Hi! I am back from Colorado, and recovering from skiing soreness, sunburn, jetlag, and a redeye flight. Tomorrow I go back to work.

On the way out there I had the most awesome takeoff possible, where I had a perfect view of the city skyline by night. I never get tired of pressing my nose against the window for takeoff and landing, trying to identify everything below me.

We did not actually get up at four in the morning for the first Red Sox game of the season, but we were up by six to go skiing, so we listened to the second half of the game on satellite radio in the car on our way into the mountains. At some point it occurred to me that I was listening to a game in Japan on a radio station from Boston while looking at the Rocky Mountains and I was astonished by the technology of it all.

It was a pretty relaxing visit, all in all. Sarah and her husband have a lovely home, and their pets were entertaining as always. I met their new Australian cattle dog, Roxy, who is incredibly energetic, and a compulsive fetcher. It's as though she will suffer from some deep-seated doggie guilt if she doesn't retrieve whatever you throw for her. I was also spoiled by delicious home-cooked food the whole time I was there. Now that I am home I am feeling sort of petulant about cooking for myself, but also inspired, because their neighbors introduced me to nut roast, which I guess is an English thing, but it is awesome and I need to learn to make one. Plus, Sarah's husband made a macaroni and cheese that I need to make myself one of these days, and also he let me try out his good vegetable knife, which is now on the list of Things I Need To Buy When I Have My Own Place.

So it was a wonderful vacation, but now I am home, and there is sort of a lot to do around here, so I should probably stop writing now.

Hi! I have been a very bad blogger. My excuse is that I have been catsitting for a week in a place where the computer and internet were very slow. That was really lovely, by the way, so much so that I miss it a little even though I am finally back in my own apartment for the first time in what seems like forever. The shyest of the three cats finally made friends with me this time. He has a very serious face, and when he looks at you it often seems like he's trying to tell you something, or like he's looking into the depths of your soul.

I am not going to write you a proper post now, either, on account of the fact that I am going to Colorado to visit Sarah tomorrow after work, and I have to finish packing and go to bed, already. For those of you keeping track (I admittedly wasn't until maybe yesterday), the Red Sox season starts next Tuesday. They will be in Japan, and I will be in Boulder. The jury is still out on whether we will be awake at 4am for those shenanigans. I like to think we are pretty hardcore, but this is supposed to be a vacation, after all. On the other hand, since September of 2005 Sarah and I have hardly ever been in the same place during a ballgame* so in theory we should take advantage of that, right?

While I'm gone I will leave you with some songs. A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled upon Immaculate Machine during my wanderings over at the sixtyone, which is sort of feeding my need to discover things by listening to music randomly, sort of like grabbing something from the rotation rack at good old WRCU. (This is an improvement over my usual method of discovering music these days, which is listening to and becoming obsessed with whatever Dave is playing in his car. This is not the most efficient because I am not in Dave's car terribly often.) I bought their album Fables a couple days ago because I told myself that it was unhealthy to listen to "Dear Confessor" and "Wo Xiang Tanbai" on an endless loop. (Because, people, do you know what the difference is between those two songs? The language. That is all. So really I am just listening to one song on an endless loop, except that I have also learned how to say "I want to confess" in Mandarin, which is of dubious value in my life these days.)

I am a big fan of "Dear Confessor" because it seems like an apt metaphor for the uncertainty and potential for big changes in my life lately.
Maps won't show us where we're going, all they are is just the boring facts -- relax...



My other obsession is "C'mon, Sea Legs" which is my new favorite metaphor for anxiety.
C'mon sea legs, pull yourself together.
You're gonna have to learn to like the rockin' of the waves, whatever.
C'mon now, it's not meant to be easy
But you're not gonna spend your life being sick over the side.



I adore Kathryn Calder's voice, by the way, and I wish you could hear it a little more clearly in that video.

That's all. Have a lovely week!


*This is actually the reason that I run into my doorframe so often. Since Sarah and I mainly talk on AIM, whenever something exciting happens in a ballgame, I run to my room to comment on it on my computer. And I tend to go too fast, and skid a little on the hardwood floors, and then ow, doorframe. At the moment this is the most compelling reason that I need a laptop.

You know how it feels when you've lost your train of thought and you have a nagging feeling that whatever you were just thinking about was very, very important? That is happening to me a lot these days. But whenever I retrace my way back through my mind, I realize that it's not some urgent mental post-it note that had temporarily slipped from my grasp (errand to run, email to send), but some kind of comforting daydream that I felt like I desperately needed to retain. When I struggle back to that moment, instead of a crucial instruction for life I find a calm induced by the ripples in a slow-moving river, or the memory of how it feels to be hugged. They might not remind me to get quarters for laundry, but maybe those are the things I should be trying hard to hold onto, anyway.

My poetry group meets this weekend, and it would be incredibly clever if I had something written for that. Sadly, I'm not feeling terribly inspired at the moment. I have been thinking a lot about poetry lately, if not actually writing any, and what I have been thinking about is the use of the first, second, and third person in poems, which is something that I've handled more instinctively than deliberately in the past. I've become sort of fascinated by and addicted to the late-entering second person, where most of the poem goes by without a mention of a "you" and then it appears, strikingly, at the end.

Here's a silly example: The song "I Make Hamburgers" (you can listen here) by the Whitlams is about this guy who works in a fast-food place, and for some reason this makes him some kind of chick magnet. The song describes the different women who come in to the restaurant with whom he goes on dates. The guy sounds kind of arrogant and self-congratulatory until the end of the chorus, when the "you" suddenly appears (for the moment we're ignoring the "yous" where he's repeating conversations with the women he's dating in favor of the big, unknown "you" that the song seems to be addressed to, which might not make this the clearest example, but work with me here.)

I make hamburgers I get all the girls
And I take 'em out to dinner and I give 'em all a whirl
And if they work I keep 'em, if they don't I keep 'em too
But I teach 'em all how to be dirty girls like you...

So, okay, it's not exactly the height of romance, but after all that you're startled to find that actually, there's a torch being carried here. Which, without negating the self-congratulatory arrogance, is sort of cute.

A good actual-poetry example that everyone knows is Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art". It's hard for me to read it and be startled by the you anymore because it's so familiar at this point, but I remember when I first read it, after all the talk of losing things, reaching the last stanza where the you is lost was kind of heart-crushing. Even though I am not really much of a Bishop fan, myself.

Last weekend I was visiting Catherine and we started watching a documentary on Allen Ginsberg, which reminded me that "Howl" is another one of those poems. It lulls you for about three hours with those long third-person lines, and then suddenly towards the end of the first part, you get:

ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you're really in the total animal soup of time--

Which, for me, is just heartbreaking, and I love it. And frankly, (this probably makes me a bad poet) I find it easy to sort of get distracted during "Howl" because it is long, and I have a short attention span, and after a while I am just reading sounds without really comprehending, but this is the moment where I am brought back into the poem. (And also I get extremely jealous, because really -- while you are not safe I am not safe? Why didn't *I* think of that? Perfect, and gorgeous, and necessary. Sometimes I get very petulant because I think I was born after all the good stuff was already said, so I don't have half a chance.)

So one of the poems that I'm stuck on is something that I think would really benefit from the second person appearing out of nowhere at the end. And that's about where I am on it. Because the next thing that I have to figure out is what comes before that, so I guess I have to figure out how to write a poem backwards again.

earlier --