Recently

I have a new song obsession. These things come over me suddenly, and when they do, I pity anyone who has to share a house with me (in this case, the Man). Hearing the same rhythms over-and-over-again-for-hours-upon-hours. But it makes me more productive. Or maybe it's that I obsess when I'm already feeling productive. I don't know which and, frankly, the whole thing is weird enough that I don't really know if I want to delve any deeper.

(Because you asked, here's my current favorite. Click on "Golly Sandra" to hear what my house sounds like at the moment.)

A lot of people recently have said to me, "I don't know where the autumn went, how is it already a new year, how is it already mid-March?" and I've been saying back, "I don't know, but I feel the same way." As humans, we're incapable of processing time in the way we think we're supposed to. But then I looked at my calendar and I realized that I probably feel this way because I had something happening EVERY FREAKING DAY IN NOVEMBER. Sometimes poetry doesn't explain things as well as I like to think.

Lately, I've been on a constant sock-and-stocking hunt. I've actually altered outfits because I can't find the right garments for my feet. I don't know where they go, exactly, but I do think I know what they're telling me: it's about time for Spring. Bare legs, bare feet.

Speaking of which--I've been seeing blossoms. Not fully-fledged, springtime-is-here blossoms, but the sweetest little buds. There are some by our front door. It's nice.

How to Start Your Thursday

It's another grey-skied lapsang souchong Thursday.

The Man fixed the electricity problem. I do love men, don't you?

I've got three blog posts to write today. (Yes, I really am sticking to a schedule). I've spent the morning doing anything but work. I'm organizing old photos and music. I plan on making lists at some point, lots and lots of lists, but I haven't even begun thinking about the lists. I'm watching the birds dig around in the wasteland that is our back garden in winter. They're sending dead leaves and wet twigs everywhere.

My books for next term arrived yesterday. I'm quite excited to read W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, but otherwise I'm unimpressed. Beloved I read years and years ago and despised. I hope I was wrong about it, that I was just being a snotty teenager, but as I recall, my general impression was, why does Toni Morrison have to write like this?

I'm digging KCRW this morning. My tea is just the right drinking temperature and I'm bobbing my head around to the Dandy Warhols and Loudon Wainwright, and Michael Franti. Not the most promising way to start a day meant to be rife with accomplishment, but good fun anyway. I'll check back later.

Joe Allen at The Cellar/The Community of a Street

So it turns out that the violinist-who-used-to-live-next-door (occasionally we could hear a few notes floating through the walls and into the kitchen) is actually part of this group, who we heard last night at the Cellar.  As per the wonderfully circular world of Oxford, Joe Allen works at the Corner Club, neé QI, which almost everyone we know has connections to.  I like this sort of smallness: not stifling but familiar; large enough still to be surprising, and pleasantly so.

The Cellar would probably more aptly be called the basement.  Cellar implies wood, and warmth, and (quite possibly) wine; but the place reminds me far more strongly of a friend's spacious under-house hideout--a dingy, dark, sticky-floored hollow perfect to listen to music by.  The beer is cheap and the ambiance appealingly sparse; and all confounded by a sense of wonder that you can be here, underneath ancient alleyways, listening to a thoroughly modern selection of youthful, pretty musicians.

Joe Allen, accompanied by Angharad Jenkins on the violin and Chrissie Sheaf on the drums, has a sound that reminds me of Damien Rice, or possibly Stephen Fretwell, with operatic elements (and the shining sounds of an electric violin, which I'm starting to think is something no band should be without...).  The threesome has clearly mastered the art of performance: that is, their music is, in rare fashion, actually enhanced by their physical presence.   At one point I was smiling so widely that a friend looked at me curiously (presumably thinking the £1.50 Foster's had gotten to my head); it was just that good, in a heart-soaring kind of way.

In bed later that night, we were aroused from our half-sleep (books on our chests) by a series of bangs, followed by shouts on the street which sounded distinctly different from the drunken yelps of late-night returners, or the fierce calls of virile men aching for a boozy fight; so we rose on our knees and peeked our heads out of the window.  Down the street, not half a block, we could see an enormous, orange crown of flames pouring out of an alleyway; billows of white smoke came running down towards us and we smelled the acrid flavour of something wrong, something electric.  

Firefighters had arrived on the scene silently, and we watched their figures dart and flit until the smoke had been shrunk and the fire reduced and our necks had begun to ache from craning.  A father and son went out into the street to assess the danger, but otherwise no-one showed any signs of stirring.  We could have gone on sleeping and never even known.  

The whole street seemed precious then, fragile, but ours: the violinist next door, who you know only from the sound of her strings and her Welsh voice, turns out to make you smile harder than you've smiled all day; and firefighters do their job with austerity, guided by the blinking blue lights of their trucks; and we are somehow in the middle of all this.

Ruminations

Have a slight aching. Today is a day full of rain and wild wind; the weekend seems to be going too fast, yet the time, the time is going too slow; how can this be? I like to think of this time as my penance for being happy; yet I know I only think of it this way because I want things to have balance and for there to be some kind of perverse, but forgiving, justice in the world. Still it is comfort enough, on a cold day, to look outside at the brown leaves crumbling from the tree, to shiver and sink deeper into the duvet, to ponder not getting up at all, this day—and then to bring one’s mind back to the great happiness harbored in one’s heart. It thaws the body out, a bit.

It is always on days like this that you run out of milk. The day when the only thing you can do, if you’ve got any sense, is stay inside close to the heater and listen to jazz (cheery jazz—of the 1930s big band variety, primarily, though Brett Dennen does me well too, if I feel like having a voice in the house.) with cup after cup of tea.

Thesis presentation next week. I’ve completely neglected my thesis, to be honest. Now I feel the weight of it bearing down on my shoulders—I spent all summer using it as an excuse to do nothing else, but read and write and be merry in the evenings, but my accomplishments to date seem meager compared with what I still have left to do. I MUST get something done today. On that note, (a spark of inspiration??) I shall away to try to remember what it was I meant to explore in the first place, and then, with any luck, get things done.

In Which the Creature of Perpetual Worrying Comes to an Important Conclusion

I am, rather characteristically, still trying to decide how I feel about my “new” haircut. Is it “new” enough? Is it too new? Does it make my face look funny? Does it look too much like a mullet? (I don’t know why I think it looks like a mullet. It doesn’t. But at one point I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror and the thought popped into my head, just like that, spontaneously, nothing reasonable about it, POP!, and now it keeps haunting me. I don't want to be the amazing mullet-girl)

Have given up trying to find myself a proper job for the semester. Why was this always so easy before? Anyhow, there shall be plenty of time for proper jobs. What I need is an improper job (which, please mark you, is not my way of euphemistically wishing I could become a dealer). And some wine. And to not be so lazy. I could be taking a Salsa class right now, but I’m curled up in a duvet on the rug instead, listening to the Dixie Chicks (no, I am not making the Dixie Chicks bit up).

The Salsa thing is funny. I thought, last week: “I’ve always wanted to Salsa!” so I headed across the river to the-place-where-I-go-to-pretend-I-could-someday-be-a-respectable-dancer (last year it was Ballet), shelled out $14, and swung my hips in what I hoped was a moderately sexy arc for an hour and a half. I had fun—although I didn’t like the uptight man with the white hair who I got partnered with at one point. He didn’t seem to understand that I was trying my hardest; he just thought (his grim face and exasperated eyes said) that I was trying. Despite that, I was going for a lackluster run earlier and decided that actually, what I’d rather do tonight: eat ice cream in front of the computer. Then curl up in a duvet on the rug. And look up Salsa classes that are slightly closer to my apartment. (So it goes, so it goes…)

I would say my greatest accomplishment of the day was going to (and completing with a reasonable amount of grace, I might add) the job interview, but actually I don’t feel particularly thrilled about it. I’ve moved on from the stage where getting through an interview fills me with visions of my glorious future (everyone gets through them, after all); and where doing grunt work for very little pay seems like a “great opportunity to learn”. I am, and I’m shocked to find myself thinking this (me, the perpetually-worrying-always-insecure creature!), better than that.

(Am now waiting, with baited breath, for lots of prospective employers to reach the same conclusion…which may not go so smoothly)

So my greatest accomplishment of the day is, perhaps, reaching that conclusion. And I’d say that’s not half-bad, considering what I can be like.