Things to do in Charlotte: The Whitewater Center

I recently had two little adventures at the Whitewater Center. First, I went mountain biking. Let me tell you, mountain biking and I: we are never going to be best friends. This is the third time I've tried it and it always ends like this scene from The Princess Bride: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqaNi0UfOoI

As you wish, tree stump my bike ran over, as you wish. I think the time has come to sell my mountain bike and just buy a cheapish road bike with a few gears that I can use for regular, lazy biking. The main thing standing in my way is my total lack of knowledge about bikes. I imagine trying to write a craigslist post for my bike and all I can come up with is:

One mountain bike. Red.

It's definitely red.

I fared much better when I went kayaking on the Catawba River. I love kayaking; I try to get as much of it as possible in (on the ocean) whenever I go home to the DR. It was so great to be out on the (very) calm river in the evening. It reminded me of rowing while I was in high school in New Hampshire. Something about the low-slung late-summer light was particularly evocative. I only did one term of rowing, because I didn't love the vomiting into trashcans after intense indoor practices, but the river on a spring evening I could've loved every day forever.

Ursula Le Guin's "The Farthest Shore"

This is the third book from Le Guin's Earthsea Cycle, and also the third book of hers I've read. One particularity of Le Guin's style that people seem to find sort of objectionable (on Goodreads, anyway) is how impressionistic it is. I wonder, though, if it's because fantasy and science fiction tend to be such overwhelmingly male genres and Le Guin's writing (to me) feels so essentially female. So yeah, there's not a ton of physical description and there's a lot of introspection. It gives the books this dreamlike quality that maybe is not for everyone. Personally, I don't understand how anyone could prefer pages and pages of tedious description or impossible-to-remember fictional history (I am looking at you, Silmarillion), but to each his own, I guess. In this particular book, Ged (who has been a main character for the two previous books) has risen to Archmage. All over Earthsea, magic suddenly begins to disappear. As magic drains away, a malaise spreads over the people, such that their lives are full of sickness, conflict, and a weird sort of resignation in the face of it all. I am not even going to feel bad about partially SPOILERING a book that was published in 1972, so I'm going to go ahead and say that the source of the problem turns out to be that one dark mage has unlocked the secret to escaping death, and become immortal. In opening a rift between the land of the living and the land of the dead, he causes the entire world to enter a state in which it can neither fully live nor fully die. Ged, along with Arren, a prince of Enlad, sets out to stop Cob. Mostly the book worked for me as a parable about the paralyzing effects of fear. In this case, a great fear of death prevents the full flourishing of life; by escaping death, the dark mage and those who follow him also essentially escape life. In the end, the plot of The Farthest Shore is the most traditional one Le Guin has come up with among the three books I've read. There's even a prophecy about a great king and a solution that only comes at very great sacrifice. On the other hand, the book is basically the Tao of Earthsea. It turns out Le Guin was heavily influenced by the Tao?

Which gives me a great excuse to post a favorite passage from the Tao--one I think Ged would like--because why not?

"Therefore the Master

acts without doing anything

and teaches without saying anything.

Things arise and she lets them come;

things disappear and she lets them go.

She has but doesn't possess,

acts but doesn't expect.

When her work is done, she forgets it.

That is why it lasts forever."

PS-I really love Stephen Mitchell's translation of the Tao (which is where this little excerpt is from).

Kobayashi Issa

This weekend, I read a book of Issa’s haiku. His poems are full of humor and melancholy; apparently he had an incredibly tragic life. He does more with a few words than some people (me) do with whole pages. Here are some favorites: This world of dew is only a world of dew - and yet…

*

Just to say the word home, that one word alone, so pleasantly cool

*

As the great old trees are marked for felling, the birds build their new spring nests

*

The snail gets up And goes to bed With very little fuss

*

In my old home which I forsook, the cherries are in bloom.

*

For you too, my fleas, the night passes so slowly. But you won’t be lonely.

*

A world of trials, and if the cherry blossoms, it simply blossoms

Snow leopard cub, king of my heart.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Jk4J1dsEJ44

This was on Jezebel today. Sometimes you just need to watch a snow leopard fall off a branch. I've watched this like 5 times today.

Some books...

Here are some books I have read these last months: I read Tan Twan Eng's The Gift of Rain and The Garden of Evening Mists. Both books are set in Malaysia during WWII, and both are concerned with how people coped with the Japanese invasion. It seems to me (and maybe it's just something missing from my own education) that one doesn't hear nearly as much about Asia's war as one does about Europe's, although the scale of atrocities is similar. For example, China is second only to the Soviet Union in number of war deaths. So, it was fascinating to read both of these novels on that level. Furthermore, Eng is a really gifted, empathetic writer, and his characters are rounded, full of contradictions and self-delusion. Both books are beautifully researched; brought to life by vivid detail. There is such a love of place in both stories. Of the two, I thought Garden of Evening Mists was superior, even though I would say that Eng's rendering of his female protagonist was just a little bit...masculine? It didn't really bother me when I was reading; after all, you can put a lot down to idiosyncrasy. I only noticed it later, when I was nit-pickily looking back on the whole thing. The stories are quite similar, in that they both feature a young, local protagonist falling under the sway of an elder Japanese mentor with whom he/she has a complicated relationship. It's almost as if, having written The Gift of Rain, Eng thought he could do the whole thing just a little bit better, and did.

I read another 100 pages of Infinite Jest this past week. I'm sure you're wondering why I'm mentioning this book I haven't finished here, but it feels like an accomplishment. This book is a slog. The internet tells me it's going to be worth it. I have to say though, Foster Wallace is not exactly my kind of writer. It sometimes feels like he hates all his characters. Which is fine, except why should I care, then? Every time I read this, I have this image of Foster Wallace just sitting at his desk, sweating and working so, so hard. Every sentence feels labored. He sure doesn't make it look easy. You read Alice Munro, for example, and you can delude yourself into thinking, "hey, I could do this." She makes it seem so easy to write something great.

On the other hand, I listened to Consider the Lobster on a road trip, and it was excellent: melancholy and sharply observed. Especially the essay on the Maine Lobsters Festival. As I later learned, the audio version is super-abridged from the book...but it's read by DFW himself, so...

I am currently reading Rivers of Gold, Hugh Thomas's history of the early years of the Spanish Conquest (from Columbus to Magellan, as the subtitle would have it). For my purposes, no detail is too minor, but if I were reading this for funsies and not for book research, I might wonder if it's necessary to know the name of every banker that ever gave Columbus a maravedi and every Genoese merchant living in Spain and the name of every sub-assistant to the Inquisition that blablabla. 

I have also been listening to hundreds (seven) of the Mrs. Pollifax books, which (if you're not familiar with them) are a cute series of adventure/mystery stories about a middle-aged widow who inveigles the CIA into recruiting her as a spy. They're set in the bad old days of the Cold War. They're buzzy, light reading. I gardened to these in the spring.

AND OF COURSE, I continue to both read and listen to the Disc World books. I often think about Terry Pratchett and his Alzheimer's and I wonder if it's any comfort to know you've created something so wonderful as the Disc World.

Inside the Apple

Recently, I've been re-reading (for about the hundredth time) a collection of poetry by the late Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai. Amichai was assigned reading during my first creative writing class ever (in college), and I can remember so clearly reading one particular poem of his, "Inside the Apple," for the first time. It was printed all crooked on that extra-thin 8X10 you always got at the school copy place. To me, it's a perfect poem. You know how sometimes things are just precisely in the key of you? Sometimes I wish I could read it with someone else's brain; I love it so much, I wish I could meet it again. But anyway, here it is:  

Inside the Apple

You visit me inside the apple. Together we can hear the knife paring around and around us, carefully, so the peel won’t tear.

You speak to me. I trust your voice because it has lumps of hard pain in it the way real honey has lumps of wax from the honeycomb.

I touch your lips with my fingers: that too is a prophetic gesture. And your lips are red, the way a burnt field is black. It’s all true.

You visit me inside the apple and you’ll stay with me inside the apple until the knife finishes its work.

How I feel after a night of little to no sleep.

When I haven't had enough sleep, a funny thing that happens is that I feel the complete range of human emotions every 15-20 minutes.  Here I am, getting up this morning:

Discussing things I need to do at work:

Ordering lunch:

The best/worst part about today is that a small portion of my mind has remained unaffected, and it's just sitting there mocking me like "Are you crying about your dog dying IN THE FUTURE? HAHAHA."

Human Hair Buffet

Now that Spring is well under way, I've taken up gardening again. Last year, I didn't do anything except water my plants, and I can't pretend my front yard didn't look like something a depressed second grader drew in therapy. Basically, gardening is fun if you love being outside, but also want a contentious relationship with nature, which obviously I do.

And so it has come to pass that I have been reminded once again of humanity's no. 1 enemy:

I imagine that every time a slug bellies up to my yard, it must feel the same kind of joy a compulsive eater feels when they see a Golden Corral. No. 2 on my hit list is either deer or rabbits, but let me tell you why. Come with me on a journey to a time three years ago when I fell in love. The object of my affection: hostas. Just look at them...

I mean, it's fine if you don't get it, just picture something you get the sweats for, like a fancy bike or a steak. I planted three of these beauties and beside slugs giving them a swiss cheese look all summer, every year, EVERY YEAR, something chooses the second before they bloom to just eat them down to little green nubs in the earth. Luckily for me, they are the sorts of plants that just go dormant and are then reborn in the spring. I am determined that this year will be different.

The other day, I looked online for a solution to my problem. People had lots of nice suggestions for my slug problem (eggshells everywhere, bowls of beer for them to drown in), but really only one suggestion for my deer or possibly rabbit issue: human hair.

Yes, human hair.

Apparently the smell scares them off. This sounds great, but I'm sort of concerned about how walking into a salon and demanding hair off the floor is going to make me look. Should I bring my own bag? Should I go to my own salon where they know me, and risk looking crazy there, or to a strange salon where they don't know me and will probably imagine that I'm using the hair in a voodoo ritual? What does one wear to request human hair? I assume it's dirty sweatpants, gardening boots, and a crazed look in one's eye. Maybe a caterpillar to fall out of one's hair at a strategic moment. Because that's what I'm wearing all summer.

I just want everyone to know that if I had a SPAM name, that name would be Tabitha Warpl.

As I go through my 1200+ comments that I received while this blog was abandoned on hiatus, I find that SPAM names seem to be composed of the kind of first name someone would choose if they were a teenager who read too much Victorian fiction, and something that sounds like a last name but patently is not.

Thomas Stroptar...Vivian Pertff...Dorothea Heimmml...I mean, how does one go about becoming a spammer? Because I don't want to brag (yes I do), but I think I might be the Don Draper of SPAM names.

Resolved

For the new year, here are some modest goals:

-To visit the UNC Botanical Gardens and the Congaree National Forest, when the Spring comes.

-Be more intense about exercising (hahahahaha). I guess at least I'm exercising regularly? For a while there, I was really into crossfit. It's just...so much muchness. This is me at the gym lately:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ue6l7P5lROY?feature=oembed] 

-Update this blog more, duh.

-Be more patient and less....judgemental and negative

-Find a fun summer sport challenge...this year's was bootcamp. Sailing?! Is sailing a sport? Climbing?!

-Cook more things from Sunday Supper at Lucques, my favorite cookbook.

My own personal Questing Beast.

Did you ever read The Once and Future King when you were a kid? You SHOULD have. You didn't? Don't worry, that's why we have Wikipedia:

"As King Pellinore describes it, the hunt of the beast has always been the burden of the Pellinores, and all Pellinores are in fact trained for the hunt from birth... Having searched fruitlessly all his life for the beast, Pellinore is convinced by his friend Sir Grummore Grummursum to drop his quest. However, when it turns out later that the beast had been pining away for lack of attention, King Pellinore nurses it back to health and resumes his Sisyphean hunt."

I too am on a hunt. A quest, even. For The Most Perfect Walking Shoe Ever Made. I need it before I go on vacation in October. The things is that I enjoy walking while on vacation. Like between 5 and 10 miles a day. I also enjoy looking 'funky-fresh'. Look at how cute this girl looks while living out of a suitcase. Here is a graph I made:

So, to summarize, I need a shoe in which I can walk 10 miles, but that is also pretty enough to wear with dresses. It can't have a heel. It must be black or brown or gold or silver or covered in glitter, because those are the only colors I like. It can't make my legs look weird. It must have an interesting detail. It has to look good with my preexisting purses. I want it to last a full three years before it falls apart.

I mean, I am a simple girl with simple (first world, entitled) needs. Why can't I get what I want?

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3LxEo3Jbps?fs=1&feature=oembed]  

I'm so glad someone wrote a song about my feelings and someone else made a creepy video for it.

Sometimes it's only later that you realize you kicked fate in the shin bone.

I'm so excited about the luck I've had lately with weekends out of town. A couple of weekends back, I went to Wilmington for the first time: it's one of the friendliest, prettiest, most comfortable little cities I've been to here in the States. This coming weekend, I'll be visiting my little brother in Philly. Cheesesteaks, Philly Museum of Art, and blessedly cooler temperatures here I come! I'm so thankful every time I get to see a little more of the US. You would think it'd be easy to get out in your own back yard, but whenever I try to plan anything, there's always one complication or another. We are all so awfully busy, for one thing. It makes me extra-happy when things do work out.

Well. I got as far as Atlanta over the course of 12 hours. Then I came home. AirTran, you are a disaster. I'd love my luggage back. Kthxbye.

NOTHING ELSE GOOD IS GOING TO HAPPEN THIS YEAR. DO YOU HEAR THAT, UNIVERSE? NOTHING GOOD.

I'm so excited about the luck I've had lately with weekends out of town. A couple of weekends back, I went to Wilmington for the first time: it's one of the friendliest, prettiest, most comfortable little cities I've been to here in the States. This coming weekend, I'll be visiting my little brother in Philly. Cheesesteaks, Philly Museum of Art, and blessedly cooler temperatures here I come! I'm so thankful every time I get to see a little more of the US. You would think it'd be easy to get out in your own back yard, but whenever I try to plan anything, there's always one complication or another. We are all so awfully busy, for one thing. It makes me extra-happy when things do work out.

Mantra for the weekend: I WILL remember to pack a camera. I WILL.

Book for the weekend: The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis

Book for reading in the middle of the night if I can't sleep: Mort (by Terry Pratchett) 

Blog to inspire the most travel fantasies: http://www.exploredreamdiscoverblog.com/

Nothing-to-Do Puppy.

When I was little, my dad used to read me this book called "Nothing-to-Do Puppy." As far as I can remember, it's about this little dog who is so, so bored. The lesson is that boredom is just an illusion blablabla there's always something to do blabla. Only boring people get bored. That is not actually my current problem. 

I've graduated from school, which is exciting! And I'm working on a novel, which is more exciting! Except that a lot of the time it feels like nothing is happening. I have this enormous reading list of books that are for research, which aren't really fun to write about here. All my time is taken up with this silly project. Hmmm.

Anyway, I was looking through my phone today and I found the following list I made while at the airport a few weeks ago and then forgot about.

Some People You (I) Always See at Airports

1. People who cannot stop talking, ever. This is a disease exacerbated by whatever is going on at the airport.

2. Passenger who has never traveled before and is shocked by TSA's aggressive 'mope and grope' policy.

3. On the other hand, the guy who manages to walk through the checkpoint sarcastically. Oh, I'm gonna put my hands up now! Here they are! Oh, wow are they up! Whatever.

4. Girl suspiciously well dressed and made up for 4 am. ARE YOU A VAMPIRE? Please make me one of you.

5. One Latin American teenager with Louis Vuitton luggage.

6. Middle-aged Dominican man with mother who does not speak English.

7. Oddly accurate flight attendant who tells you you'll start boarding in three minutes.

8. A family dressed in pyjamas, carrying pillows. Almost always headed to foreign destination.

9. Some person making a weird list on her phone. God, wtf.

For my writing friends...

I have only recently started submitting my short stories for publication in a systematic way, and yesterday I found this great website (that you probably already know about, but I'm going to share it anyway): duotrope.

It lets you search for suitable lit mags with all sorts of different criteria (like acceptance ratio...whether they pay...how long your story/poem/whatever is), and you can track your submissions. I am still using my little excel spreadsheet that I made a few months ago for that, but anyway, it's pretty awesome.

It's like the Novel and Short Story Writer's Market, but less professional, and a lot more...desperate, I think is the word I'm looking for.

Edit: well, the link is working now. I need to stop throwing up posts in a hurry.

So excited about seeing Don Hertzfeldt tonight!

You've seen Rejected, right? He's here in Clt to screen his new movie...

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJYxCSXjhLI?fs=1&feature=oembed] 

Bonus:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lV5lnYlR58?fs=1&feature=oembed] 

Abuela Olga

Over the weekend, I said goodbye to my Abuela Olga, who taught me how to read, among other important things. Last night it was super hot in my room for mysterious, La Niña reasons, and as I always do when it's hot at night, I remembered a little piece of advice she gave me when I was five or so.

I often slept over at Abuela Olga's house when I was little. I would always sleep on the left side of her bed, because her house was full of three million relatives, and there were no spare beds, not even for an 'advanced in size' kid like me. Plus, her husband had died many years before and when I wasn't actively sleeping on it, she tended to use that side of the bed for storing a large host of impermanent, transitional objects like knitting and yesterday's newspaper. Back then, the electricity went out all the time in Santo Domingo...like three or four times a day. Abuela didn't have a generator to power her air conditioner, so if the electricity went out at night, it would get really hot, and I would lie there sweating and being chubby and angry.

One night, Abuela noticed how frustrated I was, because obviously I was tossing and turning like the self-involved little jerk I was, and she told me, "Ana, if you stop thinking about being hot, you'll stop being hot."

This is usually the part in the story where the narrator would be like, "My grandma was so wise, and I learned something that day." 

I did not learn anything that day. Instead, I started rage-crying. She got me a glass of water and a wet rag to put on my forehead. She was a very practical woman, really. Eventually, the overpowering smell of menthol in the room lulled me to sleep. She was seriously asthmatic and she was always putting on Vick's Vaporub.

Anyway, many years later I actually would realize how valuable and how strangely revealing that little piece of advice was. You can get over almost anything if you put your mind to it.

Sometimes it seems to me like my grandmother (my mom, too) was so much tougher than I am. She had to be, you know? Her husband died tragically, and at a young age, as did her sister (who was actually killed by a bus on the way to see my Abuela), and she ended up raising about ten children, only three of whom were hers. Nobody in my family thinks of her as a survivor, because she wasn't as tough as my great-grandmother, and she expressed herself in a particular language which sounded a lot like constant complaining. Nevertheless, she had a surprising tendency to just muddle through difficulty when everyone expected her to fall apart. A few years ago, out of the blue, she won a pastry contest and started a successful little pastry business. She worked until a few months ago, which I think says a lot about the sort of person she was.

I'm not someone who really believes in an afterlife in the traditional sense, but I do think that people live on in the memories of those whose lives they touched, and in that way I think Abuela Olga will remain among us more than most. Although we weren't very close these last years, I'm so grateful to have had my Abuela, not just because she was such an example of backbone, but because she gave me my mom. I know everyone thinks they have the best mom in the world, but in my case it happens to be true, and I have my Abuela to thank for it.

"...though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster."

February, at times, felt a little like this:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBIdcUxdgo0?fs=1&feature=oembed] 

Yikes.

And March? March, I barely know you, but I love you just for arriving. There were times I thought you never would.

In February, I finished a draft of my thesis, for better or worse, and handed it in to my advisor, and now I'm working on my craft essay. Then I'll hand that in, revise and hand in my thesis again, this time to readers, and I'll be...basically done with school (except for some presenting and reading out loud which I'm in denial about). I have to admit that my heart just wasn't in the short stories I was working on for my thesis, and that it's an immense relief to work on something purely factual this month. When I work on fiction lately, it reminds me of my very first writing class when I was 15. I handed in this piece of fiction and the teacher said "this reads like a police report." Which it did!

Aside from this Mindy Kaling book that I'm probably typing up the review for right now, I haven't read anything worthwhile in a little bit, but I'm totally on it, you guys. (Can you believe this is the only paragraph in this entire massive post about actual books? I know! This blog is going straight downhill. Soon I'll start posting gratuitous pictures of my outfits. Just kidding! I know no one wants to see my collection of J. Crew lounge pants.)

This summer, I am hoping to get a CELTA, and move someplace for a year to teach English. My biggest obstacle at the moment is finding Molly a good place to stay until we can be reunited. I'd particularly like the place I go to be Argentina, but we'll see. Moving to South America! It's a pretty radical idea for me. It's not something I would have envisioned myself doing a year ago, but once the idea was in my head it sort of became more and more appealing as time went on. I like the idea of living in a Spanish-speaking country again as an adult, of experiencing a different Latin America from the one I grew up in. So, that's the plan. Subject to change based on mood/events.

The idea of moving to a new place by myself (again) is sort of exhilirating, if poop-my-pants scary. Inevitably, I'm thinking a lot lately about the times I've travelled on my own. When I was 20 or 21, I went to Paris by myself. Just before, I had walked the Camino de Santiago with a little tour group. I had been unaccompanied by anyone I knew, but not alone. Paris was the first time I was really alone. I had like two hundred dollars in cash that was literally all my money in the world, because I'd spent the rest of it on this amazing, life-changing vacation. I stayed at this hotel on the Left Bank (I think it was by the Luxembourg Gardens...I can't be sure because I had a weird aversion to taking pictures back then). It was such a tiny, mom-and-pop sort of place that after a certain hour they just locked up, and you would have to let yourself into the building with your key. One night, I went to see a performance of a ballet, Romeo and Juliet, at the Bastille. It was amazing, of course, but when I went to take the metro afterwards, I realized I'd left my clutch by my seat.

I began to panic. I mean, I didn't know the French word for...anything useful. I ran back into the opera house, all the way back to my seat. And it was gone!

There's this point I reach whenever awful things are happening, where something becomes so awful--my keys! my money! MY MONEY! who was going to help me? DOOOOOOM--that it turns ridiculous and sort of comical. I stood there, picturing myself having to sleep on the Champs Élysées, like my friend Laura had had to that summer we'd been fifteen and in Paris 'learning French' (another time, another time). Having to fight a pigeon for half a croissant and whatnot.

I went to the ticket desk or the help desk or some place like that. And I don't know what I said to the man behind the counter, but I remember he all of a sudden pulled my little clutch out from behind the desk and handed it to me. Jesus, I was so relieved. Can you believe someone had turned it in with everything inside? I know ballet spectators are probably not the most criminal group of people ever, but come on. I was so giddy, so shocked that suddenly everything had turned out ok, that I decided to walk home. I took this long detour through the Latin Quarter, and all around me the city was so beautiful. So lit up, so crowded in parts, with everyone speaking this language that I barely understood, and then suddenly completely empty and all mine for blocks. I just kept thinking: I can't believe everything's ok and nothing at all is wrong.

Ironically, walking home is exactly the same thing I would've been doing if if I hadn't found my wallet, except I would've been miserable. I kept thinking about that too, how sometimes the difference between misery and this overwhelming feeling I had that I was the luckiest person on earth is mostly a matter of perception (if I had lost my wallet, I'm sure it would have been inconvenient, but fine; I'm lucky in that my family is never more than a phone call away, and always willing to help me out when I ask for help) (also sometimes when I don't ask). Even now, when I think about it, I feel some of that same...lightness. I was so grateful to have that whole night, the walk home, my stupid clutch. I suppose I'm writing this down so I can remember that even something that seems like a disaster can turn out ok, one way or another, and so I can remember to be open to seeing the grace in everything that happens. 

*The title of this--let's be honest--emo post is from the famous Elizabeth Bishop poem.

The Imagined Conversations of Ill-Conceived Characters: Anthropologie, Part Quatre

Next summer, I am going to be in my friend April's wedding. The other day, she was like “you will wear a sash” and I died and went to heaven, because if there is one thing I do not get to do enough of in this life, it's wearing sashes (sashaying? I mean, are those two things related?). But it made me wonder: “Hey, I wonder what's going on over at Anthropologie?” 

SIDEBAR: Not so long ago, I was foolishly charmed into buying a raincoat from the Anthro. Oh, day that I most rue! I am full of regret, you guys! Because my bright red raincoat BLEEDS when it gets wet. Right onto my clothes. That's right, I have a raincoat that can never, under no circumstances, get wet. It only makes perfect sense. I think about returning it—about marching into the Anthro with a full glass of water and the coat and threatening to stain a spotless white bedspread that looks like a doily—but it's just...so cute.

Lately, I have been extra-judgmental of everyone around me, because I am super-frustrated with my thesis (sorry, guys), and insecurity makes me mean, but I am a kindergartener in the school of judgement compared to Lucinda and Peony, who have recently agreed to go into business together. I know this because they sent me their brochure. I transcribe it in full:

"Hello, friend!

We hope you're having a nice time in your “house” this holiday season(many people I have heard of own apartments, and I don't want you to think we don't mean you, too). Are you ready, though, to make your “house” into a home?

Lucinda and Peony now offer decoration services to the public (!), as long as there's no mold where you live. My friend Jacquelinda tells me mold is very bad, so we don't deal with that kind of thing. I have a very sensitive nose.

Anyway, here is some wallpaper that I did:

It's good, isn't it? Peony told me to apply it up-down style, but I told her that was so cliché. I think it looks much better, much more artisanal, this way.

We do wall painting:

Peony told me not to do one of my “designs”, so I went ahead and didn't do a thing. If that snotty cow wants someone to paint a wall in some boring shade of greige, she can do it herself. Anyway, I love chipping paint. You know, it's very chic. Jacquelinda came by with something called a lead test strip and swabbed everything, and then said I needed to do lead mitigation. I put on a sweater, obviously.

In this picture you can see a water heater I fixed up:

It's working perfectly now. I don't know, it's just something I've always been able to do. My uncle, Milverton Potts, told me once I was a savant. He's the very worst hypochondriac and goes around diagnosing everyone. You shouldn't listen to him, I'm sure your thyroid's fine and you just need to eat less cheese.

We do furniture:

Here I am doing something I call “existence” where I just sort of meditate on a space for some time before I go out and find you something just perfect (below...the chair was already in place, but the sculpture was something I found in Tijuana). It's really important to just sort of “be”, you know. Just “be” in a space before you go out and buy something. Many times you can get great deals on furniture if you mention your mother!

We do details:

These are some candlesticks I made from other candlesticks.

Finally, these are the contents of my purse:

Peony keeps asking if I have the receipts in there. She's doing the numbers and boring things for our little business. Really, I don't know what she does all day."

A post about how to not update your blog for more than month.

You basically just grit your teeth and do it.

But I'll be back after the 28th, and I have so many books to review! I've been reading like it's my job, but actually it's for school.

I'm all about reading things this summer, and not writing stories, because the well is DRY.

Anyway, I found this on Amazon and when the description contained the words "science fiction" and "Victorian", I was like "stop saying all the magic words to me, Amazon" and bought it at once.