Notes at the end of the day.

1. Sometimes it is good to lower the bar, like when your alarm goes off at 6:30 and you think, screw it. 7:15 will be better.

2. Waking up coughing in the middle of the night could not be less delightful.

3. I like going to a meeting with people I like and kvetching about work in a friendly way.

4. That entity known as "Cling Wrap" occasionally over promises its clinginess vastly.

5. Getting in the car, ready to jet off to deliver green salad for 40, pasta salad for 20, and 120 water bottles to singing son's house, so they could take it and a half ton of more food to the Road Home for tonight's dinner, was made ever so much more enjoyable when running son came with and we listened to Coldplay and Sufjan Stevens on the way there and on the way back.

6. For, like, a year, I have been waiting for the guy and the girl to get back together on this, it must be admitted, perhaps less than stellar sitcom. A year or more. And finally it sort of happened on tonight's episode, and that was pretty darn satisfying.

7. I predict more coughing in the night. What the hell.

Let us review.

I think it is healthy, salutary, to pause at the end of something to assess what one has accomplished. What one has learned, if you will. And it is in this spirit of self-assessment that I offer firstly a consideration of what I thought I might accomplish this summer; secondly an enumeration of what I did indeed accomplish this summer; and thirdly, a reflection upon what the two data sets, compared, might reveal.

Firstly. I said I would make movies, write poems, revise a couple of manuscripts. I said I would "Gather my wits and be the happy genius of my house" and that I would lay "hands upon a will, a desire to start again, an urge from which I will not be diverted." I also had ancillary plans to organize and order my house.

SECONDLY. What follows is a detailed but not complete listing of my accomplishments since I turned in my grades in May:

1. I organized the footage for exactly one video, as yet incomplete.
2. I did a radical and far-reaching inventory of my poems, both manuscripts, to better understand what my poetic project is and what my poetic means are.
3. I did a revision of one of my manuscripts, but that was before item 2 above. So I don't know what I think of this revision. Also, the version of this manuscript that prompted the revision--it had had, to a very recent point, seemed to have absolutely no traction--no one was interested in it. Yesterday, I heard from a competition--this no-traction ms was a finalist. God. This possibly leads one to wonder what revision even means.
4. I traveled hither and yon, here and there, far and wide. L.A., NoCal, Idaho, the wilds of Nevada.
5. I spent lots of time with my daughter who has since departed for Louisiana. I did not anticipate that she would spend quite a bit of time here this summer, as she moved out of her apartment in anticipation of the big move. We also took two of my grandsons (her nephews) to Idaho in advance of their parents' arrival.
6. I saw a fair number of trashy movies, and some of them twice. One of them three times.
7. I read a pile of police procedurals and some other books, even some good ones.
8. We got a new roof.
9. I have not yet lain hands upon a will, a desire to start again, an urge from which I will not be diverted. At least not consistently.
10. I recently wrecked our car.
11. I have written no new poems. None. Whatsoever.

finally....

I have found the recurrent cycling in and out of my house of my youngest two children to be more of an emotional event than I would have predicted. Or maybe that's not true. Maybe I really expected it, but it has still hit me hard. I miss them, and I know that missing them is no tragedy, rather a necessary step that comes before whatever's next. Still.

Even so, one of the great pleasures for me--and one of the most meaningful--was to have spent that time with my daughter. I did not expect it, but I will remember this summer as the summer my daughter left, and before she did, she lived here, we talked every day, we ate together, we watched endless episodes of Criminal Minds because it is her current favorite show. I loved that. I am still watching it, because it makes me feel connected to her.

I am still finding my way back to writing--the act of writing. My friend Renaissance Girl says that everything, for a writer, is writing--walking out in the green world, thinking about things, mourning them. And I think she is right. I would like, though, to be back at making the things. This last week, I have been collecting notes for a couple new poems. I think they are poems. I'm going to try to make them into poems. We'll see.

The lack of blog in the last several months--the paucity of posts, certainly, but also a failure of delight in making them--is indicative of something, and I want to see if I can do something about it.

One day--the day after I had finally articulated my own depletion to myself--I said, aloud, to myself whilst walking the dog, Just be happy. Why not just be happy? And this sort of seemed like an answer. For awhile, anyway. I just want to assert my words, my little words, into the world. Just let them have their say, let them work their way to the surface, let them become these statements, poems, whatever. I want to keep trying.

The good things.

Having my daughter home for a few weeks before she launches into a big brand-new adventure.

Cherries in the fridge. Iced tea morning noon and night. Lemonade. Toast.

AC in the afternoon. The breeze sifting through the trees in the morning. Windchimes. Sitting on the patio for an hour or two, writing.

A beautiful, big, wonderful dog who wants to go on a walk, morning noon and night, and who greets us at the door with a whole-body wag.

Realizing that I have the doldrums every single summer at the exact same time, a realization which allows me to mitigate it, even if a little, even just by writing a list of the good things.

Writing, always. Always.

An old friend, a new friend, the oldest friend.

Daughters and sons, hither and yon.

The beautiful, loyal, funny and smart historian, who is always on my side.

Open letter to my blog.

Dear Hightouchmegastore,

Have I neglected you of late? I believe that I have, and I want you to know I'm aware of this fact, and it gnaws at me a little. I would offer you an explanation, or a series of explanations, but I think, honestly, you know: I overcommitted in a big, big way over--let's face it--the last two years. So this is the homestretch of my overcommitment.

I can see you waiting, hightouchmegastore, with your week-old post, and the lengthy intervals between the posts before that, and actually, rather than the afore-mentioned gnawing, I feel a little lift of my spirits. And that's because it's the middle of April, which is only a couple of weeks before the end of April. I wish I could show you my calendar for May, hightouchmegastore. It has vast creamy (that's the color of the paper) expanses of no commitments. It's maybe the most beautiful thing I've seen in quite some time.

I am looking forward to sitting down daily with you, hightouchmegastore, for a tidy little chat about what I'm reading, or viewing, or thinking about. For little gusts of complaining. For exhilarations and enthusiasms. We've had a good time doing that in the years before this, haven't we? Having a glass of iced tea or three and rambling on about nothing? I am looking forward to that. To doing it again and again.

sincerely,

lisa b

I ♥ the movies.

Recent conversation:

Me: Maybe we should buy season tickets to the theater.

Historian: We'd get a great discount.

Me: . . . and maybe we could go to a weeknight showing, so we wouldn't miss the movies?

Historian: Sure.

I love the movies so much. Mostly, we go to the movies every Friday and Saturday nights. Sometimes, we see two movies in a day. Or sometimes just I do--I'll go to something with one of my kids, then the Historian and I will see another in the evening. A weekend without two movies makes me feel like something is missing. Like maybe a lung or something. I ♥ the movies, but I also need the movies.

Another instance: we go to this jazz concert series every year. We buy season tickets. The concerts are on Monday evenings, except this year, the first concert is on a Saturday. SATURDAY. I ask you. That is movie night.

Another recent conversation:

Dr. Write: You should have come to the Red Iguana on Friday night. How come you didn't come?

Me: It was movie night.

Dr. Write: (uncomprehending this explanation, wherein movie automatically trumps dinner at the Red Iguana with a bunch of collegial friends)

Me: . . . (scrambling) and, but, okay, but it was movie night!

In my own defense, it was a work-ish dinner, not quite an obligation . . . but there was Mexican food. And my friends.

Okay, I get it. It's a little sick. I would honestly rather see a movie twice--if it was a movie I liked the first time--than do most other things, when it's movie night. More than going to a play. More than going to a concert. Even if the play or concert is good, and the movie is not all that good.

Some movies I would probably go see rather than going to the theater or a concert:

The Other Guys

The Switch

That new Bruce Willis/Helen Mirren vehicle

Well, there you are. As I like to say to people who don't go to the movies, "The movies are the great popular art of our time!" Which may or may not be true. But I cannot really identify many things that give me more unadulterated pleasure than choosing a seat on the side, settling in with or without popcorn, and, when the lights dim, watching preview after preview until the storytelling in the dark begins.

One thing I wish I had right now.

I wish I had The Sundance Channel, so I could watch that Elvis Costello show.  Also, I wish I had managed to watch this Elvis Mitchell interview series on TMC, which I have, so I wish I had had my priorities straight, or had sorted myself out--or something!--so I might have watched it.  

Also, I would like to have a new book successfully placed with an awesome press.  Or that my putative new book would win a book competition.  Or that I could stop whining about it and everything else, because frankly, I'm getting annoyed with my own self.

        The two Elvi.

Me, too.

Ever the copycat, I am borrowing this book meme. Which is, here's a bunch of books picked by someone else (it's the "Top 100 Books Marked as Unread" on Library Thing), and I am telling you that:

• I read the bolded ones,
• I read the underlined ones, but I read them for school, and
• I only started but did not finish the italicized ones.

Books without formatting I did not read at all.

All that said, I am not sure what this demonstrates. Like that other list--the even longer one--this list is partly "sure, that makes sense to be on a list of agreed-upon books" and partly "what? why that and not this?" But I do sort of enjoy this kind of thing, because it reminds me of things like, I really want to read Love in the Time of Cholera and I might want to tackle a monumental gap, like Moby-Dick or most of Virginia Woolf.

So: whatever. I've read books, some books, some of them because I was told to and some of them because I wanted to. As a side note: no poetry on here except Homer, which just goes to show that people read so little poetry that it doesn't even show up as a phenomenon like "I bought this book but I haven't gotten around to reading it." Yes, people: a literary art that no one reads, that's my art.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha (started reading this in a bookstore)
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion is this
There is Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield