I also had this plan about how I was going to write more blog posts.

That hasn't materialized either, though I've tried once or twice. For whatever reason, I simply have nothing to say here.

It only just occurred to me to switch hands. To give in to my wordyness on Twitter and to give in to my taciturnity here.

In other words, I'm going to experiment, at least, with making this a photo blog. Or a blog primarily about images, anyway.

So...if you want to read about my surgery or my difficulties convincing the cat to make my espresso in the morning, or my unending thoughts about bikes and boys, you'll have to check Twitter.

If you want to see what I've had my eyes on lately, stop by here now and then.

Let's see how it goes. Life is mostly about experimenting in one form or another, I believe.

I keep saying that lately. It's kind of an expression of attempted equanimity, in the face of several things that are really not so very okay.

Thing One: I have a hernia. I might have two. It needs surgery.

Thing Two: While I'm under the knife (terrible expression) I'm getting another major thing done to relieve an ongoing problem. It's not the most delightful thing ever.

Thing Three: Because of Things 1 & 2, I shall be grounded and trapped and furthermore miserably prevented from riding my bikes or doing any other thing that makes life worth living for 6 weeks.

On the other hand, I'm really very strong these days, and I can probably find a way through it all. I've been making a list of thing I'm allowed to do after surgery that will also make life worth living. Suggestions welcome.

Ooh, must add "Walk with Nikon" to the list. I never do that anymore, and I do so love it.

Anyway, there are cherry blossoms out these days, very pink. You should go look at them.

My life has changed so radically that I hardly know how to express it. I went from standing on a nasty precipice for an extended length of time (not jumping, mind you, or even quite falling, but getting dizzy and sad from looking at the drop) to suddenly being tossed a lifeline. But it happened so fast that I've hardly had time to adjust.

A few weeks later I woke up after a particularly bad night (45 minutes of sleep is not enough for a growing girl) and realized I needed to move right now. So in that dogged, resourceful way I get when I'm desperate (which, I begin to realize, is quite a useful skill), I began looking for and almost immediately found a better apartment. Same amount of space, nicer building, quieter neighborhood, less money.

Since then it's been the usual cavalcade of completely inconvenient and scary health problems that seem to accompany any big change, and trying to juggle the overwhelming demands of new job, packing up all my possessions (which, for an adult person with a lot of books and a lot of hobbies, is not a small job), dealing with pesky freelance hangers-on, and so on.

It's a lot.

The only part of it that really bothers me is the health crap, because, well, it's crappy. I may need more surgery - two kinds, in fact - and in the meantime, it hurts to do most anything. And of course, the one thing I really shouldn't be doing is heavy lifting. Yeah.

Everybody keeps telling me - oh, don't complain, because it's only another couple of weeks and then you'll be in your new place, where everything will be all bright and shiny. Well, my new place promises to be lots better, certainly, and I expect to be a lot happier there. But bright and shiny and perfect and solving all the world's problems? No. It's just a nice apartment.

I'm still going to be broken and in pain, and needing surgery, and I'll still get lonely at night and wonder whether that swelling is anything to worry about, or whether I've just gotten fat in those four days off the bike.

And I'll have weeks and weeks more of lifting, and shifting, and drilling and hanging, and putting together of new dressers, and the cat waking me up at 4 am because she's convinced herself she's starving to death and needs to be fed right that moment.

In other words, life goes on. And I'm glad it does, because if it doesn't have to be perfect then it's something I can live in. I think there'll be space for me to stretch out and relax, and take my time getting used to the fact that I'm not going to die of starvation because I'm too poor to buy chicken for soup.

Eventually (read: now would be great, or maybe next week) I'll meet a really unusual and preferably very handsome fellow who will find me irresistible and charming and compellingly fiery, and then things will get very interesting.

For the first time in a very long time, I'm not just whistling in the dark about that. I feel it coming.

I once saw a charming bit of theater: 60-second Shakespeare. It was Hamlet, and Ophelia drowned, quickly, by sticking her head in a bucket.

In similar spirit, I shall give you a compressed version of my tale.

Phone rings: Hello from my old boss, would you like to come work for me again? I have a great job for you. Me: Why yes, I would.

Flash to: Airport, snowstorm. Board full of cancelled flights. Magically, mine leaves on time. Arrive to sunshine and warmth.

Flash to: Another airport, sunshine and warmth, weather in NYC = icestorm. Magically, flight arrives on time with no difficulty.

Next day, nearly fall ten times trying to walk to subway. It's a 10-minute walk. Took me 45. Get to work safely. Love my job.

Following day, back on bike. Ice ice baby. Walk much of bridge and some bits of streets, but ride anyway. Love bike.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

Gist: Work is tiring and requires getting used to mornings (ack!), but beats the motherlovingshit out of being out-of-work freelancer. Anxiety level way down, even with traffic and horrid weather and horrider anti-bike campaign by cops and public "servants" (well, I do want to carry a railgun at times, but...).

Here, look at these pretty pictures and dream of summer.

It hasn't happened. What has happened has not been easy.

I fell. Hard. I got hurt. Every time I felt like I was getting better, something else happened to hurt me more.

That's a metaphor, but it's also the bare physical facts.

These are not easy days, and they have not been easy years, and this is not an easy place. And I am way past tired of life always being this way.

I need rest, and I need play, and I need pleasure, and there is none of that on the horizon - or at least not visible from where I stand.

I know it's a geographic cure, but I am pretty convinced I need to move. I am also pretty afraid, because it means more risk, and more isolation, and more not-knowing-anything.

It means leaving a lot of important things unfinished.

It means I may make things worse for myself, financially and otherwise. I don't think I have a choice.

I was listening to a song today while I rode my broken bike with my broken body, and the lyric that caught at me was this:

Yeah there are some days
When you peer off the Brisbane Bridge
And think sweet thoughts about the river (by Chris Pureka, who is brilliant)

I'll tell you the truth. The truth I've not told anyone who knows me. The bike is not just my favorite thing, it's my essential thing. It's the thing I do so I don't give up on everything else. Because without it, I have no desire to keep bashing my head against this stone, trying to break through. Or just not the strength for it. When I get on the bike, I am saying, yes, I'm willing to keep at it. When I'm prevented from getting on the bike, things get very dire.

I get human-tornado angry. I get so I could crush someone's head in my hand.

I also get so that river looks awfully sweet. I don't need to be here, anymore, I think. Not at all.

I'm in a time of hanging drama; on the cusp of great change, but with no clear indication yet of what the outcome(s) will be.

I've been trapped by a blizzard in my small neighborhood for several days, unable to ride or even walk very far. It's given me a lot of time to think (and to try and make some headway on my holiday knitting). It's also given me a lot of time to feel, which is not especially pleasant.

What I feel and what I think are mostly a tangle, but a few things are clear. I'm severely lonely. I desperately need to change careers. I think I need to change my whole notion of what a career means.

I may very well need to relocate. I'm intimidated by the fact that relocating someplace that's easier and better-suited to me is gonna make me even lonelier (as if that were possible) for a while.

It's like looking at a plain white wall that you need to get through or over, but there are no visible seams and it's a hundred feet high, and you've got no equipment - nothing but your hands and feet and an increasingly bad back. I just have no idea where to begin. If only it were made of marshmallow, I could chew my way through.

Not because I'm all that ashamed of being in a mess, but because it makes them uncomfortable. No one really wants to hear you say that your life is a disaster and you're miserable, especially not at this time of year. Even when you know full well it's not uncommon for people to feel let-down during the holidays.

I don't put much store by any of these holidays. I wasn't raised on Christmas, and I envied the other kids who had trees and lights. It was one more way in which I wasn't allowed to belong.

When I lived with Boywich, we had extravagant Christmases. He always overbought for me. We always had a fight when we went to get a tree. I guess the holiday was pretty fraught for him. It reminded him of unpleasant things about his own childhood, and he would tend to be in a serious funk for the few weeks before and after.

But the day itself was kind of wonderful. I made us stockings out of colorful scrap fabrics, and there was always a lot of color in the house. The tree smelled wonderful - we'd decorate it with a combination of handmade and store-bought and given-to-us things. The cats would always drink out of the tree water, and we'd always worry whether it was bad for them.

It wasn't perfect, but for that brief time, I felt like I belonged to somebody. I don't think I ever felt that way before then, and I certainly haven't felt that way since.

And we are still friends, but he lives far away, and we are not in each other's daily lives. And it isn't the same, anyway; nor should it be, with people who aren't together anymore.

But these days the only one I really feel connected to is the cat. I'm grateful for her; every day she makes me feel better about something. But it would be nice to have some humans I felt like that about, too.

Maybe they are coming this year.

(PS. Commenting is temporarily disabled due to preposterous onslaught of spam.)

I thought, "Thank god." And then I thought, "It's time to change that."

I don't know what anyone would guess that I'd do, looking at me, but it reminds me of that game bloggers play whereby they tell you a list of things you don't know about them.

I don't like the word meme (I have an allergy to popular lingo, and anyway I'd rather keep that word as its French self in my head - pronounced "memm" and meaning "same"). But I do like lists. I like lists for the same reason that I like Twitter - little nibbles of information have a tendency to be charming and quirky, more so than the same information imparted in paragraph form.

They operate like poetry - sometimes you need a little air around something to see its shape and appreciate it properly.

Or because it lets me out of having to lay down grand ideas for you, when I need to let my grand ideas jell on the back burner.

Thing One: I was a caffeine-free zone for five years. Expected I'd stay that way indefinitely, but one day I was planning to have a boy over, and I knew he was a coffee-drinker, so I went out and bought a little French press. You know what happened next, right? He did that freaked-out-boy thing whereby he skedaddled immediately upon waking up and never called me again. A few days later, I looked at the French press and thought, "I might as well make some coffee so it's not a total waste of money." Been hooked ever since. As my friend K says, "Coffee is a harsh mistress."

(Apparently this list may take the form of paragraphs when it's necessary to tell a story. I make no apologies for inconsistency.)

Thing Two: When boys dump me or force me, by their bad behavior, to dump them, I give them epithets to assist in the getting over them process. The French press boy, who was so tall and skinny he reminded me of a crane, became Bird Boy. Another one (whom I had trouble giving up) went from being referred to as Blonde Heroin on a Bike (BHOB) to simply the Junk, which led to the following hilarious conversation:

I'd planned to meet my friend J for brunch one Sunday. In the meantime I'd booty-called BHOB. I called J to see if we could meet for dinner instead.

J: Sure, sweetie, we can meet for dinner. Hey...are you off the Junk yet?
Me: Oh yeah, I'm off the Junk.
J: (pause) You are so totally ON the Junk. I bet you're at his apartment right now.
Me: (sheepish) Yeah.

Thing Three: As much as I think and talk about boys, I don't get involved with that many of them. I don't think, to look at me, you'd be able to tell I have such bad luck with dating. Although I have wondered whether being pretty is actually a handicap. Maybe if I'd grown up with an awareness of being pretty, it'd be different. But I grew up as a nerd, so I'm a weird hybrid. My brain knows I'm pretty, but my heart still looks out at the world and expects to be treated like Elephant Man.

I'm not sure what the solution to that is.

It always strikes me because I love to be outdoors at this time of year. To be fair, I have to be outdoors at all times of year, and in all weather - it's just how I'm built. I wither indoors.

But I love riding in the blustery cold, and I love the way the sky looks on days like today - layers of different greys, with black trees silhouetting themselves in front.

I love the way it looks like children's book paintings outside, and the way the downed leaves smell - especially the oak. I like the silence. I like the rustle and the snap and the lack of crickets.

I like wearing lots of wool, that slightly funky smell even, when it gets a little wet. I like wearing things I've made, the fact that my head was warm and comfortable tonight because I had on one of my earflap hats, which I'd designed myself and knitted out of some especially lofty wool last winter.

It's winter, gang, and I like it out there.

I like coming inside and seeing my cheeks all flushed. I ride along and feel myself smiling. I like being alone in the outdoors.

Strange words from a woman who lives in a large city.

It's in the leaves that sail down, some twirling in mid-sail, others not. In the pumpkins and gourds and six kinds of squash and late, slightly soft apples all piled up at the outdoor markets.

In the cold, windy rides and the dark, quiet rides. In the layers of things I've knitted that all get worn, suddenly and frequently. In the way the cat curls up with one paw over her eye. It's a contemplative season.

Summer is all rush-rush; all about the body, heaving and stretching and pounding the pedals. It's all about sweat and flirting and tiny little skirts that leave little to the imagination.

November is different. It's not quite the onset of hard winter, where being underdressed means risking your life - or at least a few toes. But it's possible to find yourself wishing devoutly that you'd thrown on that extra layer in those first few miles before you've built up enough steam to keep yourself warm.

I'm feeling a little under-the-weather. Maybe because I just got a flu shot, maybe because a lot of people are sick, and so there's always something for my body to fight off. One poor friend of mine has already had pneumonia. I let myself sleep and sleep last night, though I'm not sure how much good it did me, since my dreams were bad and I woke up sweaty and angry.

I've been noticing little bits of things as I go about my daily business, filing them away like snowflakes for a dark sky. There was a large red ship running under the bridge while I was riding over it. One of those long, low industrial ones. A barge, really.

There are several streets that smell like donuts at night.

A cyclist's bag is a little like a Scotsman's kilt - you just never know. I met a fellow who carries hot sauce at all times. "In case of a hot sauce emergency?" I said. "No, I just think everything tastes better with hot sauce."

There was a woman twirling and twirling on the beach at Coney Island. She twirled and then got dizzy and had to sit down in the sand. It seemed to me to be a religious ritual.

I walked into a cafe, and there was a young man dancing to an old soul tune. I watched, delightedly, then went up and joined him. I was sad when an even better song came on a few minutes later, but he was gone and I had no one to dance with.

About an incoming plane I mistook for a supernova.

About how the sky never goes black here, only blue.

I'd like to sing to you, only it isn't singing weather. It's crochety knee weather. It's the weather where toes get numb and I get out the heat packets, because I've never been able to figure out the right shoes for winter riding.

I could hum a few bars of knitted things. I could tell you I finished my sea-colored gloves and how soft they are, with that bit of silk in there. I could tell you I went for a walk and a long-haired man caught me checking him out and nodded, and I blushed. (It was dark. He couldn't see. Plus, I pretended not to notice him noticing me.)

I could tell you I looked at every bicyclist and it was no one I knew, and I decided that meant it's not real winter yet.

I could tell you about special dogs I've known, about my mom's and my sister's (who died a few years ago, taking the title of my favorite dog ever with him) (his fur was very soft) (that's not why he was my favorite).

I could tell you that when my mom called from Florence the other day, I could see and smell everything she was describing, because I'd been there, in the very spot she was calling from. I loved that city; I would have simply stayed there, lived there, if some jeweler had asked me to apprentice with her, or the tour guides at the Duomo had said they needed an English speaker, or the gelati salesman had proposed marriage.

I could tell you how different our city seems, in winter, when everyone is scurrying about like mice in their long coats. I could tell you that the water looks different, as you cross above a river or look out over the long stretch of beach.

I could tell you that sunsets are prettier.

I could tell you that I am lonely, and I miss having someone who knows me well, and likes or even loves me for that. I could tell you, too, that I'm not sure I could handle the reality of that, even if I am yearning for it sometimes.

There was an omelette with a dear friend the other day. She has the loveliest long hair. Every time I see her, I think, now why should we both have to be so sad? We deserve better than this from life. We are both so strong. And we move through the world with verve.

It was a very good omelette. I ordered it with ham, and forgot I'd done so until it arrived, and then it was a little like eating the forbidden dance, with a sprig of rosemary.

Everything looks lovely in this long, low, golden light. This season was a long time in coming.

I remember someone telling me once that purple was a healing color. If that's true, I wonder what sort of color red would be. Martial, fiery, aggressive, confident, powerful? Hot-blooded? Hot-headed? Scorched?

I don't know, but whatever it is, it seems to feel right. And on the days when I don't wear red (or when I do, also...) I wear orange. It's all fire, fired-up, fiery.

I'm in flames, I guess.

What I really am is in change, in progress, and maybe that is what all the fire is about. Fire for phoenix. Fire for transformation, fire for intense growth. Burning it all down before stepping through the flames as something new.

Yes, that sounds about right.

Interestingly, the mittens I've been knitting are the opposite of those colors, and they're mittens for me.

I tend to get into a frenzy of knitting for other people the moment the cold weather strikes, and then it's hard to work in projects for myself, but one terrible day (which hadn't yet been terrible, but perhaps I had a premonition) I went into the LYS (on an errand to buy yarn for someone else) and found myself holding this skein.

This amazing, ethereal skein. All the colors of water, I thought. An underwater kelp forest, spun into 50/50 merino and silk. It's Malabrigo. Into my bag it went, and I knew what I'd make of it.

My well-worn and well-loved sportweight fingerless mittens have been unraveling at the thumbs for two years, and for two years I've been saying I'd knit some new ones, but I haven't. I've knit plenty for other people, including several pairs out of the amazing Malabrigo silk/wool, but none for myself, and it was time. Make that high time.

So here we are, my mittens and I. One done, the other underway. I made sure to photograph them in daylight so the colors would come out right, and lo and behold, they did. This is what they really look like. Water water water. For when all my burning makes me thirsty, I guess.

It occurred to me last night that the last time I had to get over somebody, I didn't have to be in the same state, much less the same small section of town. We never ran into each other accidentally, we didn't have to put on a show of niceness, and, oh, come to think of it, he didn't deliberately say something cruel to me in public.

There are various problems with the current situation, some to do with the laws of physics, many to do with the equally perilous laws of Murphy, not a few to do with the fact that this guy spent so much time in my apartment.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but there's no place in this apartment we didn't have sex. Except maybe the ceiling - though I'm sure we would have managed that eventually.

It's not so easy to put someone out of your mind when the ghost of their sexy naked presence is haunting your house.

And it becomes a whole lot less easy when you can't even think of them fondly anymore. I'm not used to that. With a few notable exceptions, I like my ex-lovers, and after the adjustment period I tend to be glad I knew them (in the biblical sense).

In this case, the whole thing's been poisoned, and I'm not sure how to deal with that, internally or externally. Well, I guess externally I'm hoping to simply avoid ever seeing him again (good luck with that; we live all of 3 miles apart). Internally it's a disaster. It's like a failed piece of origami - every way I turn it, it just looks wrong. I can't see a way through it, and - perhaps because I am no longer 14 - I am not used to this sort of petty behavior. I just don't know how to cope with it.

I'm dumbfounded, in much the same way that I get dumbfounded by the behavior of drivers in this city. "What? You really want to kill me? Just because I'm on a bicycle, on the same road as you? I don't get it."

I haven't been answering my phone.

I haven't been saying yes to anyone.

What I have been doing is riding my bike to lonely destinations and standing there, ill at ease, watching the sky change.

I've put hats on my head when it got cold, I've taken layers off when it got too warm. I've been to the grocery store (which was quite pleasant - the people who work there are often magically nice to me).

I bought ingredients for this soup I keep seeing (or smelling) in my head. It's the intersection of sweet and fiery. (Yes, I tweeted that already, but it bears repeating, because I think it's the ultimate personal ad for me. If I really had guts, in fact, I'd delete every word of my stupid Internet dating profile and replace it with that one phrase.)

Anyway. I will post a picture of the soup (maybe), and if it's good maybe I'll even tell you how to make it. Though if it's really good, it'll almost certainly be because I've made it half-consciously and it'll therefore be unrepeatable.

Anyway. Again.

I'm hurt and I'm angry and I want to build myself a marshmallow igloo to live in.

Instead, I gotta live here. I got invited to three parties yesterday, and I went to the one I'd been invited to first, and it was not as much fun as I'd hoped. I couldn't help but wonder if the other two were better. One of them, at least, might've held the possibility of getting fresh with a young boy (that was who invited me).

On the other hand, marshmallow, ya know?

I'm probably not ready to make myself vulnerable in any way, not even enough to have some well-deserved and really quite needed boy-type-fun.

"Jean-Luc, blow up the damned ship!" - this I hear from the other room. (Not actually a whole other room, but it's essential to small-apartment living to think of your various subspaces as rooms.)

Yeah, Jean-Luc, blow up the ship.