along with my own.

i'm wishing these fricking bug bites would heal.

i'm cursing, silently, because jason is sleeping.

i'm reminding myself to take out the trash and dust tomorrow.

i'm almost, i think, through with the day.

a funny thing.

this might be kind of a juvenile thing to admit, but.

remember when the west wing came out? remember how great it was? it was a great show. and i would watch, religiously, as i wended my way through college and graduate school. cross-legged on the twin bed in my tiny dorm room in mackimmie hall, stretched out on the couch in the apartment i shared with my sister senior year, folded up into the papasan chair squeezed into my comm ave apartment. i watched, week in and week out, and i thought - maybe. maybe i could do that.

not be president, of course. but that - that life seemed like something i might be able to fit into, or at least try on for size. a life of policy and law, of thick-carpeted hallways and backrooms, of suits and cabs and wide avenues and the capitol coming into view. it was a feeling that i filed aware somewhere in my brain - put away in that recessed space reserved for everything that seems, somehow, too daunting. i thought it, but i never really considered it. it was too - too juvenile, really, and was best left in the realm of vague sensation.

but then, a funny thing - i kind of went ahead and did it anyway.

i didn't come here to DC to try to live out some aaron sorkin fantasy - i actually didn't even come here to get into politics or law. hell, i didn't even come here with a job. but looking back, i can see how the move here made sense - how it gave me a chance to slide sidelong into a place that had, to be honest, captured a bit of my imagination. i came here to do this. and while i'm no amy gardner and never will be, i go to lunch with the women who are. i've heard my heels echo as i walked down the marble-floored halls of the capitol building. my boss has the ear of the obama campaign. our reports are referenced in committee hearings. we are doing this work, and i'm part of it.

a while back, the speaker of the house threw a luncheon in our honor at her offices. i stood out on her massive private balcony overlooking the national mall - i pressed my palms into the cool stone of the massive railing and looked around. the sky, blindingly blue in the early spring, museums stacked up to the left and pennsylvania avenue reaching off to the right. i realized, at that moment, that i really had done it. wherever i went from there, whatever city i moved to or job i took or house i settled into - i had done DC.

and it felt really good. no - it feels really good. it feels good to have achieved a goal that you thought was too lofty, too hazy, too ridiculous to even set. a life like the west wing. really, who gets anything like that?

turns out, i do.

a thought.

"you say i choose sadness,
that it never once has chosen me.
maybe you're right."

in which i actually utilize microsoft paint to make a point.

something tells me this wouldn't be a headline on yahoo this evening if tim pawlenty had been mccain's vp pick.



that's some hard-hitting political reporting within the first 12 hours of her candidacy, wall street journal. kudos.

top three.

things i am looking forward to tonight:

1) wine
2) pesto pasta
3) mad men

food, drink, and good tv. sometimes, i am truly easy to please.

(and ok, any bets on when birdie's really going to crack up? we've had a shooting gallery on the front lawn, the return of the hand afflictions, and last week, a shoving match in the bedroom. it is imminent, non?)

true or false?

kate got a little overexcited while watching michael phelps win his eighth gold medal last night, resulting in a broken light sconce and the need of her sister's expert medical assistance to dress a small flesh wound.

yup.

that one is true.

summer.

it's so...hot.

everywhere, it's hot. it's either you're in the midst of the hot or you're near an a/c, in a respite from the hot. the hot dictates everything. august is here, and everyone who is smart in this city is somewhere else. the train cars are half full. dupont circle is deserted.

you walk up the escalators and feel the grime under your finger tips, touching the rubber handrail only intermittently, for balance. you sit at happy hour in the breezeway and feel your legs sticking to the leather stool, and you fan yourself with the bar bill. you kick the sheets off at night, trying to conserve energy (and money), the old air conditioner working hard even at half blast. you embrace it, at the beach, with the sun at high noon, and the sting of sunscreen in the corner of your closed eyes, with the screeches of children and tinny salsa music on someone's radio.

it's just hot. there is nothing to do but ride it out. sweat, wince, cry, purify. wait. because it will all be over soon.

right? right.

who's in your five?

the tagging continues unabated!

so, the "celebrity free pass" list. got one? you know you do. here's my five:

george clooney

so he's like 85 years old. who fucking cares. look at the man.

tom brady

my tommy is not the brightest bulb on the circuit, i know. but really? intellectual prowess is not what this exercise is about.

matt damon

the thinking woman's brad pitt. who said that...i think it was....um.......hmmm? i'm sorry what were we talking about again?

freddy rodriguez

gio from ugly betty. i had a serious "is it hot in here??" moment after the end of the penultimate episode last season.

matt iseman

ok this is out of left field, i know. but my love for clean house's "go-to guy" is well-documented. at least in my apartment. where jason is pretty sick of hearing about it.

honorable mentions - disqualified from actual list for being fictional characters or residing in a previous decade:

dean cain, circa 1996

i don't care what you say. this man was HOT back then. and a superhero on the tv. yes please.

daniel craig as james bond in casino royale

it's not so much daniel craig, actually, as it is him playing this character in this movie. i nearly passed out in the theater.

they are always the same thing.

it was just past one in the afternoon, and i had conquered most of Maryland, a small slice of Delaware, the entirety of New Jersey, and the upper reaches of Manhattan. i merged onto the Taconic State Parkway and reset the trip odometer – i could cruise for 80 more miles before thinking about where to turn next.

the journey through Westchester, Dutchess, and Columbia counties, out of the city and into the midsection of New York state, has little in the way of landmark or distraction. nothing but shades of green in the height of summer – everything at full flush, a blinding monochrome of grass and weeds and leaves. i had never driven it before, but i knew it – it might sound strange, but even with no distinguishing characteristics for miles, i still could have told you where i was. i could have told you where I was headed.

i rolled up and over hills, around wide curving turns flickering in deep shade, past the exits signs for town names: Yorktown, Cold Spring, Peekskill, Fishkill.

Pawling.

***

we all have our origin stories. each of us, on our own little odyssey, each of us always racing forwards and tracing backwards simultaneously. there is no logic, no continuity in life without it, the origin story. they are at once vastly complex and stunningly simple – beginnings usually are that way. i suppose that’s because beginnings are rarely ever just a moment, but an unfolding series of moments and parts and contexts – a thing, constructed, and then set in motion.

***

my grandparents lived in Pawling when i was born until i was five or six – then they moved across the Massachusetts border to Great Barrington, where they lived for the next ten years until their deaths. Pawling and Great Barrington are, in a way, of the same place – the Berkshire mountains, the great stretch of hills and woods and valleys between New England and the mid-Atlantic. since i was so young, the two are largely entwined in my mind – both generative spaces, full of so many things that pierced my mind clearly, twenty years later, as i drove past the exit for Route 55.

this origin story has so many moving parts, so many slippery images – i kept seeing them out of the corner of my eye as i sped along, northward, towards the Massachusetts border. long gravel driveways, low stone walls, saint statues. stray cats. foxes in the night, shotguns. sheds. barns. carved wooden mirrors, carved wooden signs: Mostly View. snow-laden pine trees, acres of lawn and forest dulled to shimmering yellow by the setting sun. oriental rugs, basement doors, birdseed kept in big metal tins. cereal with sugar in white and blue plastic bowls. wading pools, motorized trainsets, sandboxes, back decks. bedrooms behind bathrooms, steep wooden stairs painted blue. tv carts, china cabinets, rolltop desks with metal keyholes. canvas gardening gloves, tire swings, tennis balls. creaking wooden doors, windows scraped by tree branches. mahogany. silver. ceramic. wood. alberta spruce. green, green grass.

***

sometimes, it seems to me, we look in the wrong direction for answers. the future, though it holds many things, usually does not reveal solutions. it just creates more questions. why is it, then, that we don’t turn around, that we don’t reach back into the past? why do we so rarely even consider it? perhaps it is too frightening to acknowledge just how much is contained there. perhaps we would rather be without knowledge than be overwhelmed by it.

***

and so i was moving in two directions as i passed under the sign that said “Great Barrington – 10 miles.” forwards and backwards, ahead and behind, towards both what has past and what is to come.

when i reached downtown – the intersection of route 23 and route 7 – for a moment i was disoriented. i should have known where i was, but i didn’t recognize the surroundings. i felt, to be honest, a moment of rising panic – if i’m in a place that i know, but i don’t know this place, well…where am i?

the light changed, and i turned left, where a large white house loomed on the hill. a carved wooden sign: Finnerty and Stevens funeral home. one building, but it was all i needed to gain my bearings – the town spread out in front of me in my mind’s eye, and the reality of my arrival – my re-entry – punched me in the chest as i drove down main street. the wake would start in an hour.

***

in the high heat of summer, the mid-afternoon light in the Berkshires has a sharp quality about it – it clarifies the edges, brings the foreground into relief. in a few hours time, the opposite effect will take hold, a golden hour blurring of the scene, but in these moments, everything is clear and present. i begin to remember it even before i stop seeing it.

which doesn’t matter, really, because here – for me – they are always the same thing.

more meme-time.

i knew this day would come. sooner or later, someone would tag me with the book meme. and i am nothing if not honorable when it comes to being meme-tagged! so, without further ado - my completion of the book meme.

(oh wait, one moment of ado - does anyone else wonder how exactly they came up with this list of "the top 100 books they've printed"? i mean, "top" in what sense? and who exactly are "they," anyway? the Big Read website does not make it easy to track down the origin of this meme's statistical claim - the whole thing seems like a front for some kind of shadowy literature syndicate to me. bent upon world domination via internet propagation. anyway. end of ado.)

"The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed."

1) Bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own blog.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Ronald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

food for thought.

i'm off to massachusetts for two days - the circumstances of the trip are essentially the opposite of ideal, but the faintest of silver linings means i'll get to spend time with some family that i haven't seen in a while. before i go, though, i wanted to share a Susan Bordo quote i stumbled across today in the comments section over at Shapely Prose. what can i say - when i read something that actually makes me say "yes!" out loud, in my office, in the middle of the day, i have the impulse to pass it along.

in my view, feminist cultural criticism is not a blueprint for the conduct of personal life (or political action, for that matter) and does not empower (or require) individuals to ‘rise above’ their culture or to become martyrs to feminist ideals. It does not tell us what to do [...] — whether to lose weight or not, wear makeup or not, lift weights or not. Its goal is edification and understanding, enhanced consciousness of the power, complexity, and systemic nature of culture, the interconnected webs of its functioning. It is up to the reader to decide how, when, and where (or whether) to put that understanding to further use, in the particular, complicated, and ever-changing context that is his or her life and no one else’s.

i love this idea. i love this kind of critical ethos. and it mirrors what a lot of other feminist bloggers that i admire have said, which is essentially that they refuse to condemn women for the choices they make in a patriarchal culture in order to survive and try to thrive. they'll condemn the culture that circumscribes those choices, the hierarchal system that bullies and intimidates and coerces and cajoles women into acting in its best interest and not their own - but women, when it comes down to it, are always just doing the best they can with what they've got. and that means different things to different people. but i'd like to think, regardless of those differences, we can all agree that MORE knowledge about the contexts in which we live, breath, think, and interact is always better than less.

anyway. that's all. now to go put that book on my DC library hold list...

you know what my problem is?

(part one of a 4,327,896 part series...)

i see ugliness everywhere. forget about seeing the beauty in all things - my inner eye often finds itself trained upon the down side, the dark side, the heartbreaking side of random arrangements, of totally inconsequential moments. and this is not surface-level ugliness - this is existential ugliness, the deep-down ugliness of life that you can only bear in short increments. that, so often, is what registers with me.

i see it on a perfectly normal day, at 4:15 in the afternoon, while standing in line at cvs to buy gum, altoids, and lollipops.

i see it where no one else is even really looking.

your comfort is my silence.

LaVena Johnson.

i just want to say her name, out loud, here on my little blog, and hopefully add one tiny little internet voice to the movement for justice on her behalf. if you haven't already heard her story, hear it now, and join the movement to compel the army to formally investigate her death. speak up for her, spread the word, carry a little piece of the torch.

the first step is refusing to be silent.

h/t to the tireless Waveflux - see his site and the petition page for ongoing updates.

a letter.

"Four years ago, when I was still at Ms. but had just learned about Bust, the editors of that zine asked me to interview Björk, the Smurfy Icelandic pop star, for their issue on motherhood... Trapped in my own earnestness about Third Wave feminism, I found myself asking a lot of goody-two-shoes questions about being a single mother. I wanted to know what had led Björk to divorce the father of her son after only a year of marriage. 'Why suffer?' she said, and picked her nose." --Jennifer Baumgardner

dear 2008:

you have been, by all accounts, a bitch of a year. i don't really believe in the cosmos (not in the fatalistic, sun sign-moon sign alignment sort of way), but if i did, it would seem that they asked you to wreak some havoc pretty much anywhere that you could. big ways, little ways, in-between ways - any kind of havoc was preferable to none. in just under six months you've brought me and mine, in no particular order: weddings, tumors, power outages, deaths, eye afflictions, heat waves, elopements, arguments, retirements, broken refrigerators, falling outs, denied medical treatments, tornadoes, the flu from hell, hospices, turbulence, ended friendships, surgeries, and one disintegrating pair of favorite jeans. just to name a few.

and honestly? it's been great. i mean, it's been god awful, a lot of it, but it's also been great. it feels like a year of forging, in a way - or maybe, more aptly, a year of being forged. of being both the sledgehammer and the red-hot metal underneath. a year of total upheaval, of these shifting tectonic plates that still have not quite decided where to settle. and i am learning so much.

after one particular decision i made recently - one that had to do with cutting off communication with someone that had once been very important to me - my sister made a very good point. she said, essentially, that we accept too much unnecessary negativity in our lives. if someone or something is bringing nothing positive to our table, why tolerate it? why not just cut it out, toss it aside, and move on?

why suffer, indeed?

i've been thinking a lot about this, this idea of excising undue suffering from life when you can. of embracing the positive, even if you're not the most positive person - because lord knows i'm not. but i think there's a way, even for the most committed of cynics, to refuse to engage with things that are not improving your life or helping you grow in some way. because, as far as life goes, there's good negativity and bad negativity. for instance, my work can be really depressing sometimes - the dogged societal persistence of inequality for nearly half the world's population will have that effect. but the reality of that negativity - as much as it sometimes makes me want to curl up in the fetal position and stay that way - ultimately fuels me, motivates me to take some action. whereas so many other kinds of negativity - pettiness, manipulation, fear, self-doubt - just wither you on the vine. they make you smaller, less engaged, less alive. and here's the thing - you don't need them. they are infinitely and continually disposable.

so, 2008, i'm rolling with your punches. i'm using everything that i experience as a filter, a lesson, a discovery, a new context. i refuse to be pulled under. i am more thankful, i am more mindful - i am easier on myself, much more gentle with myself. i admire shoes more. i worry about my hips less. i send facebook gifts more. i online stalk ex-friends less. i eat fruit more. i hurry through dinner less. i read more. i watch tv news less. i sleep more. i dwell less.

honestly, i have no idea what else is in store for us before new year's eve finally rolls around. maybe it will be harmony, maybe it will be catastrophe. who knows. but last week, i was home in massachusetts looking through some pictures, and i found one of my dad standing in the place where, thirty years earlier, my parent's wedding reception had been held - a big, warm, wood and stone-filled building which i'm certain has seen many a good party. on a wooden beam above his head, a carved inscription read: "enjoy yourself - it is later than you think."

and so i will.

push and pull.

isn't it always a balancing act, living in the neighborhood? the good, the bad, and sometimes the ugly. always shifting slightly, so you never quite know - on the day you leave the place - what your ultimate verdict about it will be. big things, and little ones, happen every day, and your mood has to keep recalibrating. like, for instance, this weekend.

the good: walking down the street that bisects the park just outside our apartment, jason and i notice something. the parking signs, which had just been changed out a few months ago to reflect the new "pay to park" nature of this tiny through block, had changed again. gone were the fury-inducing signs instructing people to locate the few new-fangled, credit-card-accepting parking meters along the block and pony up for the privilege of parking there - a by-product of the new nationals stadium nearby, and a circumstance that seriously cut into our ability to park within a block of our apartment. in their place were new signs, ones with a blessed green background and white lettering lower third that reads, "zone six permits excepted." i am not kidding you when i say i did a dance of joy on the sidewalk - heel kicking and elbow swinging included. us, one, DDOT, zero! take that, bitches, your stupid idea failed and we can park here again!

the bad: as we returned from running our errands that afternoon, we got the last spot right on our block. walking over the curb, i noticed that the fire hydrant 500 feet from our apartment now bore that ominous plastic ring around its metal snount: "maintenance required." dammit. i would rather not die in a house fire, DCFD, so please do get on that.

the ugly: we are still playing the game called "hmmmm, how much will our rent go up after the landlord signs on the dotted line to sell our building?" this will happen, we assume, any day now, since the 45 day period all the tenants had to band together and buy the building instead (ha. hahahaha.) is just about over, if not over already. my wallet feels lighter already.

thought for the day.

sometimes, i feel like a jumble of loose ends. and none of them seem to have a beginning.

which makes it hard, you know, to tie things together.

a wee retrospective.

things that i have discovered (or re-discovered) during the month of may:

• the midwest is flat. no, like, really flat. flatter than a native new englander can instinctively comprehend.
• falling down drunk in a hotel hallway can be comedic gold. especially if you are drunk on magic wine that does not give you a hangover in the morning.
• i have an enormous capacity to misread a situation.
• big plastic bangle bracelets.
• my man looks really good in a tux.
• horse tracks have limited culinary options, and a distinct inability to accurately assess supply and demand needs for soft pretzel consumption.
• if i get my hands on a little bit of resentment, i often have a really hard time letting it go.
• what a tornado siren sounds like.
• crispy leeks and lemon-butter sauce over linguini.
• seeing someone walking barefoot on the vegas strip at 11:00 pm will kinda make me want to hurl.
• 100 calorie packs (while they are still, generally, the devil) make remarkable convenient airplane snacks.
• the little black dress still fits.
  
• free breakfast is good. hot free breakfast is even better.
• when i am off of anti-depressants, certain things can make me incredibly sad for no good reason. on the other hand, certain things can make me incredibly happy for no good reason. it is, in essence, a trade-off.
  
• the drivers of the BWI airport parking shuttles can be assholes. especially at 1:00 am.
• it is nearly impossible to find a $5, 3-2 blackjack table on the vegas strip after dark. or during the day, come to think of it.
• american gladiators.
• travel-induced exhaustion.