The meth labs among us

Yes, yes, yes--I know that my body's expulsion of mucus is a way of ridding itself of toxins and speeding recovery. But still. There comes a point at which nose clearing and hacking and sneezing cease to be anything approximating therapeutic.

That point came for me last evening, so I went to Walgreens to score myself some Wal-bitussen or Wal-phed or other Wal-something that would, at least temporarily, dry things out and allow my hands to be tissue-free for upwards of five minutes. I propelled myself down the Cold/Cough Remedies aisle, picked up a few boxes to investigate whether they were what I needed, and, deciding they weren't, moved on a few feet.

And then I saw it: the wall of faux package fronts, each one bearing a picture of the product in question, its price, and the instruction to take it to the pharmacy counter--during regular pharmacy hours--to procure the real thing. Now, we've all heard about how pharmacies are taking measures to restrict the number of pseudoephedrine-containing OTC drugs someone can buy at once, given the ingredient's status as a necessary component of crystal meth, but it was jarring to see the practice in place at the corner Walgreens.

As I pulled a Wal-bi-something tag from the array and brought it to the pharmacist, several questions occurred to me: how does the pharmacy staff determine who does and doesn't get this stuff? If I were to come in at 8 p.m., would I be hopelessly out of luck in terms of buying a potion to quell my sniffles? Has every Walgreens store taken this measure, or does Hayes Valley seem like a particularly meth lab-prone neighborhood?

And, perhaps most astoundingly, how can it be at all economical to use a drug as expensive as, say, Benadryl as the base of what's supposed to be a cheap high? Have you seen the price of Benadryl lately? I have to assume that the other components of meth (which are, what?, Drain-O and kitty litter and antifreeze or something) are inexpensive enough to be able to make up the price difference.

Maybe it's my congested head talking, or the 60 mg of pseudoephedrine hydrochloride in the dose of Non-Drowsy Day Time Liquid Caps I just took, but it seems a sad and sorry commentary on modern society that we've managed to make something as simple as cold medicine so wildly complicated. It's amazing to me that at the ripe age of 31, I can actually long for the good old days when it was possible to pluck a package of decongestants off the shelf and down a few with some oj and not have to give even a passing thought to how they might be put to nefarious use.

IM wisdom

Josh says:
the major benefit of an ivy league education is to be able to read jacquelin suzanne without guilt

...and the pursuit of happiness

Someone, for some reason, has deemed the second week in November Pursuit of Happiness Week. Who am I to argue?

Sure, this is wildly arbitrary at best--are we meant to unquestioningly accept our lots in life, however meagre, for the other 51 weeks of the year?--but still, setting oneself off hot on happiness' tale isn't a bad way to do battle against the painfully early Standard Time darkness that still, this week, seems like an aberration.

So, happiness, get your ass over here.

On the plus side of things this week: Friday and Saturday's unexpected treats, dim sum for Val's birthday on Sunday, a continuing supply of Canadian and German chocolate in the house, an upcoming wine rendez-vous with Alisa, and a full hour of Arrested Development last night.

On the minus side: some kind of cold-type thing creeping up on me, getting busted by the CHP for speeding on the Golden Gate this afternoon, the aforementioned hemmhoraging of daylight lately. Must continue pursuing happiness to keep further annoyances at bay.

Neko

If there's a better song to listen to than "South Tacoma Way" while lying face-down on the floor (hypothetically--I have not actually tested this, as all of my floors are hardwood) and thinking "[Insert Name of Emotional Mess Here] will pass soon, and hey, it could be worse, but auuuggghhhh," I can't imagine what it might be.

"STW" is brilliant for its twangy kinda-alt-country sound, and for its defiance of all sorts of lyrical conventions. There's a death at its center, but there are no black veils and better places and RIPs on the edges. Instead, there's an achy impatience with "stupid angels," a disdain of funerals, and the sort of slow, murky sadness and rage that are often the first things to bubble to the surface in the wake of an incomprehensible loss.

And of course there's Neko Case's soaring, gut-shaking voice, which makes lines like "I can't comprehend the ways I miss you" even more heartbreaking than they'd normally be. If ever I get the chance to see her perform this song live, I will be unabashed in my willingness to let myself get teary-eyed and snotty-nosed in public; it's a song so beautiful, pride be damned.

(As an aside, Bloodshot Records' description of Furnace Room Lullaby, the album on which "South Tacoma Way" appears, is perhaps the most apt summation I've read.)

JDS

A few weeks back, I popped over to my friend John's blog to read his latest chatterings and was dismayed to find a note saying he'd gone on hiatus due to a family emergency. I immediately wrote him a concerned e-mail (would've called, but he's in Slovenia, which mucks up both my sense of time and my phone bill) letting him know I was available as needed to do whatever I could, and sending my fervent hopes that the emergency had passed.

The worry I felt was of the sort that I reserve for my closest friends, which I consider John one of. That's a remarkable thing, that closeness, given that we've only actually seen each other twice, and have lived on the same continent only once, and then for a mere matter of months. Our friendship amazes me both for its strength and depth, but more than anything because of the fact that it was established entirely on e-mail.

Our history goes something like this: in August of 2000, J posted a funny and intelligent message on tautologies and road travel to Sinister, the Belle and Sebastian-themed mailing list to which we both belonged. Amused, I replied (directly to him),

This is just to say that your post may quite possibly be the best thing posted to Sinister ever. EVER.

Bravo. Write more. Please.

Right on, [Yes, I did indeed use this phrase, but the folly of youth excuses it]
Emily

This elicited a flattered response from him, and began a never-ending back-and-forth flurry of messages in which we discussed topics ranging from JD Salinger to Phil Collins to Argentine wines to edible innards of animals. We cobbled together an odd and entirely e-mail based but nonetheless durable friendship, and soon felt comfortable enough to seek and offer advice on various relationship and career and life choice matters. (Before leaving my job last year, I printed out vast swaths of our messages, which now serve as a sometimes hilarious, sometimes heart-rending, always fascinating look at a particular point in time.)

We met for the first time in the summer of 2002, when I flew to Europe and we spent two weeks traversing a goodly part of the southern chunk of that continent. We saw each other again that December, when we both happened to be in New England at the same time and met up for pad thai in Cambridge. We haven't seen each other since.

But J is one of the first people I turn to (electronically, but still) in the midst of life-crumbling moments, and through his blog, our e-mail exchanges, and the occasional letter or postcard, I feel like he's far closer than thousands of miles away. I've never met his wife or their son, but they both seem familiar to me. John and I used to live significantly different but not entirely dissimilar lives; now the similarities are so few as to be countable on a hand or two, but that seems to matter very little. He remains "J," I remain "E," and there feels like there'll always be at least one constant in the world.

For that I am grateful, and still now, four years on, fairly amazed.

The New Pornographers rock the house

Dana and I went to see the New Pornographers (along with Immaculate Machine and, glory be, Destroyer) at Bimbo's last night, and what a freakin' awesome show it was.

Bimbo's is perhaps San Francisco's best small-scale live music venue--more comfortable than Slim's, better laid out than GAMH--and we got there early enough to score one of the tables that ring the perimeter of the room. So we got to avoid the crush of the crowd (which becomes less and less appealing the farther you get from 25) and had the added bonus of being up on a riser of sorts, which allowed us to stand up and see clearly over everyone else's head.

Immaculate Machine (a new--and adorably young--group from Victoria) opened with a set of NP-inspired pop, with some hints of 80's New Wave thrown in for good measure. Destroyer was up next, featuring, of course, my current Inexplicable Musician Crush, Dan Bejar; though I kept telling Dana, "It's his voice! It's all about his voice!," she shook her head, perplexed, and said, "And here I thought I was the one who fell for guys who look they've just come off the street. (Fair enough: his hair is insane, he could really go in for a shave, and his garb suggested middle-aged Trekkie/former AV club leader. But it's all about the voice--the clarion, full, heavy voice. And that one widely disseminated publicity photo of him at a piano in which he actually looks sultry.)

Destroyer is something of an acquired taste, for sure, but I find the combination of Bejar's voice (and generally indecipherable lyrics) and the band's guitar melodies (Built to Spill-esque in their richness and catchiness) to be pretty infectious. So their set made me happy.

But, of course, what put me over the edge (and onto my feet) was the NPs, who were as catchy and funny and melodious as ever. As I had hoped, Dan Bejar joined them for a few numbers (increasingly tipsy each time he came out on stage as the night wore on), and though they didn't do "Broken Beads," they did do both "Jackie"s and "Ballad of a Comeback Kid," so I can't complain. It was the first time I'd seen the entire band play live together (Bejar didn't do the last two tours), which was delicious and wonderful.

Also great is the fact that they played twenty-four songs--essentially the equivalent of two whole albums--and did two encores, which included aborted covers of Led Zepplin, AC/DC, and Nirvana and ending with "Letter from an Occupant." All told, it was a brilliant, fun, sweet, exciting show.

Set list as follows:
Twin Cinema
Use It
The End of Medicine
Mass Romantic
Jackie, Dressed in Cobras
These Are the Fables
Three or Four
The Bleeding Heart Show
Ballad of a Comeback Kid
Falling Through Your Clothes
The Laws Have Changed
Streets of Fire
It's Only Divine Right
Stacked Crooked
The Fake Headlines
The Bones of an Idol
The Slow Descent into Alcoholism
Sing Me Spanish Techno
All for Swinging You Around
Jackie
From Blown Speakers
Miss Teen Wordpower
The Electric Version
Letter from an Occupant

Of Proust, "Bells On," and electronic downsizing

I.
One of the gifts I asked for (and received) for Christmas in 2000 was Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past in its entirety. I started to read it in early 2001, and made it to "Place-Names: The Name," the final chapter of Swann's Way. Then I defected.

For some reason, I was seized last week with the desire to try again. From the beginning. And this time, all the way through--all three volumes, all eight books.

There's something in me that gets determined to finish something, no matter how monumental, no matter how occasionally tedious, and then becomes willing to do so at all costs. Call it commitment, call it stubbornness, call it folly. I call it curiosity and determination.

And so, for the foreseeable future, I have a new bedtime companion: a sometimes insufferable, sometimes hilarious, always verbose French guy with something of a mother fetish. Should make things interesting.

II.
On various mix cd's that came my way from G. over the years, Sloan made an occasional appearance. Their "Penpals" is giddily silly, and "Deeper than Beauty" almost as much so (especially in the line "And your glasses, your hideous glasses," at the end of which you can actually hear the singer's voice crack with laughter).

But I don't think I'd ever heard "Bells On" before I downloaded it (and the rest of Twice Removed) from eMusic last week. It's another thing altogether: achy, angry, ever so slightly bitter, and, ultimately, resigned. All of which is to say: brilliant, and the perfect tune for the legions of angst-ridden and disaffected and sensitive who are drawn to Conor Oberst and his ilk.

I can't stop listening.

III.
Last Saturday night, as I was doing a final once-over of my house to weed out any final additions to my garage sale offerings of the next day, I decided that it was time for my stereo to go. It was a relatively gigantic thing--two cassette decks, a 51-cd changer, two large speakers--that, after the arrival of iTunes in my life, had gotten increasingly little use.

So I emptied it of cd's, dug up the user guide and remote control, typed up a description of it to post at the sale, and felt something in me lift. On Sunday, I sold the unit (for $45), rejoiced in the shelf space the stereo's absence revealed, and promptly bought an iPod dock/speaker set from Amazon.

Over the past week, I've been unloading relatively large swaths of my cd collection online, which has been oddly thrilling. It's the income, to be sure (ignoring the depreciation factor), but it's also an inexplicable sense of moving on and up, of simplifying without really sacrificing. And it's the thrill of finally being able to take advantage of technology's benefits: I may never give up my Filofax for a PDA, and may never feel the urge to do anything more with my cell phone than make and receive calls, but I will gladly trade my huge stereo and hundreds of cd's for a tiny set of speakers and a tiny green iPod.

Set out running

On the morning of September 11, 2001, after I got the first news that something had gone horribly wrong back east, I went out for a run with my Walkman and listened to the coverage on Morning Edition. I remember the morning in a crystalline way: hearing Bob Edwards stumble as he tried to make sense of the news of the Pennsylvania crash, my headphones filling my ears with disaster as I ran through the sunny streets of the Mission, stopping to water my garden plot and just thinking No No No.

I ran that morning because I wanted space to understand the magnitude of what had happened. I ran often in the days, weeks, and months that followed because I came to love that space, and the way air flowed into and out of my lungs as I moved, and the feeling that when the music in my ears was right and my legs were working together I could keep going forever, could close my eyes and run and run and run.

Just where I picked up running I'm not sure. I more or less loathed running as a kid, and stuck to walking and hiking throughout college, and never, as far as I can recall, ran in my early days in San Francisco. Perhaps it was G. who turned me on to it, or maybe it was something I'd turned to by necessity when the ellipticals and bikes were all in use in the gym. I only know that in 2001, I became a Runner.

Which I remained, off and on, for the following years. Earlier this year, though, I fell out of the habit, often running once a week or less, looking un-longingly at my sneakers as they sat unused on the mat in my front hall, feeling my legs soften. But then I came to my senses.

Now I'm back on the pavement, iPod in hand, ponytail swinging, legs moving in their impossibly graceful (and occasionally seemingly effortless) way, lungs more or less working as they should. And I've rediscovered that space--that space where regret disappears, where everything becomes possible, where all that isn't or can't or won't be slips away, at least for a while. There may come a day when my knees give out, or my lungs stop cooperating, or running and I fall out of love, at which point I'll have to set my sights elsewhere.

For now, though, it's all blissful, and I can only look forward to my next runs--like the one I'll get to take on Saturday afternoon when I'm back on the Vassar campus, and will have time to set out for the trail behind the field house, where it's quiet and calm and full of memory. I can't wait.

Ugh

On the cusp of sleep last night, I had a moment of worry as I thought, "Must put in application with CIC before my TEF results expire"--that is, make the final push to finish my Canadian residency app and get it in the queue before my French proficiency exam score reaches its use-by date next March.

But now there's an even larger fire prompting me to act: Rehnquist's death, and the resultant court-packing that looms large on the horizon. John Roberts is bad enough (and, really, all things considered in this Bush-y world, probably not nearly as crackpot a conservative as he could be), but good Lord are we screwed if Scalia or Thomas winds up as Chief Justice. It's painful to think who might get ushered in as the now-ninth justice.

Rehnquist was no liberal hero, to be sure, but he seemed to bring a measure of balance to a court that might've otherwise been in danger of listing ever more to the right. Sandra Day O'Connor's retirement was enough of a blow; Rehnquist's death just seems to obliterate whatever remainder of hope there might've been for a balanced court. How can the more liberal and centrist justices who remain possibly stand up to what's ahead?

ASAP, then: go sit for the photos needed for my application, and cobble together the money for the fees. Must get my paperwork on some CIC official's desk before another groundswell of discontent here inspires more likeminded Americans to do the same, before the application process takes longer than it already does. I can't bear the thought of being around to witness first-hand the demise of rulings on privacy and other rights and freedoms we're sadly sure to see the end of. They were great while they lasted.

William Rehquist and your balanced Supreme Court, RIP.

Sing Me Spanish Techno (and Catchy Canadian Pop)

If there's a more fabulous release out this month than The New Pornographers' Twin Cinema, I have no idea what it might be.

Mass Romantic and Electric Version were both hard acts to follow, but TC undoubtedly fits the bill, at least as my first 10 listens suggest. I'm especially enamored of Neko Case's ever-beautiful, rich vocals in the second half of "The Bleeding Heart Show," and, more than any other track so far, the insanely infectious "Broken Beads," in which Dan Bejar sounds better than ever.

But don't just take my word for it; go to the Matador site and download one of the MP3s (or, better yet, drop $12 on the cd). I defy you to remain unmoved.

(On a related note, the band is coming to SF in late September, playing two shows at Bimbo's with Destroyer in tow, which means that there's a better than average chance that Bejar will stick around for the NP performances. This thrills me to an inordinate degree, especially as he's my latest Nonsensical Musician Crush. Plus, Bimbo's is a great space.)

The heart a-flutter

When I was relatively new to San Francisco--and, really, for several years thereafter--returning to the city after being away would always send through my body a little frisson of excitement, followed by a sense of exhaling, of being home, of feeling that all was right again.

So here's the sad thing: all of that is kind of missing now. When my plane touched down at SFO on my return trip from Boston a few weeks back, all I really felt was Oh. We're here.

In contrast, though I haven't actually been there for a few years now (is that really possible? must check my math), any glimpse or mention of Vancouver in a magazine, in a book, on Flickr, in conversation just sends my heart fluttering away in my chest. This is a very weird feeling indeed--it almost seems like the small thrill of doing something vaguely inappropriate, forbidden, or unseemly--and it's one I haven't yet quite made peace with.

But for better or worse, I think I know what it means.

I haven't fallen out of love with San Francisco--not exactly. It's still very much my home, and by this point it's so familiar, so much a part of me, that there's no way I can really define myself without it. I guess it's just that since I moved here, lo those many years ago, I've watched San Francisco change, and it's watched me change, to such an extent that we sometimes feel like we don't know each other anymore, and sometimes long too strongly, too impossibly, for what's gone.

So my sights (and my fluttering heart) are set north, to that other city of water, mountains, forests, liberals, immigrants looking to create something new for themselves. And I try to start making peace with the fact that sometime in the near-ish future, I'll have to let go, finally, of what I've loved for so long, and will get the chance to start again.

Grumpy

Perhaps it's the standard post-vacation letdown, or the fact that my stomach has been in a serious state of disarray for the past week (reasons unknown), or the low-level stress that's run like an invisible but annoying thread through the past several days. It might also be the truly sucktastic "summer" weather San Francisco's been mired in lately, complete with more fog and wind and brutally chilly temperatures that anyone in the northern hemisphere should have to bear in August, or the fact that I woke from a pleasant dream this morning to the realization that it had in fact been only a dream, and thus all of the pleasantness was more or less blown to bits.

Whatever the reason, I've been exceedingly grumpy lately, which makes all of the above even more difficult to put up with than they'd normally be, which in turn makes me even grumpier, and so on and so freakin' on. Here's hoping the tide soon turns, that my whinging interior monologue stops, that I stop cringing every time I get hit in the face with a gust of wind, that I remember that crappy summers are the price we pay here for the ability to hike in shorts come January.

Off now to enjoy our daily half-hour allotment of sun. Dammit.

In Season

Val and I went to the Center City farmers' market this morning, where I was somewhat surprised to find a new crop of apples already out on several vendors' tables. Though I'm sure I should've learned otherwise by now, I was fairly well convinced that any apples one might see during the summer were sure to have come from cold storage, while the new ones wouldn't pop up until next month at least.

But there they were: beautifully variegated new apples, their skins taut and matte, their flesh firm under a thumb press, their scent vague but sweet. I picked up a few, considered buying them, thought about how nice it would be to once again be able to toss a piece of fruit in my purse without having to worry about the mangled pulp it would be when I pulled it out again. (One does not, if one is smart, heave a ripe piece of stone fruit into a bag with any other contents.)

There were the peaches, though.

Across from the stand with the loveliest new apples was a table with fat yellow cling peaches, which, as a sign above them noted, were "Almost like mango!" And it's true: they were dense and juicy and a crazy shade of yellow-orange not often seen in the peach world. They had the feel and taste of summer on the tongue. They carried the suggestion that although San Francisco may be dipped in fog, although our moments of daylight may be slowly ticking away, although there's been a slight downward pull to things since I got back from vacation--that despite all of these things, summer is still very much with us, fall still somewhere uncertainly down the line.

The apples were beautiful, and tempting in their new ripeness. But I know they'll be around for months to come, while the peaches, one of these Sundays, will quietly fail to appear, and all of the berries will be gone, all of the plums done for the year.

While there's still time, then, I opt to fill my bag with those hefty yellow globes, to gingerly carry them home so they won't bruise, to lean over the sink as I bite into one, feel the juice run down my hand and splash onto the white porcelain below. While there's still time, then, I hold what will soon--all too soon--be little more than a memory.

Up the Creek

Going Upriver, the documentary about John Kerry's experiences both in and after Vietnam, is intriguing and engrossing for a number of reasons: it presents an interesting picture of the time (which I know little about, though I'd like to learn more), draws some parallels (perhaps somewhat unintentionally) between Vietnam and Iraq, and offers a fascinating portrait of both Kerry himself and the Vietnam Veterans against the War movement.

What struck me the hardest, though, was the sense of being thrown back to last summer and early last fall, when it still seemed like the voting populace of the U.S. might do the right thing and oust Bush, when the vibe from the Kerry campaign (and MoveOn, and the DNC) was full of promise and possibility, when I was still able to summon something akin to hope about the state of political affairs in this country.

Granted, the film presents Kerry in an unabashedly positive and unblemished light, and doesn't touch on his life and career after the 70s; it was intended as (and is) a somewhat heroic portrait of a somewhat heroic (though also somewhat flawed) man. But still.

Though it's refreshing to remember what I felt last year at this time--a fairly even blend of hope and doom, perhaps tilted slightly in favor of the former--there's no overlooking the fact that these days, much of the hope is gone. I need to stick more religiously than ever to my media diet: no more than headlines when reading anything about Bush, Iraq, the Republican-led Congress, and a bevy of other blood-boiling topics, and no radio or TV news that might feature any sort of sound clip involving Dubya's voice. Because not only do these stories remind me daily, endlessly, of how misguided the country seems these days, they also serve as unwelcome reminders of what might have been. If only.

Her Hardest Hue to Hold

After exceedingly foofy and delicious cocktails and nibbles at No. 9 Park, Otis and I tripped happily out into the evening (still--to my tastes, at least--wonderfully warm) as my phone rang. It was DaveG, calling from my flat in San Francisco, where he was staying for the weekend while here for a wedding.

So the three of us strolled through the Common and into the Gardens, past the swan boats and the impossibly lush flowers and the grass an otherworldly shade of green, all of it bathed in a Golden Hour light so perfect it almost seemed fake.

Later in the evening, after picking up dinner and wine and consuming both on the roof of the boys' apartment, Otes and I watched the city sink into night (the moon full, the air humid) and had an extended, Pinot-fuelled discussion about memory and forgetting, about Buddhism's dictum that life is suffering and Emism's dictum that it can't possibly be (at least not always), about the way I stack my favorite memories and moments from the past so they're a solid force beneath and behind me when everything else seems to crumble. About how something as simple as the recollection of sitting at the hotel bar in Vancouver with Dave and Otes, drinking Cosmos with floating cranberries and eating far too many spiced almonds and talking about politics--about how this simple moment can be so many things at once: gone, ever-present, treasured, impossible to return to.

At length, when our livers cried uncle and my legs started to sport a lattice of mosquito bites and we couldn't reach any of the west coast friends we'd tried placing tipsy phone calls to, we went downstairs and to bed, another moment--a day full of moments--gone.

But then there was the next day, spent traipsing around the city in search of NPS Passport stamps. There was the sweetness of picking blueberries with Isabella at Twin Chimneys, of laughingly watch her eat two ripe berries for every half-green one she put in the basket. There was dinner on the river in Westerly with Mom, Dad, and Greg, and meeting baby Joseph for the first time, and sitting on the patio at Crispo with Ry and Amy while the city sky went dark and the lights came on around us. There was--as there always is--moment after moment after moment.

Robert Frost, in "Nothing Gold Can Stay," gets it half right:

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower,
But only so an hour.
The leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

But long after the golds and flowers and dawns are gone, there's something about them that sticks around. On my summer vacation, I let dozens of moments come and go. I can't ever have them back just as they were, but that isn't (never is) the point. I know where to find them when I need them.

Vacating

Though I still haven't quite figured out how I'll get from Philadelphia to New York on a Friday evening while avoiding Amtrak (because I refuse to pay $54 for a one-hour trip, and I doubly refuse to pay $81 for the same trip during peak hours), and though I haven't yet tried to butter up my Auntie Paula to ferry me to Logan at 5 a.m. for my return trip to SF (A.P., if you're reading this, you're the best great aunt ever!), my itinerary for my upcoming vacation is set. It goes something like this:

• Fly into Boston next Wednesday, where Otes will fetch me from the airport and I will (of my own volition, though the promise of wine helps) spend the next two days helping him and Sean pack for their impending move.
• Head to the Cape on the weekend, either via Greyhound with Jonny D. on Friday night or with Paula (and the rest of New England) on Saturday morning.
• Drive home with Mom, Dad, and Greg on Sunday night, and stay in CT until Wednesday morning, at which point I will...
• ...fly to Pittsburgh to see Rachel, David, and adorable little Joseph for a few days.
• Fly to Philly (alas, Southwest goes no closer to NYC) on Friday afternoon, and somehow (SEPTA? New Jersey Transit? Greyhound again?) deposit myself in downtown Manhattan.
• Ingest as much of New York as I can before Amtrak-ing back to Boston on Sunday night for one last hurrah before the aforementioned crack-of-dawn departure on Tuesday.

It's funny: I keep describing this trip to friends and colleagues as a chance to relax, do no work, and generally lounge around. Of course, it's clearly insane: not even counting my cross-country flights, I must be spending the equivalent of a full day on various forms of mass transit, and I haven't scheduled more than three days in one place.

But I couldn't be happier. This is a vacation I feel like I need more than ever, both because I still feel like I need to keep slathering myself in some sort of balm that will help dull the effects of the various stressful events of the past half-year and because, with the exception of Amtrak's bathrooms and Logan before dawn, I love everything that awaits me: some of my best friends, some of my favorite cities, time with the family that loves me without question and without fail, the chance to pick blueberries from Twin Chimney's bushes and run the Rail Trail in Orleans in the cool of the morning and swim in the Atlantic.

And the chance, best of all, to fall asleep on thirteen cricket-soaked, open-windowed evenings with the smart of heartache, the gut-punch of financial worry, and the tug of uncertainty thousands and thousands of miles away.

Birthday Wish

Though I'd dig a Bose iPod dock, and would love the security of knowing that business will be as steady going forward as it has been for the past few weeks, and also wouldn't mind a relaxing weekend at Canyon Ranch, what I wish more than anything today is that 31 will be easier than 30.

How the August Night

The town I grew up in sits on the shore of Long Island Sound in southern Connecticut. It's sleepy and fairly quiet for a good part of the year (or at least it was), but when summer comes, everything in it and about it comes to life.

It's perhaps because of that, and because I'm a July baby (the 6th, just like Dubya, Nancy Reagan, and Sly Stallone), that summer has always been my favorite season, and the one that seems to me the most mythic and full of possibility. I never learned to love the snow or the nostril-freezing temperatures of winter, and spring and fall always felt to me little more than the lead-in and end to summer, respectively. In June, July, and August, I was happiest and most at home in my life.

So when I first read Edna St. Vincent Millay's sonnet X, from Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree, it made me feel giddy and lachrymose and punched in the gut and hopeful, all at the same time.

Many of Millay's other poems got me, too--my Auntie Paula gave me a book of them, which I still have, spine broken at the pages I read the most, full of notes and stars next to the pieces I liked best, even a few pencil marks on sonnets whose meter I tried to annotate with that odd series of swoops and dashes. But Ungrafted Tree X was (and remains) the only poem I could recite by heart.

What grabbed me was not only the fact that the poem is fairly exploding with ripe summer imagery--which, in itself, was (and is) often enough to win me over--but also its sly, quiet promise that sometimes, when the moon is right and the crickets loud enough and the circumstances sufficiently mysterious to invite no questioning, sometimes you find what you're looking for.

That appealed to me in an immense and unshakeable way when I spent my summers in Niantic (as my journals from that time can attest). And even now, when my summers are windy and chilly and fog-bound and my skepticism is sometimes sharp enough to poke holes in most notions of romantic promise, Millay's poem holds out a sense of hope like an outstretched hand and a swim-perfect moonlit lake.

Plus, the last line is a kicker.

X
She had forgotten how the August night
Was level as a lake beneath the moon,
In which she swam a little, losing sight
Of shore; and how the boy, who was at noon
Simple enough, not different from the rest,
Wore now a pleasant mystery as he went,
Which seemed to her an honest enough test
Whether she loved him, and she was content.
So loud, so loud the million crickets' choir...
So sweet the night, so long-drawn-out and late...
And if the man were not her spirit's mate,
Why was her body sluggish with desire?
Stark on the open field the moonlight fell,
But the oak tree's shadow was deep, and black, and secret as a well.

Digitalia

Thanks to JDS, I am now the proud owner of a free Flickr Pro account. This is somewhat amusing, as I don't actually own a digital camera yet (though my intentions to purchase one post haste are absolutely good--would that I had done so while I still had the guidance of my technical advisor at my disposal) and thus have to rely on scanning and uploading old-school photos. (As a side note, what do we call these? Analog photos? Offline photos? Normal photos?)

Anyway, despite the laughable amount of labor involved in getting my stuff prepped to be posted, I've been doing plenty of precisely that over the past few days, and now have a decent photostream in place, which you can (and should) visit at http://www.flickr.com/photos/emwilska/.

With Flickr, as with my iPod, I have no excuse for coming to the party so late (and not fashionably so, I'm afraid), and I can't claim to be on the cutting edge of anything. I guess that by nature I'm inclined to go the low-tech route, and it takes a while before I can really see the appeal of the digital alternative in many realms.

But once I do, damn if I don't go whole hog on the thing.

From the "Yes, You Read That Correctly" Department

Leonard Nimoy Hosts the Arab-Jewish Ensemble of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, Monday, June 27, Temple Emanu-El, San Francisco