the real thing

Okay, I'm back for real now. The internet got fixed after a week and a half, and then my computer broke two minutes later. And then the internet didn't work again. But now (two and a half weeks and about two hundred dollars later), I am finally connected. Soon I'll post about all the fascinating things I did in the last three weeks or so (actually, I mostly read Lolita, practiced for an upcoming audition, had a medical scare, and felt very isolated), but right now I'm going to go put together a pesto lasagna instead.

return

So with even the slightest bit of luck my internet will be back tomorrow, at which point I will make several longer posts that have been floating around in my head. For now, I'm just happily anticipatory that I can have mostly unnecessary internet service again. Hopefully I'll be able to quell my addiction and keep reading, cooking, etc., as much as I have been in the interim.
I went to a party last night where we spent a great deal of time discussing a poem by e e cummings. I love that kind of party.

damn

So my internet is broken again and the person who's wireless I was filching has moved or something, so don't expect a ton of posts for the next week or so.

go away

It's my day off today, so it's raining. It's weirdly hard to tell when it's actually raining up here on the fifth floor, but the lightning was a tip-off when I woke up at 7:30.That means I can't do very many of the things I had planned today, so I have to clean the apartment instead. Grrr.

repeat

I just finished reading Margaret Atwood's The Robber Bride for the third time. I have a thing about re-reading books: if I liked it, I've probably read it more than once. (For a while a few years ago I even tried reading things twice in a row to see if it saved me any time, but mainly it was just kind of boring.) In fact, even if I didn't like it the first time around, I frequently find myself reading it again later. Sometimes (fairly often) I hate something initially and like it the second, which is exactly what happened with this book. The first time I read it, I think I was still gushing over Atwood's The Blind Assassin, which is still by far my favorite of her books, and I think it made me unable to appreciate this perhaps less showy novel.
The Blind Assassin has a complicated structure, mixing present-day narrative with omniscient history, science fiction, and personal history. The Robber Bride doesn't go to such lengths, but it does have a very structured format which I've come to appreciate. The novel follows three friends who have all been hurt in personal ways by Zenia, a mysterious woman with no definable past. Each of the three friends serves as a narrator, and each goes through her present-day life, her past relationship with Zenia, her childhood, and then back to the present for the conclusion of the events started in the first part of the book. I didn't much care for it initially, as I said; I couldn't understand why the women were friends, why none of them could get over the damage Zenia had done them, what the point was. It gave me a headache. But now, after a few more readings, I've come to see the interest that lies beyond those things. I love each narrator's distinct voice: Tony, a diminutive historian obsessed with war and too academic for her own good (it's a very Tony book to me, so I'm inclined to see her as the main narrator); Charis, a haphazard spiritualist incapable of expressing a concrete thought in a way that her friends can understand; Roz, a boisterously cheery businesswoman who wears her heart on her sleeve but also hides behind her clown facade. There's very little dialogue, and the majority of the text is dealing directly with the characters' inner narration. Atwood doesn't shy away from the flaws in her characters, but those flaws are mostly visible from the viewpoint of others. Tony is fascinating when I'm in her head, but scary and hard to relate to when I'm listening to Charis or Roz, and so on.
So while this book doesn't pack the punch of some of Atwood's more narratively-driven works, I think it's worth it for the details. There are so many lovely phrases: the "aromatic, painful dark" of childhood summer camps, an ugly and "heavily artistic" flower pot, "You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman" to describe our self-policing of beauty. I don't know how many more times I'll have to read this book over the course of my life; this time it seemed oddly involuntary and I tried to resist and failed, so maybe a few more readings will happen. But hopefully I'll keep finding small reasons to enjoy it more.

nothing to do but dream

Isn't there something really nice about getting up moderately early on a Saturday (or any day, really) and drinking coffee by yourself and listening to music and reading for an hour or two? It's one of my favorite things to do, and one of the times I most like living by myself. I'm listening to Jolie Holland and about to read some Margaret Atwood and then meet an old-but-mostly-absent friend for crepes to discuss the states of our lives. Of course, then I have to go to work, but I still think it's going to be a good day.

those boom times went bust

Yesterday, I had an arrangement I was trying to make figuratively explode all over me. I was trying to use a technique that I'd never actually done before, only watched (it involves making a grid of clear tape over the mouth of the vase and then arranging things inside the grid), but it was still clear that I hadn't even made wise flower choices. I had to call in a more-experienced co-worker to save my centerpiece and spare me the wrath of the soon-to-be-returning customer. (She was, thankfully, very kind about doing this.)
In and of itself, this isn't that important. Everybody fucks up sometimes, and I was trying to do something that I really had no idea how to do, so it's not that surprising that it didn't work well. But it was definitely a moment of reflection for me; it reminded me that I'm twenty-six and working in a flower shop, and that even in this (my one really marketable skill) I still have a lot of holes. I basically had one of those pathetic self-reflexive moments where you think, "My god, two college degrees and I'm sweeping a floor for $x an hour!" All of my co-workers are younger than me, and this just isn't where I was expecting to end up.
But I know I'm not "ending up" here, just kind of here for now, and mostly I enjoy it. I like working with flowers and plants, and I get a sleazy capitalist thrill from subtly getting people to buy candles or green cleaning products. Lately, I even have ideas about what I'm going to do next, which I haven't for a while, so that's exciting. It could definitely be worse in a million different ways. I'm just on the downswing of last week's emotional high, or I'm realizing I'm going to have less time off from now on, or I'm stressed out about something. It could be any of those, really.