I sat in the park with my sandwich and my novel, on a bench under a tree, sweating out what I hope is the last super-hot day of the year, listening to a guy practice his serve against the other side of the tennis court fence, two students complaining about a roommate on the bench next to me. He was all, Well, as long as you’re doing laundry, could you throw some of mine in too? And dragged out this garbage bag full of underwear!
September 1, 2010
August 31, 2010
The new giant hugely anticipated Jonathan Franzen book arrived on my Kindle while I was sleeping last night, meaning I have to quick like a rabbit get through the giant hugely anticipated David Mitchell book I’ve been slowly paging through since it arrived on my Kindle while I was sleeping sometime last month. So quinoa and the Thousand Autumns for lunch. I want to read what everybody else is reading.
August 30, 2010
Tonight’s retirement dinner (not mine) includes choice of appetizer, entree, dessert, tea & coffee, and unlimited beer and wine. I thought about that while I ate my under-salted over-dressed quinoa salad, wondering if they’d even bother with a vegetarian entree, if I ought to get the meatballs which I usually love but then found out were made of veal and started freaking out, whether B. would really get both tea and coffee like she promised this morning, what leadership gurus and secrets-to-continued-employment experts might recommend with regard to the unlimited wine offer, if I should just stick to the chicken, if I’d get a dessert choice beyond tiramisu which is, if you get right down to it and consent to be honest, really just a pile of wet cookies.
August 29, 2010
The cat sat on a paper bag in the middle of the floor while I ate a bowl of pasta on the couch watching a program on television. Pedestrian!
August 28, 2010
Table in the back all dappled, plate in the center, coffee at 2 o’clock, paper at 10, quiet even though it is always loud in Brooklyn.
August 27, 2010
With S. tethered to the apartment due to a delivery scheduled to arrive between 9 and 6 (really? really?!?), our lunch choices were limited to pizza, sushi, or Indian. Pizza seemed easiest and cheapest, so we ran out and got slices and ran back and agreed that writing is hard but probably worth it, and that meetings are both important and not important, depending on how you look at things.
August 26, 2010
Picked up my special order at my local independent bookstore, walked it over to the sandwich place, sat and cracked its spine in four places, divvying up into quarters, read the back copy, read the acknowledgements (and cried a little, the social worlds that make our solitary work endurable!), started the introduction, wrapped it up, back to work. Long live print! Long live my Kindle!
August 25, 2010
I gathered everything I’ve done so far and put it in order, start to finish, and then wrote the 916 words that I think should suffice as an introductory note, eating out of my dish inattentively, actually wanting to do the work. Or, wanting to finish the work. I’m mobilizing the pleasure I take in completing things, in tying things off, putting things in folders and then in drawers, taping down flaps, crossing off lists, deleting and discarding and moving from my desk to your desk. Meta-inbox-zero. It had been a couple days since I’d been able to open any files at all, something about seeing over the horizon that makes looking even harder. And yet, there it is, off in the distance, getting closer all the time.
August 24, 2010
S. and I ambled up DeKalb to the rice restaurant, sat and ate the exact same thing, talked shop, talked shop. There was also laughing, and the articulation of hypotheticals, and a little complaining, and some looking-forward. The usual. Of course I forgot my umbrella.
August 23, 2010
Everything old is new again! I finished my desk shift, grabbed my dish out of the refrigerator in tech services, brought it back to my cloffice, and ate it at my desk, staring at the style guidelines for a journal and wondering what I should do next. Like not a day had passed, much less three whole weeks.
