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I started doing that meme where you answer questions about your year - what you've never done before, what countries you visited, the best thing you bought - and my answers were so deadly boring I could not bring myself to post it. I don't lack for anything and I don't want anything more. I didn't do anything of real importance and I had no big failures. Most of my money went to the mortgage. I didn't even buy anything good.

For the last several years when people ask me in casual conversation, "What's new?" I've replied by saying, "We're at the place in our lives where the victory is making it the same every day." I believe that is true, that it is the great victory of our family that E and I can provide our children with the utterly comforting routine that gives children a safe place to grow up. Still, it doesn't stop me from feeling bad when I see other people who have really done something with their lives, something in the sense that Betty Friedan meant when she skewered the importance of housewives.

When asked to describe living in Wyoming, I couldn't come up with much. Now, browsing pictures of things I never thought to take pictures of from my hometown, I can see why I was stumped by the question. None of what I know about home would make a good answer. None of it could write a brochure. I remember things that aren't interesting, things I saw and touched every single day, things I know intimately even when I'm sleeping, things like the Greenway project and the drainage tunnels I went into when things got too heavy in the house.

Grier Furniture, sentinel of downtown. First major business heading into a cluster of historic buildings turned shopping centers. Saw it to my right on countless days when we drove out to Denver, on days when we went to ride the horses at Tammy's, on days when we went as a family to LCCC.

LCCC, community college, mom's one-time place of business, sister's first attempt at a degree. Scent-memories reach at me from here when I'm not even thinking of home. I remember buying bag after bag of the original Cool Ranch Doritos from the closed cafeteria and sneaking them into the computer lab, placing them seasoned-side down on my tongue and sucking on them so nobody could hear me crunching. Downloading and printing endless pictures of Sailor Moon and Urusei Yatsura to stick around my wall, my first experience with the internet. The courtyard, the indoor bridge, the narrow stairs carpeted in orange, 80s design I didn't know at the time was 80s. Walked these by myself after hours while mom and sister were busy. Pretending to be in college, feeling important. I'm amazed at what I thought college was in those days, how everyone who was 20 seemed untouchable and wise. Now I know 20-year-olds I wouldn't trust with a $20 dollar loan.

Lincoln Theater, watched The Cell here. Watched Titanic here, 4 times. Watched Meet the Parents here. It was once a real theater - the screens are set back on wooden stages, draped by expensive curtains, framed in ornate, distracting carvings that reach out into the walls. I liked to imagine grisly backstage drama from another era leading to ghost stories if what I was seeing bored me, so that at least I could be scared by my own imagination, if not by the flick.

Greeley Ave, business. All business. Restaurants and shopping. A theater. My first job, Wendy's. The National Guard base at the tip, an architect with my name at the back (now retired). Much smaller when I lived there. Sister and I would sneak in the service entrances of the mall and I hid in one once from a former boss, touched the old gray paint and the pipe rail with my back flattened against the wall and thought what an interesting scene this would make if it were a movie and he were a killer. I know the bumps and curves of Greeley Ave, I know where it goes, I know how to get there. I know it.

My Tunnels. I called them mine because there was never anybody else there. I saw someone walking near them on my way through the field only one time, and thought I might start a fight if he was still there by the time I caught up - I was so possessive when I was younger. And I went through a phase where I was absolutely certain I could kick anybody's ass. Laughable. The water was full of pebbles and crawdads and I could fit inside each tunnel with room to spare, hiding from the hot sun and biting flies. When you're 15, this is paradise.

Her bedroom, always the same exact scent even when she changed locations and beds and clothes. Girl sweat, rose oil. Girl sweat and rose oil, girl sweat and rose oil. Her posters made me uncomfortable, she taught me about fetish and bondage, she introduced me to roleplay and losing yourself in unreal worlds. These things are now so much a part of me that they may as well be limbs, but I know my interest in them stemmed from an absolute need to mold myself into something she could appreciate. We sat on her roof and she trusted me enough to cry on me over something I can't even remember because I was paying too much attention to her hair. Spending all night on her computer because I didn't realize back then that I had issues sleeping in houses that weren't mine, so I was never able to warn friends about it, or their furious parents who didn't like me awake when everyone else wasn't.

I get tired of nostalgia, of remembering a certain kind of warmth, of throwing so much affection onto things I don't have anymore and can't get back again. It's a waste. It's exhausting. I think of things that didn't matter to me at the time and I ache for them, I ache for my obnoxious grandparents decorating the Christmas tree, for dank, musty houses, crumbling, 100-year-old houses that we all lived in, for Country Buffet and Kara behind the cash register, for that brief, shining era when my mother was a mother, a lonely, sad woman who welcomed a series of school nights where I woke up late and found her watching Apollo 13 over and over, and she made us homemade milkshakes.

I ache for the hot, rich smell of horses, for feeling their muscles churn between my legs, for watching their crisp furry ears turn to pay attention to things I couldn't even see.

I ache for familiarity, for the lighted soldiers at the Cole theater during Christmas and muddy, cruddy snowdrifts. For driving past any place, any time and wanting to scream, to urge, to insist, "I know this! This is a part of me!," but knowing that it's something only the self can appreciate.

I'm beginning to reject the abundant and direly necessary bad memories of Cheyenne like a kidney; I may need it, but my body isn't interested. It's the reason I hesitate at the thought of moving home, because to me, it IS home. It is not uncharted waters. It is not a new beginning. It's my history and my past, my fumbles and failures, my bad, bad days and my intense moments of pure joy. It's the place I took for granted when I lived there, and the place I might've built up too high now that I'm gone.

⌈ Secret Post #1091- ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

101.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 050 secrets from Secret Submission Post #156.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 1 2 3 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 1 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

There is a tradition of four different levels of Torah interpretation. The acronym for them is Pardes, which means orchard. The first level, the "P" is peshat, or simple, literal story level. There's nothing wrong with peshat analysis and, quite frankly, when it's my turn to lead Torah study I stick to peshat because I don't feel capable of more. However, I love it when the more educated people in the Torah study take it deeper, to remez or derash or sod, the allegorical and the subtext and the mystical - and I don't think that I would want to dive into a text that didn't hold the promise

I've been reading The Lightning Thief at the suggestion of my friend J. His son and B both read these books (because, of course, it can't be a kids' novel if it's not a series) and J said that they were good. It's not good.

There is no possible way to read this book except on the peshat level. There's a story, a narrative, and that's it. It's built, like the Harry Potter books, on one very clever conceit (that the Greek gods are still active and beefing with each other on Olympus, which has moved to the 600th floor of the Empire State Building, and they are still hooking up with mortals and having demigod children) that gets decorated with some clever details and some ham-handed ones. The protagonist, a strange and slightly troubled kid who has no idea that he's special, goes on adventures that are thrilling and resolve right on time, like a TV procedural.

And that's it. There's no character development. The main character doesn't go on an emotional journey. He figures out who his mysterious father is - but he doesn't learn more about who he is as a person. There's no artful writing, no striking form, no subtle message, no universal theme. There's no theme at all, there's just a story. It's not a good book. It's decently entertaining but it's not a good book.

Interesting interview here:
http://www.retrojunk.com/details_articles/6256/

Happy New Year!!!

Holy bejesus, I can make crepes! It turns out that they are the easiest thing in the world to make (although having use of what is allegedly a crepe pan might help.) For dinner tonight I in fact made black bean and corn crepes. They were a bit spicy and salty, due to my culinary miscalculations, but mostly they were delicious. In fact now that Katie has not come home yet, I am going to start on the ones that I was saving for her. *evil cackle*

I also have discovered that I love produce shopping, not because I'm good at it particularly, not even because produce is pretty (although it is), but because it's freaking cheap if you do it right. It's so easy to add little touches to dishes - scallions, carrots - for practically no money at all. I should start going to the farmer's market, though, because even the vegetables at the natural food store are mostly not at all local.

So far it appears that I do not have New Year's plans, which is rather depressing if I think about it too hard, since I've celebrated New Year's Eve with good friends every year since the beginning of high school, but I have sent a pathetic text to a friend and maybe something will come of that (although I won't blame her if it doesn't, since she has been working crazy holiday hours.)

I think the reason this New Year's is important to me is that it's going to be 2010, an ominous number that seems to stand for "the rest of my life." The first ten years of the 2000s felt somehow attached to the nineties, as they were after all my high school and college years, but now I feel like we're going into The Future. I felt the same way when I came back from England and discovered that in the six-month interim everyone had acquired shinier cell phones and was perpetually on Facebook or Twitter. This makes no sense because it's not like everyone in the UK doesn't also have shiny cell phones and a Web 2.0 obsession, but it still felt like I'd been in a time capsule and they'd just opened me up.

When you sit very still and clear your mind, you can feel everything happening, like Sartre's Nausea*, time wheeling on of its own accord. Maybe the air around you is silent and blank, but only as blank as the pages of the history books that have yet to be written.

But of course history and the future are nothing special; they're just ideas wrapped around the everyday events that have happened and will happen to everyone. Even still, the ideas become powerful and alter what they describe. Everyone watches and waits for the future to happen, hands clutching pens or poised above keyboards, and they forget that the future is not something that happens to us but something we partly make.

So I guess those are my extemporaneous, muddled thoughts for the end of the 2000s - the future doesn't exist yet, and we are the ones who will be responsible for what it look like.

...also, crepes are delicious!

*disclaimer - everything I know about Nausea is via the director's commentary for Firefly's "Objects in Space. I should probably read it though.

***

There is one thing I'm excited about for 2010: Neil Gaiman is the Honorary Chair of National Library Week! He is a huge library cheerleader so this is awesome. Also it means that his attractive personage will be all over various ALA materials. Haha, he thinks he was chosen because he is a famous author, but really we all know that he is just eye candy for the librarians.

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EDITOR IN CHIEF - KAZUHIRO SAITO. FASHION DIRECTOR-NICOLA FORMICHETTI. ART DIRECTOR - MARKUS KIERSZTAN

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From Vconfession.com, Moscow, Russia,Nov. 09
Photog. D.Zhuravlev
Style N. Sych
Model D. Polyakov

⌈ Secret Post #1090 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

101.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 04 pages, 123 secrets from Secret Submission Post #156.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 1 - broken links ], [ 1 2 3 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 1 2 - too big ], [ 1 - would hit it ], [ 1 - ships it ], [ 1 - take it to comments ], [ 1 2 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

I’m not sure what’s wrong with me today. I’d like to blame jet lag or that I woke up with yet another (thankfully mild) sinus infection, but I think it’s truer to say that all my plans for the future seemed to end abruptly at Christmas, and I didn’t notice that until today. I’m not sure what to do with myself now.

So I’ve stayed in my pajamas and taken all day to wash and hang up one load of laundry and... not much else. Ate some yogurt. Fought with some yarn (and lost).

I’m not doing that end-of-a-decade meme. I have been so wary of it that I haven’t even read anyone else’s. They’re big years, surely the biggest for me (not that that’s saying much; I’ve just started my fifth set of skin*), and yet I don’t want to look at most of them.

And the new year’s coming, but I don’t want to think about the future either. Not making any New Year’s resolutions sounds like putting it mildly. I don’t want to remind myself I have no goal or plan for my life, don’t want to disappoint myself again by failing to keep my promises to myself... and instead of solving these problems by creating goals or plans, or doing what I resolve to, I’ve decided to go for the “solution” of not thinking about them at all. Yeah, I’ll get back to you on how well that works.

I don’t feel upset about any of this, nor angry nor even depressed in the way people usually use the word. I just feel stuck, and I’m curious, more than anything else, to see what happens when (though I want to say if) I get unstuck.


* One day shinydan and I were talking about stupid myths and one of them was that supposedly every cell in your skin is replaced by a new one over the course of seven years. Having noticed a serendipitous connection between this concept and our then-upcoming birthdays, I pointed out that he was finishing his fifth set of skin just before I finished my fourth. In other words, I just turned 28.

So I just realized that the Skiffy article on Wikipedia, which mentions William and Mary's Skiffy, links to that club's webpage. I.e. the one that I designed.

This makes me warm and fuzzy inside, like I have contributed somehow to The Internet!

Also, I retook the Skiffy Purity Test and I am still 69.5% pure. Still impressive since there are over 500 questions....

Christmas was excellent! I ate an incredible volume of food on Christmas Day, failed at MarioKart, walked in the snow (haha, we got snow), and spent quality time with the people to whom I am related.

Also, my younger brother is moving from his current lame residence in New Hampshire to a much spiffier residence in a slightly larger city in New Hampshire, which will hopefully lead to his getting re-employed and not being poor forever. So yay for him.

Let's see if I can remember what I got for Christmas:
-several articles of clothing (including two sweaters, one of which I am wearing now)
-lots of earrings
-a Dream action figure from Sandman *squee*, from Graham
-an awesome apron and lots of hand-picked dessert recipes from my brother Ben and his fiancee
-handmade lavender soap from Matthew and Leilani, plus a late 19th/early 20th century copy of Dicken's Sketches by Boz, which impresses me with its very nice typeface and makes me think I should consider owning more crappy old editions of Victorian novels
-two copies of The Dispossessed (asked my mom for it, but Graham also knew I needed a new copy - oops), A Room With A View, Peter Pan (the original novel), a Tom Waits album, two vegetarian cookbooks, and a $50 gift certificate to Borders
-$50 from my grandmother, which is much appreciated for grocery-purchasing purposes

***

And now for a meme, via intertext:

List the towns or cities where you spent at least a night away from home during 2009. Mark with a star if you had multiple non-consecutive stays.

Haha, I stayed all over in 2009, especially since "home" was a constantly shifting entity!

Oxford, England
London, England
Paris, France*
Mestre, Italy (right over the bridge from Venice)
Florence, Italy
Marseille, France
Nîmes, France
Cardiff, Wales
Tintern, Wales
New York City, NY
Nashua, NH
Zuni, VA*
Farmville, VA
Middle Of Nowhere, VA (or wherever it is that Erika lives)
Niantic, CT
Naugatuck, CT
Westford, MA*

Um... I think that's all?

I’ve figured out the lesson of this Christmas.

I was worried about this a few days ago, when it looked like I couldn’t be grossly commercialistic (living off underwear and sweaters that didn’t fit me which is why they were left at my parents’ house in the first place, for most of the week) nor sickeningly sentimental (since I wasn’t going to get my usual food-eating present-opening family-visiting Christmas Eve and Christmas Day).

I woke up Saturday pretty early, walked out in my new Christmas-present pajamas to find my dad watching football. English football, Fulham v. Spurs (my poor dad trying to say “Tottenham”, when I asked who was playing, was worth the price of admission on its own). So we watched the rest of a tedious nil-nil draw together, me fielding questions about why they add time on at the end of the ninety minutes and why the goalies wear different-colored shirts from the rest of the team, and then cringing whenever I saw or heard anything about Jermain Defoe or Peter Crouch -- who were the only Spurs who seemed to do anything, dammit (other than the goalie).

Then I knew things were looking up, and sure enough our luggage finally arrived that morning and we got to have our Christmas Eve with my grandparents that day, only a couple of days late, with the promise of Christmas Day with my dad’s side of the family to follow the next day, as it should.

And yes I wouldn’t have chosen to spend Christmas Eve a bit glum, and trying to hold up my end of my mom’s crushing unspoken expectations for the perfect family Christmas. I wouldn’t have chosen to spend Christmas Day watching that damn Santa Clause movie again and then taking a (delicious but antisocial) nap.

Most of all I wouldn’t have chosen to listen to my mom describe this to everyone else as some kind of Odyssean voyage, Sisyphean labor, trial of Hercules. She and Dad described over and over, in loving detail the times of our flights, the nature of our delays, playing Chinese Whispers with their very own selves so the details were never quite the same in any two retellings. It was excruciating to listen to, not just because they seemed to make things sound more extreme than they had been most of the time but also because they were making it sound much worse than it felt to me. Mom was telling people we were depressed, we were disappointed at our Christmas, and we weren’t really.

To be honest it ended up mostly like any other year we’ve done this, except in some ways better -- we hardly saw my annoying aunt, my loud cousins were nowhere near, and my parents didn’t get a chance to drag us around a mall (as shopping seems to be the only thing they can think of to do for fun). Sure, we only had a couple of pairs of underwear to see us through until our luggage arrived... But hell, it was an adventure.

That’s the thing. This year wasn’t about material things, even I got to give the presents I bought for my family. It wasn’t about love and togetherness even though I got to see almost everybody I was expecting to. It was about framing. It was about the vast and often-underrated importance of how we structure the narratives we tell ourselves about our lives, what we chose to emphasize or ignore in the inevitable filtering process of creating stories and memories that are strengthened by repetition down familiar brain pathways. Thus my mom apparently thinks I had a depressing, disappointing Christmas. I think I had an adventure. (it’s already left a much greater impression than last year, of which I remember nothing particular.)

On belated-Christmas-Eve at my grandparents’, listening to them and my mom tell stories of Christmases past, I could already imagine how this one would be related in future years. It would be the one where Andrew and Holly travelled all day and their luggage didn’t make it for days afterward. It would be the one where we had so much snow Christmas was all but cancelled.

I went to church with my mom on Sunday, seeing it as always as nothing more than a good way to say hello to people I wouldn’t otherwise see on these brief trips, and one of those people was telling me this was the most snow we’d had at Christmas since 1946. This is hardcore history here.

And I’m thrilled to be a part of it. I grew up with people telling stories about things I hadn’t seen or been or done, and now I’m starting to have stories like that of my own, and that means a lot to me. Especially when it means I can continue to feel a part of the community I’ve left behind, fifty weeks of the year, but don’t want to lose touch with any more than I have to.