Flotsam: March 2008 Archives

It's cold, and I seem to have instantly caught a friend's cold. Within hours of seeing her. It's a new record.

The city offers bits of color to keep us company, and the daffodils bloom early at the bodegas, and there is good Mexican food in little places where the menu is on a big board, and next to the listing of "hard shell tacos," it says "for gringos and our Texan friends."

So when I order my tacos I feel the need to specify that I want soft ones, so they don't assume and bring me the crispy kind.

But it's still so cold. Every time I go outside I seem to be underdressed, even when I am consciously trying to dress more warmly than the weather forecast calls for. Everyone's cats are shedding despite the low mercury, and I was wondering today whether they might have the power to bring the mild temperatures on. And Annabelle wrote me that she hopes I don't have cause to wear my legwarmers, even though she is sorry about that.

I don't know what else to tell you. I hardly left the house this weekend; I had so much work. These photos are from a marathon photography walk a couple of weeks ago. I took nearly 300 photos in a couple of hours, and am still sorting through them.

Strangely, they have cheered me up a little, with their bright colors and sudden surprises. There were art fairs this weekend, lots of them, and I wasn't able to go, but now I feel like I have seen a bit of that, just from looking at images of the glorious and strange city.

I now have ten inches of legwarmer done. Will I finish them before spring really arrives? Tune in next time, same bat channel.

So I was at the pool the other day, and a woman asked me where I get my bathing suits. "Depends. Sometimes I order from Amazon, sometimes I buy from a swim-specific place."

"How much?"

"Well, I just ordered some new ones - they were on a good sale. About $45 each."

"Forty?! I paid four dollars for this," she said, holding a dripping leotard (clearly not an actual swimsuit) right in my face while I was in the shower.

Now, let's just look separately, for a moment here, at the fact that this woman was invading my shower stall with her naked body (I was wearing my suit; I shower for real when I get home) to ask me the question in the first place.

Oy.

I mean, NYC is a big object lesson in losing your personal space and freedoms in all kinds of ways, but there really ought to be a limit. And I'd like to draw mine at the door of my shower, thank you very much.

Then there is the whole other question of Getting What You Pay For. On that subject, I am about to descend into hitherto unheard-of regions of bike geekdom. Because My Goddamned Knees Hurt. Like Hell. Every fracking day, and for several days after each bike ride, no matter how careful I am, despite my new easier rear cog.

So here we go, with the discontinued obscure expensive-as-hell cranksets in impossible-to-find short lengths. Here we go with the Q-angle, and the vintage parts market, and ohmygodI'vebecomeabonafidenutcase.

But it's not for the esoteric love of vintage parts (not that there's anything wrong with the esoteric love of vintage parts, mind you). It's because, as I keep plaintively crying to Boywich on the phone at all hours of the day, "The world does not fit me!"

Waaaaaah.

Anyway, now that I've got that off my proverbial chest, I can tell you that I have knit eight whole inches of a legwarmer. Whoop de dooh.

And I have to get back to work.

Annabelle sent me a text message today that sums up the last few weeks rather perfectly: "Not a bad day. Just sort of blah."

Well, I suppose blah is more the final analysis than an accurate description of the tenor of individual moments. There's been a lot of up and down. The downs mostly having to do with parts of my body deciding that they've had enough work for one lifetime thank you, and they are gonna crap out when I least expect it.

The ups mostly having to do with the selection of bike parts.

Yeah, I know, but it really does float my boat. Before you go scoffing and laughing, consider how your yarn shopping behavior would look to someone who doesn't give a hoot about yarn.

Okay then.

So here I am with a cat being as in-the-way as possible on my lap, fourteen tons of work to do in not so many days, a nightmare tax bill looming over my head, relatives continually begging couch space (like, every weekend this month), a half-busted tailbone and assorted knee issues, a new and glorious bicycle awaiting my love, and, oh, I don't know, a half-dozen other things preying on my limited attention.

I somehow have no time to grocery shop, do laundry, clean my bathroom (and no cleaning supplies even if I had that time), and anything else that tends to keep body and soul in working order. My hair is two weeks overdue for a haircut, I am out of face wash and paper towels, and you wouldn't believe how hard it is to find a 15 mm wrench that isn't "too long" or racheting in this city.

I ended up buying a whole damn set of metric wrenches at Home Depot, but I may return them if I can get a single one at an auto parts store someplace. And as you might expect, auto parts stores are not quite as thick on the ground here as they are in the burbs and boonies, where people actually own cars.

Now you begin to see why I have been light with the words lately. Because all my words are boring.

I attribute this to several things:

1. I am doing a project with Annabelle that involves writing every day.
2. I am really, really busy.
3. I am in an interesting emotional state - one that involves change and moving forward, and those tend not to be chatty times for me.
4. I am in love with two things: my bicycle and my Nikon. So they are getting all my juice. And neither of them are especially wordy creatures.
5. I don't have a 5, except to say that sometimes a girl needs a break from showing off her punctuation prowess to the wide world - or even the small and lovely network of readers she has mysteriously managed to amass (I still don't know how that happened, honestly, but it's an awfully cool thing).

So, 6. I appreciate your patience and just bear with me for a little while. I will at least show you some pretty pictures now and then. Or maybe often. I have been very fruitful in the camera department lately.

Love,
Lizbon

PS. Blanket statement: All of my photos are clickable for bigger (and sometimes worth it), and also copyright of me, so please don't steal 'em. Thanks.

Oh, my mojo is wonky wazooky these days. I'm up, I'm down, I'm all around the town. I wake up feeling hungover (having drunk nothing to induce such a feeling), swim for 50 min., feel like a new little superhero, go down to my management company to re-sign my lease (I missed a bunch of pages - d'oh!), come home, dechlorinate, have a brief meeting with a potential client who probably can't afford me, call bike shop, eat something or other, work a bit, daydream about this and that, IM, waste time, buy a new saddle, watch a Robert Redford movie with half an eye, work some more, play with sweet kitty cat, blah blah blah.

Really, I seem to feel best while I am in the pool. And just after (well, once I've dried off and warmed up). In the pool I am a superhero. Out of the pool, I am mortal, oh so mortal. And I have not the power to change myself into a tall blonde 20-year-old. And I have not the power to will the universe to act according to my specifications and/or desires.

And I had to put on a Clark Kent suit yesterday, which always queers the mojo in some way, even though I stripped it off at the earliest possible moment and changed it for a Speedo.

Not knitting. Can't be bothered. I feel the early spring loss of all interest in knitting coming on. Whoop de doozle.

On the plus side, I received a magazine with an illustration of a wiggly blob on the cover and under it the caption: Is this the shape of the universe?

So I figure, compared to that, I am in reasonably fine fettle, all things considered. Sort of.

Okay, okay. I'll give you a little more to go on, though, really, I do think that sometimes there are no words needed, especially when one has many many photographs to play with. I am not going to go into gory details, but I have not been having the easiest couple of weeks, and I am not in the mood to discuss it. So let's just leave that by the wayside. Don't be emailing me with sympathetic whathaveyou. It's nice and all, but I don't need it, and I don't really want it. I'm in one of those moods. Everybody who knows that kind of mood, raise your hands and grumble in chorus. Very good! Now let's hear the same thing, only in Swahili this time.

Anyway, the city continues to give me its little difficulties (nothing major on that score; it's not the city's fault) and also its little gifts to try and cheer me up. I got two large boxes of $1 strawberries today. In March. Yes, that is my neighborhood telling me it still loves me. Just ask it.

"I'm gettin' hungry. Peel me a grape!" - if that line doesn't reverberate gorgeously in your chest, you clearly haven't heard Shirley Horn's recording of it.

Again, I seem to be running out of words. There is always the temptation to just shift into the abstract and be a purely visual creature. My friends tend to be artists, so they don't mind when I do that. And we all kind of look at each others' work and dig. But here, as in my professional life, I am expected to sling the Big Big Verbiage, phthwap! onto the page, and make with the grand pronouncements. I guess I just get tired and long for a damn pencil after a while, preferably the colored kind.

But let's see what mundanities I can ply you with. I've been quietly buzzing along on Snow White, though I've reached a point in it where I really need to email the designer and ask her if I can put the increases closer together to allow for my royal shortness of torso, or whether that will Frack the Math.

Speaking of Frack, there are mere weeks until the return of BSG, to which I am looking forward, despite its having jumped the shark to some degree a couple of seasons ago.*

End vhat else? as anyone's Yiddish grandmother might say.

There are no boys to speak of, which is perhaps just as well, since my body is currently far too broken to have much fun with them, had I them available to have much fun with. I am writing lots of poetry, which, now that I think of it, often coincides with a void in the boy department. So there's that. What is bad for the sex life and bad for the blog is good for art. So screw everything else. Art rules.

*Nota bene: Please don't be emailing me correcting my spelling of frack after you've followed the link to the sci fi channel. There should be a goddamned "c" in there.

Later additions...

From Band of Brothers: The tale of the Battle of the Bulge, as it is told today, is of (Gen.) Patton's army coming to the rescue of the encircled 101st Airborne division.

No member of the 101st has ever agreed that the division needed to be rescued.

From the back of my napkin at the bar last Sunday:

In the candle a hand
beat like a heart
and she heard nothing
but the drums
in her eyes
The sand rained
like a scratchy fog

and still the shells
fell, and helmets
ripped like cotton drawers.

In the end his hands were
small brown birds
that she let go.

copyright 2008 Lizbon Grav. all rights reserved. usual threats apply. hey, that goes for the photos, too.