Got to watch K. and N. tie the knot last night. It was simple and tasteful and elegant and a beautiful location. I drove a van full of people, two of whom consecrated their newfound love in the backseat on the drive home. I guess some people were able to “let the love in” after all, as E. suggested articulately, although he was asleep in shotgun while the others were making out.

What a nice, odd day. I babysat for seven hours before the mom took me out on the front porch and tells me her husband just announced he’s gay, and therefore, they won’t be living together much longer. This is life; things like this happen everyday, to everyone we know. It always amazes me, though, when it happens in my presence, because it makes me feel as if some oddly-compositioned stars collided, exploded, and offset the balance of the earth for one fuzzy moment — but not fuzzy, actually a moment of intense clarity. And I’m standing there in this intensely clear yet dramatic yet completely normal moment, and I’m asking the woman: “Are you ok?”

“No,” she says. “Not yet. But I will be.”

Life continues to fascinate me. Everyday, I’m inspired to pray for all of us. I don’t do it that often, but I think I should. Maybe it would help. Meanwhile, I’m grateful to all my old pals for being fun and forgiving, and for changing and not changing all at once. And I’m grateful for new compadres who funk out on the dancefloor and share their homemade apple pancakes, good-natured temperment & inspiring thoughts, even though they continue to mercilessly slaughter me in Scrabble on a weekly basis. If I were a more sentimental person, I would refrain from swallowing my sentimental words of admiration or affection. I would shout them loudly from my window even now, to float past the paper factory, over the railroad tracks and all the way down to Kirkland. So it’s a good thing I’m not sentimental, because then I’d really feel like a girl.

Finally succeeded in forcing E. to see “After Life” with me. Thanks to talented Kate for the film recommendation. It was uncomplicated and beautiful in that Japanese-art-film way, which was just what I needed to mellow out from middle-aged coworkers being passive aggressive, and 6-year-olds yelling in my face.

Go rent it, friends. It’s different and neat to digest, like coconut & cayenne in pancakes.

Today I almost didn’t go into work. My mother dropped me at Alewife to retrieve my bike, then she headed back to Philly, and I started riding in the direction of my office. But right behind Alewife there’s this little path — not the bike path, which is under construction — this one was quite narrow and was pressed on either side by tall grass and cool trees under the overpass. You could hear cars and feel the city, but you couldn’t see anything besides grass and trees and a clear sky. I slowed down. Contemplated getting off my bike, eating my bagel, finishing my book. Contemplated getting to work when I felt like it — or not at all. Then I realized how late I already was and gave up the idea. Oh, I need a vacation, or a new journey. S. has invited me to move to Spain with her, but it’s not the year for that yet.

A few days ago, E. and I went on what I hope is the first of many photo excursions. We walked for hours, but never really made it out of Cambridge. It was a nice day and a nicer night and I think we got some good shots. I want to take a month off and go visit pals in California, Hawaii, Lima and Berlin, in that order, then return to Boston for books, bikes, baked alaska with passionfruit caramel and coconut ice cream, and more days like these.

Instead it’s DC and Baltimore next month for work and to visit a brilliant compañera. Woo! I love me my astrophysicists.

Another beautiful day in Beantown. S. and I bought interesting vegetables at the farmer’s market — pale yellow peppers, purple basil, sweet corn — so I could return to the office and make a large salad. Also, my mother’s in town. It’s the first time she’s ever properly visited me since moving back to Philly. She brought with her my duffle bag of winter jackets, and will be leaving with a new keyboard and stacks of free paper from the envelope factory for her elementary students to write on. School begins in a few short weeks. Makes me realize just how short summer is, and how glad I am not to be a student right now.

Speaking of doing nothing productive, Ry and I saw Batman Begins yesterday. It was much different from Thursday night’s experience watching Broken Flowers, but equally gratifying in that satiates-lingering-crush-on-Christian-Bale type way…and Liam Neeson, although I’m more ashamed to admit that I have a movie star crush on him. The script was abhorrent, but all part of the fun. I just wish Bale had stayed in the mountains of Tibet instead of returning to Gotham and turning into Batman. And what’s up with Katie Holme’s crooked smile?

Yikes, this is really getting eighth grade.
New topic:

Favorite search terms through which people have found links to my blog:
Americans are better than the British
teens with dentures
dreaming of insect biting
lyrics to cmon baby by wakefield

old ghosts return.
it’s summer and i want a place of my own,
plus stir-fried mangos over linguini.

everyone’s getting married.
it makes me sigh strong grey breaths.
elam says “let the love in” but tonight
my head aches and a friend breaks

up with his long-time beau, but slowly, and so
we catch a movie about sorrow and longing and
discuss it afterwards with middle aged women
whose names we don’t know and never will.

it’s summer and i want a place of my own.
i want avocados on hamburgers,
i want to raise a child, someday.

“i’m going to hire a private investigator,”
my friend says, “to spy on everyone i used to know,
to get a photograph of them so i can see what
their hair looks like now.”

the fan hums in a practised monotone.
it’s been spinning like this all season: it’s summer,
it’s summer but our sunburns are gone,

it’s nearly fall and i’d like
a place of my own in which to sit down and drink
peppermint tea

i can smell the dying leaves burning
i can sense an emptiness in all of us —
it doesn’t have to be this way. i want

a corner of my own with books
and musical instruments, a place to phone
my mother on weekends and
tell her i love her.

I slept straight from 6.30p last night to 8a this morning. That’s nearly 14 hours. I decided to do it ahead of time — I could feel the exhaustion burning in the back of my throat. And sometimes, in lieu of a vacation or a weekend away, this is all I can do to escape.

Needless to say, I had a long, weird and extended dream. Let me tell you about it:

I died, somehow. Mom died too, and J., and N., and other N., and other friends, and lots more Americans I didn’t know. We found ourselves in a half-world between life and death, where we were cognizant of having bodies but also cognizant of no longer living in the human world. We were in an institution of some sort. It was controlled by Iraqis; I guess they’d won the war, and a lot more than that. We had to file into a large hall, do some manual labor, like jail, and wait around talking. One day I realized some people were disappearing. It was because their purgatorial time was over, and they’d fizz out into Actual Death. I realized this jail-like institution full of other just-dead friends was like an orphanage for lost souls or something [this is all despite the fact that I don't believe in any of this: multiple souls, heaven or hell, purgatory, even death] — but anyway —

Three girls tried to escape. They failed, and were executed. That’s when I understood everything was political. We were POWs, but half-dead POWs. While marching single file into a room, I noticed N. across the way. She had cut all her hair off. “That’s smart,” I thought. “She did that so she wouldn’t have to worry about it getting long and out of control.” [Insert footnote here about my previously recurring dreams regarding hair growing uncontrollably and me trying to chop it off.] Then I realized my hair was long and I hadn’t brushed it in longer than I could remember. Also about that time, I realized Mom was gone. She had fizzled out to the realm of Actual Death, and I started to get really scared. I didn’t want to be in a POW purgatorial deathcamp, but I didn’t want to be alone in the universe, either.

Our guards started getting stricter. I didn’t like how there was political tension, or that Iraqi-US relations were worse than ever. A female guard tried to herald me down a stairwell with a group of others, but I was scared. I grabbed a chocolate bon-bon with strawberry cream (from where?) and handed it to her as a gift. She smiled, thanked me, took the chocolate, and let me go. I ran and hid. Suddenly it was night. I was at a gated swimming pool, hiding in the shadows behind lawn chairs. I could see male guards up above, on the roof with guns.

That’s about all I remember, but the main feeling was an incredible loneliness, or a fear of it. Not of the “today I’m bored and lonely” variety, but in the larger cosmic sense of being alone. Even in the dream, I said to myself: “Wake up! You’re scared of death and you won’t even admit it. I’m going to have to deal with this when I come out of this dream…”

I feel like I’ve gotten stuck in an existential void and the only way out is through metaphysical action. Word.

I went to Darwin’s for breakfast. Waiting to order my bagel, I noticed a 1 or 2-month-old baby in a stroller in front of me in line. The mom was ordering sticky buns. The baby kept staring at huge sunflowers poking out of a vase a foot away. It reminded me of the sunflower photos E. and I shot last night, which I’d post if the Treo hadn’t frozen and everything gotten deleted. Funny how objects become symbols to appear and reappear when you least expect it, leaving you to question their meaning, or lack of meaning, or value as either a portentous or positive omen.

Anyway.

The baby went cross-eyed, as new babies are apt to do. It tried to visually locate its mother, but she was busy ordering pastries. We made eye contact, me and said baby. I love making eye contact with babies, because they never let it go. They’re completely unintimidated. They’ll just stare you down, while you stand there like an idiot, making faces back. This baby and I, we stared at eachother for a long while, it seemed. I wondered what he was thinking. His tongue kept popping in and out of his mouth and his eyes grew huge.

I think of N. during moments like this, who talks of the procraliens that take over your body when you’re in your late 20s/early 30s and make you wanna reproduce. I’ve never had any insistent attachment to making my own biological child, but I think it’d be nice to somehow acquire one and raise it. Today I just enjoyed this momentary communication — even though, like fish, I knew this baby would forget me and the sunflowers and the sticky bun and everything except its mother, and I would order my iced decaf and leave, sipping slowly on the bike ride to work, past construction workers who’d stop speaking as I passed.

It’s definitely August now.

Fall is coming. I could smell it in the air tonight on the 2a bike ride back from Ry’s house. Having slept through dinner, I hadn’t consumed anything save his orange Gatorade. The hunger merely heightened my sense of smell, and tonight, Somerville smelled like wet trees and ripped trash.

In the spirit of Elvis Movie Marathon Sundays, but having run out of Elvis movies and it being Monday, we watched Igby Goes Down, a movie I couldn’t possibly recommend LESS, as its only purpose is to justify apathetic trust-fund hipsters and their hopeless existence. Even though it’s got Clare Danes and Bill Pullman. Like the fool that I am, I picked Igby instead of Koreeda’s “After Life” because After Life is in Japanese and we can’t read subtitles very clearly on Ry’s computer. Anyway, bad decision. The moral of the story is, when given a choice between a Hollywood downer and a Koreeda Hirokazu film, always choose the latter.

So it smelled like fall and it felt like it too — there was a chilly breeze, the seat of my bike was all covered in dew when I got outside, and the streets were totally empty. As I headed down Holland, I looked up the road towards Arlington and had a flashback of bike ride memories to G.’s house after midnight. You know, remnants of those nights when you can feel the summer slipping away from you. It was a sad time, last year. I’m glad all is better now. I feel like either 10 years or 10 minutes have passed since last August, but I can’t tell you which. Time is so meaningless, really. We take with us what we want, and we leave the rest.

At the airport, there hung a poster in Terminal C of Manchester, UK: pictured was the main hall of my university — the one I dropped out of — with a UK flag swaying in the overcast skies above the city. “That’s where I used to live,” I told N.

It had been a sign, though of what, I’m still not sure. Perhaps we need to be reminded of all the places we have been, lest we forget what parts of ourselves we’ve left there. And so I flew to Philadelphia to remember all the parts of myself I left there when I was a kid, only to rediscover my bitchy teenage self in perpetual argument with my mother (the overly tan one in the photo). A charming time. Just reasserts that every moment of life is, by necessity, a moment of self-discovery — and I mean that in the least cheesy, new-agey way possible. We just really need to work on ourselves, all the time, else we’ll always be unhappy.

Mom took us (by force, my aunt and I) to the Jersey shore. She wanted to show us all the pieces of her adolescence, she wanted me to share the same memories and sentimentality for Ocean City. Instead, stuck in traffic for almost four hours, starving, and exhausted, I barely spoke. I people-watched on the boardwalk, past water ice stands and salt water taffy factories, walking clumsily through a humidity so intense you can only understand it when you’ve been in it, and fell asleep on the drive home listening to The Postal Service’s “Be Still My Heart” on repeat about a million times. It’s become my anthem for the weird weekend.

E.’s event was fun. Lots of chill people and guitars. After it cleared out, I practised handstands on the floor of Art & Soul like it was 1987 all over again. Maybe it is.

I love how children see things. Last night I let E. go nuts (unsupervised) with my phone camera. Here’s what he shot. (PS – the mouth is mine — as might be obvious from the missing teeth — and he made me pose strategically for several minutes before getting the shot he wanted.)