whew

What a weekend. Left me so pulverized (in a good way!) that I was unable to do anything yesterday except sleep and lie around. To be clear, that would be 17 hours of the former and 6 of the latter between 6 a.m. Sunday (when I got to sleep) and 6 this morning (when I got up to go to work).

There was much costumed goofiness, most of which I’m pretty sure I remember accurately. The pictures will tell, though, once I get around to taking them in for processing.

And now it’s back to (a whole mountain of) work for me.

many many thanks

First off, thanks to Phineas (I will never again bitch about typing that lengthy URL) (OK, I probably will, but not for a while) for the fantastically, horrifically, ridiculously pimptastic redesign. This is a bit of fun in my world that was very very much required.

Secondly, I have this evening realized yet again what a joyous thing it is to be loved by the extraordinary folk I am privileged to call my family and my friends. To all of you, a deep and heartfelt thanks. Life has felt absurdly difficult of late, and not just for me – still, I couldn’t survive a day of it without you.

a farewell

So my friend Brady just came over for dinner and told me that he’s leaving on Sunday. My spare set of keys is back in my hands, lying on my coffee table on a new/old tacky/cool keychain. I gave him one of my cameras and a Thai dinner. He gave me a wine rack, a bottle of wonderful Zin and his most excellent company. He might come back. He might not. Him leaving has made me realize, among other things, what a piss-poor job I’ve done keeping in touch with my friends – those who live here and those who don’t. Made me think about the people I love and what they truly mean to me. So, Brady, this one’s for you. I’ll miss you.

you shall above all things be glad and young

For if you’re young,whatever life you wear

it will become you;and if you are glad

whatever’s living will yourself become.

Girlboys may nothing more than boygirls need:

i can entirely her only love

whose any mystery makes every man’s

flesh put space on;and his mind take off time

that you should ever think,may god forbid

and (in his mercy) your true lover spare:

for that way knowledge lies,the foetal grave

called progress,and negation’s dead undoom.

I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing

than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance

[e.e. cummings]

Sing, my friend. Sing.

year’s end, part 1

Tonight it is very cold outside and there is a bitter wind. This morning it was warm. This afternoon there was a hailstorm that, from my office window, looked like snow. Tonight, I am listening to Sade and thinking this:

a wind has blown the rain away and blown

the sky away and all the leaves away,

and the trees stand. I think i too have known

autumn too long

(and what have you to say,

wind wind wind–did you love somebody

and have you the petal of somewhere in your heart

pinched from the dumb summer?

O crazy daddy

of death dance cruelly for us and start

the last leaf whirling in the final brain

of air!) Let us as we have seen see

doom’s integration …………..a wind has blown the rain

away and the leaves and the sky and the

trees stand:

the trees stand. The trees,

suddenly wait against the moon’s face.

[e.e. cummings]

grr

This makes me very angry:

“Rumsfeld is saying the Taliban’s (claim of civilian deaths) is ‘ridiculous, ‘ but I see with my own eyes (on Al Jazeera) a poor man crying in his village. I see where more than 140 people have been killed,” Shaker said.

Read the article here. Also, thanks to Phineas, I have finally found an articulation of that nameless lumpy thing that’s been waking me in the middle of the night, by my new favourite columnist.

Despite all of this ickiness, it is a good day. I have slept, I have rested. I no longer feel sickly and weak and have sad sad German poetry in my head. And no, Andreas, the rabbit sex didn’t help. So there.