It’s Connie Francis. Singing “Siboney.” From the soundtrack of “2046″ by Kar Wai Wong.

I think the song was recorded in 1960. It gives me a bit of goose-bump action. Especially right at the end.

And I like the lyrics, despite their clichéd romantic nature… por ejemplo, “Oye el eco de mi canto de cristal” — “listen to the echo of my song of glass (crystal)”.

Xavier Cugat & Connie Francis - Siboney

Siboney, yo te quiero yo me muero por tu amor
Siboney, en tu boca la miel puso su dulzor.
Ven a mi que te quiero y que todo tesoro eres tu para mi
Siboney al arrullo de tu palma pienso en ti

Siboney de mi sueño si no oyes la queja de mi voz
Siboney si no vienes me moriré de amor
Siboney de mis sueños te espero con ansias en mi caney
Siboney si no vienes me moriré de amor
Oye el eco de mi canto de cristal
Oye el eco de mi canto de cristal
Oye el eco de mi canto de cristal

No te pierdas por entre el rudo Manigual

So I’ve decided that I need to pick up some freelance or part-time work to make it possible for me to accomplish some personal goals (getting rid of school loan debt, for example), but looking at Craigslist sucked away all the enthusiasm I had about this idea for changing and improving things in my life.

It’s making me feel like a worthless heap because I don’t know ColdFusion and I don’t want to be a nanny or do telemarketing. At the moment, those seem to be the only opportunities out there. I stress the phrase “at the moment” and the word “seem.” I know I’m not entirely rational right now and I am twisting things out of proportion just a wee bit.

Therefore, I’ve decided that I’m not going to do that now. It will destroy all the cheering up of eva that happened between last night and today. That would suck so hard.

Instead, I’m going to do more NYT crossword puzzles (see yesterday’s post re: the magical properties of Mr. Shortz’s crossword puzzle) and perhaps let some episodes of “The Golden Girls” play me off into slumberland.

Maybe I’ll get up in the morning and want to go running bright and early. It would be a change and an improvement on a small scale to start.

While I realize that there aren’t many peeps clamoring to hear my latest random musing on whatever, I know it’s not a best practice to disappear for a few days w/out posting. But I’m feeling particularly bummed and find that it’s better not to indulge in, um, self-indulgent self-pity and introspection when I’m in this state. It goes nowhere. Besides, I talked and cried for a long while with friends and I felt better and want to keep it that way.

So I’m doing lots of crossword puzzles. New York Times crossword puzzles. I bought a book of 365 of them with a funny cartoon of Will Shortz on the cover. As I told my friend Theresa earlier today, “when I write the letters in the boxes, everything makes sense.” It restores a sense of order in the same way that cleaning your surroundings helps restore a sense of order and CONTROL when your mind and emotions are in total disarray.

I’ll leave the cleaning for tomorrow.

I’ve come to an appreciation of wine fairly late in life for someone whose family is quite fond of the spirits. That’s partially because when I was younger, I didn’t like the wine my parents would have me sample at holiday dinners, etc. Perhaps this was because it was wine from a box.

Over the last few years, I’ve finally been able to enjoy wine on my own terms (which is important to the enjoyment of anything, really). I’m far from considering myself an oenophile, but I can at least tell the good from the bad. My favorite wine (at present/to date) is a shiraz. It’s lovely, but it needs to breathe. To that end, I’ve had to swirl and wait since I don’t have a decanter of my own… but I will soon!

I went over to a co-worker’s apartment for dinner a few weeks ago and she and her boyfriend cracked open a bottle of wine to go with dinner, and got out this magical decanter over here. It’s called the Versovino and it’s quite cool.

versovino® serves as a portioner. The glass sphere holds exactly 100ml. One bottle of wine holds 750ml, which translates to seven 100ml glasses, plus an additional 50ml. versovino® decants the wine glass by glass.

So I ordered one tonight from Dean & Deluca (one of the stockists of this item in the United States). Actually, I ordered the “Versovino® Wine Decanting System” which is the same thing except it’s described via more flowery language.

Decanter piccolino® the tiny decanter is what the experts at Versovino call this little gem. Created by the owner of an enoteca near Florence, it was designed to let customers taste single glasses of outstanding wines without having to purchase the whole bottle. Simply attach it to any bottle of wine and it decants exactly 100 ml. into the hand-blown glass sphere.

My friend Sara sent this to me today. And I love eeet. It’s called, “Peep Show.”

Oh, the details.

Note: this photo exists only because my back was turned. But I’ve cropped it to a satisfactory size. It’s from about 6 or 8 weeks ago - at least my hair is the same color. That’s me, about to ascend a wall.

My hands are all dry and raspy and torn up from tonight’s climbing; it’s great (really). Nothing that some Neutrogena Intensive “Swedish Norwegian Fisherman Love This Stuff” Hand Cream won’t help. I was never going to be a hand model - especially after the wrist surgery - so I feel good that there’s something I can do with these hands (Gimpy and Not-Gimpy). I thought they were going to be pretty useless.

I expressed a desire to go climbing more frequently to the friend with whom I climb; I climbed thrice last week, and it looks like I’m on my way to climbing thrice this week, too. Which is exciting. I still have to learn to revel in my little successes (because I don’t, but people who are ten times the climber I am do it for me - maybe because they see the progress in a big picture way, while I’m just dismayed that I wasn’t able to finish a problem - despite having done some good technical work that would’ve been beyond me even a couple of months ago… or so they tell me).

Anyway. It is a good feeling. I am beginning to feel the addictive pull of it quite a bit more. I’m still running on my non-climbing days, but I don’t derive as much pleasure from that - though I have also made strides (pun intended) there. Where a 3/4 mile rapid walk used to get me all winded and sweaty, I can now do 2 or 3 miles (depending on a variety of factors - how hungry and tired I am, if I wore heels to work that day) in the same time it used to take to do .75 miles. And I don’t get nearly as tired or winded.

Yay, progress.

I think I need to hit the stores tomorrow and buy a few new shirts for the impending milder weather. All my t-shirts have silly illustrations or sayings on them (notable shirts include: “Cocaine Blows”, “If There Was a Problem / Yo I’ll Solve It” with a picture of a calculator, “Reading is Sexy”, “Haikus Are Easy / But Sometimes They Don’t Make Sense. / Refrigerator) so I need to step it up and get some more work appropriate springtime gear.

Oh, here’s a picture of the shirts:

I subscribe to the Poetry Daily RSS feed and this was the poem from March 7th. It’s by B.T. Shaw—about whom I know nothing. But I will investigate further.

We End, Like Galileo

With years came diminishing ability to focus
on objects at hand. Pen nib. Collar stud.
Ruby nest of squab bones on a dinner plate.

Behind, then, the distance failed.
Northern hills and eastern olive groves
lost ground until the vineyards vanished
in soft wash of green chintz and gold silk.

He charted each loss in its sidereal arc.
Until the tipped stars, too, emptied the glass,
opening the curtain on everyday dark.

I blame the suckfest (that was today) on the time change.

Or perhaps my petulant four year-old inner child is to blame. I haven’t decided.

Waking up this morning sucked, getting into the car and having the gas light go to empty sucked, getting to the gas station and finding out that pump I pulled up to was broken sucked, being called “sweetie” by the gas station attendant also sucked, going to Dunkin’ Donuts to get a hot chocolate and whole wheat bagel with cream cheese was good - until I pulled up to the window to pay and learned that they were out of hot chocolate (I got chai instead) and out of vegetable cream cheese. I asked for scallion - to which they said yes… and then no. So I got no bagel with no cream cheese and just went to the train station to wait out the remaining time.

Once on the train, I was just overwhelmed by (non-bagel related) sadness of a nondescript and nonspecific nature and was sitting there like a fool, crying. Not bawling… but the tears were flowing in freakish silence and being dabbed away by a Dunkin’ Donuts napkin. Not the softest stuff, so I was quite rosy-rimmed in the eye region. I got to work, turned on my computer, and it froze up. I restarted it and then it refused to accept my password. I think one of the keys was stuck, so I just did some random hitting of shift and caps lock (case sensitive passwords) to jostle it loose and managed to login. Trying to print an agenda resulted in a printer error - not a jam, but an unspecified driver or software error that prompted a pop-up box stating, “printer error” with the only option being to cancel. I hit “cancel” and restarted my computer again. Meeting, meeting, lunch. Nothing looked appetizing, and I couldn’t even find something to provide pure sustenance sans enjoyment… so I went for the cheap option. A slice of pizza. Meeting, spreadsheet, cancelled meeting… and time to go home. On the train ride home, I was wedged between two over-cologned middle-aged men, which just made that 50 minute voyage endlessly pleasant.

For dinner, I explored the as-yet-unexplored (in my world) potential of Brussels sprouts. I have a vague recollection of wanting my mother to buy them for me when I was 9 and wanting to use them as huge heads of lettuce for my Barbie dolls. Instead, they were cooked and I distinctly remember a noxious sulfurous stench which has turned me off of them ever since. Well, according to the package, the sulfur stench can be avoided through proper preparation methods.

To that end, I cooked them for about 10 minutes in a little milk (low-fat), butter (not low-fat - but compensating for the fact I did not have heavy cream for this recipe suggestion), garlic and basil. Then I removed them from the heat and squeezed a little lemon juice on them, sprinkled chopped pecans on top, and added a little salt and pepper. Toss to combine and hey - they aren’t half bad and they smell pretty good, if a little garlicky (I’m not a huge fan of garlic, but it serves a purpose.)

You know what also serves a purpose? “Jump Around” by House of Pain. The purpose it serves: inviting me to make a fool of myself by rapping along to it. Yessir. Of all the things I could possibly remember from my high school days (useful things like calculus, history, chemistry, and perhaps even driver’s ed), this is what’s stuck with me.

House of Pain - Jump Around

And “One Pure Thought” by Hot Chip. The purpose it serves: making me want to dance (and my friend Sara can attest to this… I think we’ve done the whole “dancing in the car” thing to this song a handful of times now). Nothing else does that right now. It’s magical and mood-lifting.

Hot Chip - One Pure Thought

Until tomorrow, then. Arbitrary reassignment of time. Ugh.

I fully intended to come home, go running and then go shopping for spring sandals. But it’s raining. My wrist hurts. I would much rather get into bed and read a book while listening to the rain hitting the roof and the windows.

I think I’ll still go running (treadmill, indoors, Law & Order) but this might be a night to sit home, go to sleep early, and hope that tomorrow is sunnier - not in terms of weather, necessarily, but in terms of mood.

These songs seem appropriate listening choices:

The Dixie Nightingales - All I Need is Some Sunshine in My Life

Beth Orton - Don’t Need a Reason

Caetano Veloso - Cucurrucucu Paloma

Enjoy the tunes.

I’ll get to that answer.

I’m very tired (have been up and on the move since 5:30 this morning - at least I got some cool free books out of it) and I think being tired and a little stressed (busy busy busy at work) is affecting me emotionally at last. It’s what happens. Stress can take down both your physical and emotional immune systems like nobody’s business. There’s other stuff, of course (there always is) but it’s all stuff I just have to work out in my own damn head and not release as a burden on others.

I did get some new climbing shoes today, so that’s exciting. I’ve been doing the rock-climbing thing for a bit over 6 months now — and while I’m not doing a stellar job (OK enough to experience progress), I have to bear in mind that a) I’ve never been athletic, b) I am missing 3 of my wrist bones in my left hand and it’s still 60-70% weaker than my right wrist and c) I’ve only been at this 6 months.

My original shoes were OK - I didn’t spend too much on them because I wasn’t sure how far I was going to get with this. Well, yesterday, two people at the gym suggested I might need new shoes just because it seemed that the rubber on my (now) old pair was worn down due to normal wear & tear and not quite as sticky as it should be. I started looking a few weeks ago, but wasn’t positive that I needed them. Two suggestions in one hour = convincing. So I went over to an outdoor/climbing store after work and picked some up.

Those are the shoes over there [points up & left]. Some of the style names they give these shoes - esp. when they’re specifically for women - are pretty ridiculous. These are called “Siren.” Yes, siren… as in luring sailors to their deaths with a creepily hypnotic song. Then there’s a style called “Hottie” and another called “Elektra” (so you’ve got the choice of an awful Jennifer Garner movie or Marvel comics female ninja assassin… or return to an original spelling of Electra and you’ve got a Greek myth that gave birth to a Freudian complex called the Electra complex… female version of the Oedipus complex, in a really general sense.)

It’ll be good to try those out next time I go to the gym. Let’s hope they make a difference and give me some more confidence in my climbing. Sometimes a small exterior change can make all the difference to a personal perception and defeat a mental hang-up. Not the placebo effect exactly… but related, I suppose.