Y'all bring 2x4's and some nails, I've got a hammer

Tomorrow's forecast: "Tropical Rainstorm Nicole."



What happened to "partially cloudy," please!!? New York, you're killing me.

Creativity

This afternoon I was thinking about writing. Not considering doing it, obviously - because I write constantly, that isn't really even a question anymore - but about the craft itself. It's an odd thing, to assign so much personal value to an act that most people do without any appreciation for the art of it or for the collective corpus of the written word. After all, if it's written down, someone, somewhere, wrote it. And no matter how unimportant those words might be to us, wrapped up in our own little worlds, there's always a story, there.

I've thought of myself as a writer for a long time, but it's only recently that I've started saying it aloud, to other people, when they ask me what I do - for work or in my spare time - or even what I like to do, or what my dream job is. ("To be a writer," I say with a wry smile - quick, defuse the situation, distract them from my complete and utter lack of a plan for the rest of my life - and I'm mostly not serious because I'm not that naive, really. But honestly, what better job is there, in the end?)

And mostly people just look at me slightly askance when I tell them I'm a writer, and I feel how aspiring musicians or painters or dancers must constantly feel - as if I've been reduced to some silly cliche of a little girl who wants to hide in her ivory tower and write stories or paint pictures or compose music all day, but who in the end will have no real way of supporting herself later in life. I know that while most people's initial impression of me is probably a relatively self-assured, intelligent and collected (I flatter myself) twenty-something woman, after I tell them I'm a writer (not "I write," which is completely different - well, everybody writes, don't they, but nobody would say "I'm a walker" or "I'm a breather" like "I'm a writer") I become just as flighty as the rest of my generation. Another subset of people silently wonders, "What does that mean?" and then they spend the rest of the conversation trying to decide if I write murder mysteries or science fiction or period novels, or possibly erotic poetry or scathingly witty plays. (Messing with people's heads this way is a great pastime. Just as an aside.) Journalists say, "I'm a journalist. I'm a reporter." Published people say, "I'm an author. I'm a poet." Writers, though? What, really, does it mean to say you write? Is it a job, a pastime, an outlet, a drug, a dream? And they wonder how I choose, and how I can not choose.

But being a writer is none and all of these things. It's poetry shot through with stilted adverbs, it's subject-verb-object, it's harshness and cruelty softened with warm humor and and vice versa, it's raging when the words won't come and despairing when they won't stop coming, it's what you do when you can't do anything else, when you've run out of puzzles or sleep or drugs or other people. Writing is the scribbles on the back of your Spanish homework, the notes taken with a stranger's pencil on the blank pages of your calendar, it's inking characters and words and coherency onto feather-soft unlined paper with a fountain pen or violently banging out the latest drivel of an essay into your word processor. It's drafts and drafts of letters you won't send, edits that never make the cut, blog posts you never show the world, poems you don't finish but never throw out because, maybe... one day. We spend our lives chasing it all: the lucid dreams and hallucinations we aspire to record, the salvation of a perfectly metered and rhymed couplet, the beauty inherent in a string of whisperingly alliterative words - subtle, so it slides under your skin and lies in wait, building and curling until you're surprised by its power at the end, by the sensual brush of meaning that curves around phrases like parentheses, that slips into your mind like ellipses while you aren't looking. We chase the art, simultaneously creating it and finding it - because any fool can write (or so he thinks), but to be a writer is to be proud of something the rest of the world hates and, honestly, usually does very poorly.

There are precious few of us left, now, who appreciate the love and care that go into writing something truly important and beautiful. And it's a sad day when "I hate writing" is a sentence that doesn't even merit a raised eyebrow on a college campus. What are we coming to?

Leftovers breed necessity

Leftovers, the input:
Three red bell peppers, almost past their prime
One giant bunch of farmers' market parsley, starting to wilt in the fridge
Two cloves of garlic
Half a bottle of red wine
Half a can of diced tomatoes in juice
Half a sad-looking lemon
One pound whole-wheat penne pasta

Purchased, the input:
One sweet onion
Chicken broth
Walnuts
Parmesan cheese

Add the staples:
Olive oil
Red pepper flakes
Hot smoked Spanish paprika (imported by yours truly from the de la Vera region itself, of course)

Thrown together make:
Toasted penne pasta and diced peppers and onions, cooked risotto-style in a spicy tomato-wine sauce and brightened with a smear of parsley pesto and a generous shaving of Parmesan cheese - and enough food for the whole week.

Unless I eat it all tonight.

Settling in

This morning I woke up and thought that maybe I should update this! And post pictures of my new apartment, and tell funny stories of all the ridiculous things I've had to deal with in the past few weeks, and how happy I am that I am almost done with everything.

And then this happened. I don't even know, man.



Yep! That's my bathroom cabinet. It fell ON ME this morning as I was brushing my teeth. I've been picking shards of glass out of my hair for the whole day.



I swear, I couldn't make this up if I tried.

I promise to post real, nice pictures of my beautiful new apartment soon. Right after this bathroom disaster gets fixed.

Nine years

Sonnet 64

When I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced
The rich proud cost of outworn buried age;
When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;
When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win of the watery main,
Increasing store with loss and loss with store;
When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state itself confounded to decay;
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,
That Time will come and take my love away.
This thought is as a death, which cannot choose
But weep to have that which it fears to lose.

William Shakespeare

Send your thoughts downtown today.

Nostalgia

The reminiscence comes
Of sunless dry geraniums

A book of T.S. Eliot's poetry is open on the counter in front of me; this sort of thing really isn't my fault.

As I draw closer and closer to September 1, I find myself struck more and more often by soft waves of nostalgia for Madrid. Not for New York, as I had expected, or at least not yet - I've spent nearly a year missing that city, and my returns there are always laced with the bitersweetness of leaving so much of what I love behind in California anyway. And my longing for Spain doesn't lurk, waiting to ambush me with a sharpness that leaves aches and bruises, the way I missed Paris so hard for so long in high school - and honestly, I still miss Paris that way. My nostalgia for Madrid is still fresh, after all; I can still picture the faces of my host family, can still call the subway map up in my mind and imagine the long, open streets gilded with flowers and edged with long shadows. And I don't know what, exactly, I miss. Just being there, I suppose.

Madrid is not romanticized the way Paris is in my mind - and, even with time, I don't think it will be. Nor is it something I constantly long for, the way I long for New York when I'm in California and for California when I'm in New York. It's an sharp fondness, really - Madrid's like that old friend you like to see occasionally even though you've grown apart, because you had some good times and share some stories that nobody else would understand, and you can laugh about the silliest things because sometimes the world just reminds you of Spain. Madrid is not a best friend, not a first love - like Paris - and not the immediate push-pull reality of two extremes on two coasts. Instead it's faded into something so far away that sometimes the strangest thing reminds me of my life there, and then I frantically gather up the scattered shards of my memories and slide them back in to their places once more. And each time I abandon a few, lost in between the cushions or swept under the rug, until everything, eventually, will just be hazy and blurred. But for now, I think mostly I miss Madrid because I'm afraid of forgetting it. And the soft little nudges of memories are the little mementos that I'm happy to carry around, still - for a while, at least.

It seems...

...she hangs upon the cheek of night
Like a rich jewel in an Ethiope's ear...



Tomorrow we go to Ashland to see Merchant of Venice, Hamlet and Throne of Blood, which is the Kurosawa adaptation of The Scottish Play.

How is it August?