It’s been pouring since around 11 this morning. I’ve spent most of the day doing, well, nothing. I made some biscuits from scratch… had some soup… downloaded the Spore Creature Creator… watched some movies… it’s such a nice break. I even stepped outside in my rain boots to take some rainy day photos, but then the rain came down a little more heavily and the thunder and lightning started, so I opted to head back in the house. But I got this image of a gray, gray, wet day.

And this leaf struck me as pretty, though I couldn’t get close enough to get a better photo and without toppling over and getting soaked… so I did a little image enhancing to make it appear as lovely as it did to my eye in real life.

But the rain in NJ does a smashing job of beading up on my clear umbrella.

The thunder isn’t bad either. I’m entertaining the idea of going to bed at a disruptively early hour (now) since I’ve been sleep deprived for far too many weeks now and beginning to feel it more keenly than usual.

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(Note: I wrote this post Tuesday night and then forgot to hit publish. Was tired.)

Driving to the movies tonight, I spent a good 20 minutes driving in a sunshower… it was hot, the A/C was cranked, the sun visor was down because I was being blinded, and the windshield wipers were at the medium speed setting because it was a goodly amount of precipitation. I tried to see if I was on the leading edge of a storm cloud because all I could espy ahead of me and around me were fluffy clouds with sunlight streaming through them.

In the end, I thought to myself, “The rain must be coming from the next cloud over. The one I can’t see.”

I realize this is usually the case.

Two more pictures - some lovely silver hoop earrings I bought today:

And secondly, a bobble-head ninja for my car:

The story: my old car had a bobble-head maneki-neko (Japanese lucky cat) I kept on the dashboard. I’m not superstitious; however, since that car ended up smashed into the back of a parked SUV after I had an unavoidable skid across wet leaves on a rainy October night - and since my sternum and ribs were bruised and required a visit to the ER, bed rest, and a prescription for Percocet - I’m thinking I don’t want to mimic that pattern or set-up: driving a Mazda with a bobble-head cat.

I am driving a different Mazda, and a ninja is a better figurehead.

It’s raining. Tomorrow will be a day for spring cleaning; tonight will be Netflix night. I have I’m Not There (the movie in which six different actors, including Cate Blanchett and Christian Bale, portray Bob Dylan), Sunshine (potentially bad sci-fi movie with Cillian Murphy/his ridiculously lovely blue eyes) and Wristcutters: A Love Story which I watched last night with friends, but merits re-watching.

While I was in San Francisco, my friend Aaron recommended Christopher Hitchens’ “The Portable Atheist” to me while we were shopping in City Lights Books. I didn’t buy it there (more stuff to lug back) but I did get it when I got home and started reading it this morning since I finished up Michael Chabon’s “Maps and Legends” last night.

In Hitchens’ intro, there was a passage that resonated with me:

…the working assumption is that we should have no moral compass if we are not somehow in thrall to an unalterable and unchallengeable celestial dictatorship. What a repulsive idea! … [It] constitutes a radical attack on the very concept of human self-respect. It does so by suggesting that one could not do a right action or avoid a wrong one, except for the hope of a divine reward or the fear of divine retribution. Many of us, even the less unselfish, might hope to do better than that on our own. When I give blood, for example (something that several religions forbid), I do not lose a pint, but someone else gains one. There is something about this that appeals to me, and I derive other satisfactions as well from being of assistance to a fellow creature. Furthermore, I have a very rare blood type and I hope very much that when I am in need of a transfusion, someone else will have thought and acted in precisely the same way that I have. Indeed, I can almost count on it. Nobody had to teach me any of this, let alone reinforce the teaching with sinister fairy tales about appearances by the Archangel Gabriel. The so-called Golden Rule is innate within us, or is innate except in the sociopaths who do not care about others, and the psychopaths who take pleasure from cruelty.

Yuh-huh. Every time I donate blood, it’s not because I fear divine retribution. It’s because it’s something I can do that will help someone; it’s just considerate (like holding open a door for someone with a stroller, actually leaving a penny in the “give a penny/take a penny” cup, seeing that someone dropped their wallet/keys/money and returning it to him/her, allowing someone to switch lanes during crappy traffic, etc.). From there, it turns into a bad movie starring Haley Joel Osmont, Helen Hunt and Kevin Spacey.

Now, in the realm of things that don’t inspire my faith in humanity: automotive body damage.

While I was pulling away from the train station this evening, I heard a THUNK on the side of my car. I pulled over, got out, and took a look - little dent, little scratch… and a softball on the ground nearby. There’s a baseball field somewhat close by, but the field, diamonds, bleachers, etc. are all on the entire opposite side of where the train station is. But there was a little boy just throwing a ball around and he decided it would be fun to throw it TOWARDS the train station where there’s a fun wooden building. SILLY ME, letting my car get in the way of his ball-tossing. Silly commuters, all of us getting off of the train - it could’ve been any one of us. The kid saw me get out of the car, mumbled, “Sorry” and went back to playing. I inspected and rubbed away the dust with my finger, and shot him The Eye. This elicited an annoyed, “Sorry!” (if I’d been closer, I’m sure he would’ve been muttering something like, “Geez, lady” under his breath. That was the tone).

I replied, “Be careful. You don’t want to break someone’s window or put a big dent in someone’s car. It can be really expensive to fix.”

“Sorry.” (back to tossing the ball)

The woman sitting near him (mother? coach?) just looked at me, took a drag of her cigarette, and went back to watching the kids playing on the field across the way. Ugh. I did the “I’m disgusted” head shake, got back into my car, and drove off.

I got home, checked it out closely, cleaned it off, and will do the touch-up paint thing early next week. The next few days are going to be drizzly leading up to a “rain event” on Sunday. Rock.

There was going to be an Elton John song posted here, but that will wait for another day.

A meandering post, in list format… some things I want to do.

- Learn to tune a guitar (my friend has a guitar she’s offered to give me since she’s not touched it in something like 4 years… and it’s made for people with smaller hands and shorter fingers, so it would help solve the one problem I was having when I started learning this past fall… my fingers are short so I was having trouble playing certain chords because my fingers couldn’t reach the strings across frets).
- Learn to play a song on the tuned guitar.
- Learn to sew with a sewing machine and pattern, not just needle and thread.
- Sew a skirt for the summer.
- Study up on photography and become proficient using the manual features on my camera to take interesting and fetching photos.
- Participate in my company’s corporate walk in Central Park in June.
- Start learning another language (I know someone who can hook me up with Rosetta Stone software for basically any language - French and Japanese are the main contenders right now. Maybe I’ll go for both.)
- Do some market research/conduct an internal focus group at work (honestly, it would be a lot of fun to do with the product line I intend to center it around).
- Take some day trips to fun places either by myself or with friends.
- Go to more galleries and museums.
- Convert a friend (or family member) to a climbing buddy and maybe even get them to go for belay certification. Call me an evangelist.

I bought some cute rain boots today. My Saucony Jazz sneakers, while incredibly comfortable, are not meant for puddle jumping, walking through wet grass, or other such rain-related activities. So I got to work with wet feet and that sort of set the tone for the day; I was a little mopey and “meh.”

On my way back to pet-sitting land, I stopped at a shoe store called Jubilee (B’way btw. 76th and 77th Sts) and bought the same rain boots I was ogling on Saturday. They were on clearance, they are cute, and they only had one pair left in my size. And they aren’t black, which is quite a change.

My friend Sara was up visiting the NY metro area this weekend, so she came into Manhattan yesterday morning and spent the majority of the day with me. We had tea, walked a bit, did some shopping, walked some more, took the dog I’m sitting for on a super long walk in the park, ate some yummie vegan-friendly foods and had more tea.

Throughout the day, we were both finding it difficult to think of the words we wanted to use - this resulted in made-up words (I’d call them neologisms - but I’m pretty sure they’re not real), saying the wrong words (but knowing what we meant) and just lots of “I know this!” moments/”tip of the tongue” syndrome (lethologica if you can’t remember the right word; anomia is a more severe version of this that comes with aphasia - impairment of speech due to brain damage). In both our cases, this was due to lack of quality restful sleep - and I find that’s the first manifestation of sleep deficit in my world. All this week I’ve been struggling to think of words - words like “attrition” and “tomb”, for example.

Today, I’ve been feeling gross and headachey, so aside from walking the dog, my activities have included watching movies, reading and doing NYT crossword puzzles. Between last night and now, I’ve watched “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” (impressed), “Juno” (underwhelmed), “Hairspray” (surprised), “Bride and Prejudice” (Bollywood version of Pride and Prejudice - Naveen Andrews line-dancing = strangely hot), and, randomly, the E! True Hollywood Story of the Kardashian family (because I thought to myself, “What the hell are they actually famous for? I’m still asking the same question…).

Aside from seeing Sara, these are all just empty diversions and I am aware of it. I spoke with my mother in Poland today; amidst everything else, she had forgotten it was Mother’s Day. The service for my grandfather is tomorrow, and I lost it a little when she told me about picking out the urn (he wanted to be cremated, so that was done on Friday) and going over home renovation plans with my grandmother to make sure that she’s safe now that she’s going to be alone (another hard realization).

She mentioned to me that she’s reminded of my grandfather everywhere she looks… when coming back from a cousin’s house last night, she looked up at the balcony of my grandparents’ home where my grandmother and grandfather would always stand and wait for us when we were arriving from the airport or from being out somewhere anytime we came to visit. We would pull up and they would be standing up there together, waving down at us and smiling. I can see them; it’s an extremely vivid memory. Now, she said, it was just my grandmother standing there waving to them - and I can’t write about that anymore.

And this is probably too personal for the direction I want to be heading here, too much information, and I think I shall end this post now.

While I’m quite used to paying a little extra for everything when I’m in Manhattan, it’s sometimes still a bit of an adjustment.

For example, I just stopped at a supermarket here to get some food for the weekend: a bag of baby spinach leaves, a can of beets, small tube of goat cheese, box of cereal, carton of orange juice, a lemon, a couple of tomatoes, a container of chocolate-covered raisins, loaf of whole grain bread, jar of peanut butter, jar of jelly and (my luxury) two medallions of filet mignon ($11, so that wasn’t too bad). Stuff to make salads, sandwiches, breakfast and a couple of dinners.

The total bill (for me to eat this weekend) was $67. Granted, if I went out for all those meals, I’d be paying a lot more, but I couldn’t help but think about how the same stuff would’ve cost me no more than $40 “back home.”

And for that moment, I felt a bit stodgy and country bumpkin-like. But I understand that that’s what it costs if I want to eat well and not get McDonald’s for every meal or eat toast from morning ’til night. I have friends at work who will do their food shopping in NJ before heading home to NY at night so they can save $10 or $20 or $30. I was toting a suitcase today, so that wasn’t an option.

Still, it’s going to be a nice change to be here for the weekend: spending time with an adorable doggie, walking in the park and taking photos, meeting up with some friends, and just not being home (where the quiet would probably begin to affect me, given the events of this week.)

On the brief walk from my office to the train station, I had a few moments of crazy sensory awareness. Or was this the closest I’ll come to a moment of Awareness? It was mostly auditory and visual. Eh, I don’t know. Anyway, I was aware - all at once - of:

Sound: helicopters overhead, the puffity-sucking sound of an old man smoking his pipe alongside me, the jangling of metal dog tags on a pair of dogs getting walked, seagulls crying, the rhythmic splashing of water against the dock, the soft sounds of my ballet-flat-clad footsteps compared to the clomping of the business men walking ahead of me, the old man speaking in Italian on his cell phone and repeating “ciao” over and over trying to get someone off the phone, the possibly-homeless man repeating, “Good evening, spare some change?” to every passerby, the wind whistling and rushing by my ears when it kicked up, rush-hour horn-honking a few blocks off…

Sights: the Hudson River catching the light of the late afternoon sun and splaying it along the train station and wood of the dock, long strips of sunlight cast onto the walkway from between the buildings to the west of the river, the tendrils of smoke from the old man’s pipe moving very slowly and thickly despite the windy day, the tessellations formed by the hexagonal stones of the walkway, the tips of my striped shoes appearing and disappearing rhythmically from under the hem of my skirt…

…reminding me of something Stephen Pinker wrote - that one of the most amazing things we do as true bipeds is walk upright. With every single step, we’re defying gravity and saving ourselves from falling by just a fraction of a second. A toddler learning to walk really is a big deal in those terms.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have much in the olfactory sense group since I didn’t take my allergy medicine and am a congested girl.

In other news, I will be Twittering a bit (again, after my aborted efforts last year because it bored the crap out of me) every now and again. It will be an easy way to post quick stuff when I’m on vacation–or when I’m just really busy this week.

I feel compelled to do some Pilates and go running since my rock-climbing plans for tonight didn’t pan out. I happen to have gotten all addicted to a sport that requires a partner; this is highly uncharacteristic of me, but it happened. Tough. The friend with whom I climb regularly and have climbed regularly since September (”my climbing buddy”) is on the West coast at the moment and, thus, not able to belay for me. My efforts to arrange otherwise didn’t pan out for tonight, but I’m making an effort to arrange something for tomorrow night. If not, I will be doing a LOT of running. It’s just not as fun or rewarding or challenging. Boo-hiss.

I can’t believe it’s 9:00 already. I guess that’s what happens when you get home from work after 7, though. The hours run away like horses over the hill… to adapt and paraphrase a phrase. But something that will feel wonderful will be collapsing into my bed tonight and maybe getting rid of this headache. Ah, bed. Ah, slumber. You elusive temptresses.

…since I’ve mentioned my obsessive reading habit. It’s still here; it’s just sometimes a bit overwhelming to write about reading because I do a LOT of it. A LOT.

And I’m not really good at writing about reading. I can analyze ’til the cows come home and write you a lengthy paper performing a close-reading of three lines from Hamlet - but I’m not a good reviewer. This is something I’ve come to terms with and can accept.

Instead, I’ll just mention two books I read this week, quote a bit from them, and make note of the fact that I really really enjoyed them. Good? OK.

Book the first: Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading. One of my greatest regrets from college is that I wasn’t able to take the Nabokov colloquium that NYU offered, like, once every two years. I took the James Joyce colloquium and that was great - but Nabokov does rate higher than Joyce on my literary love list.

So, Invitation to a Beheading is pure Nabokov in terms of his use of language and voice; the plot, however, is allegorical and surreal in a very Kafka-esque way. The very first line of the novel is the pronouncement of the death sentence for the protagonist - from there, it’s a psychological exploration of that waiting game. He knows he’s going to be executed, but doesn’t know where or when, and the cast of characters surrounding him (prison guards, lawyers, fellow prisoners) serve only to frustrate him further and drive him to lunacy.

It’s hilarious, frustrating as hell because you’re in the same boat as Cincinnatus (the protagonist), and I enjoyed it thoroughly. There’s a great segment where the narrator calls attention to our process of reading the book:

So we are coming to the end. The right-hand, still untasted part of the novel, which, during our delectable reading, we would lightly feel, mechanically testing whether there were still plenty left (and our fingers were always gladdened by the placid, faithful thickness) has suddenly, for no reason at all, become quite meager: a few minutes of quick reading, already downhill…

I found myself smiling while reading that passage since I do read that way; feeling ahead with my right hand and deriving pleasure from feeling that there are yet pages and pages to read. This isn’t the only reason to enjoy it–there’s a gem of some sort on every page (IMHO). But I really enjoy Nabokov.

Then there’s Paul Auster. He’s another one–I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve ever read by him. And I’ve read a good bit. Not everything yet, though. That’s a goal. The most recent thing I read was Oracle Night which I purchased at The Strand a couple of weeks ago. I started reading it on Saturday night and finished up on the train today.

But I’m realizing that I should hold off on the Auster-love for tonight and hit the hay since I have an early morning tomorrow…