(no subject)

One of my longest stretches in Metro, from sometime around 4pm yesterday to at least 1am this morning.

Visited Keith and borrowed Moscow Circles. He was teaching it last semester and the class just gave up on the English translation because it's so weird. I'm looking around for my Russian dictionary in case I give up too. So many dictionaries in here.

My favorite red haired coffee girl was in, playing good music. I'm fond of Kim in that slightly off-kilter way I'm fond of certain women. Where I feel like I want to make her smile and open doors for her, Old New York sort of gallantry. I'd go down to get another glass of iced coffee to just to talk to her again.

Wrote for hours upstairs, in my favorite table by the window. Went through a lot of material, but it's still incomplete. I'm trying to finish a piece for my notebook project, and twisting something else into a short story. It felt good to write, write, write, all alone with the sun going down.

Between several larges glasses of coffee and the one chocolate chip cookie I felt very jittery and queer late into the night. It was hard to fall asleep, even though I only wanted to sleep.

The mail yesterday brought me surprises. A postcard from DC from my dear Folklorist-in-training and an article on Kafka's Prague out of The New Yorker from the Man down San Antonino way. Much as I mistrust the postal service, I like getting mail.

Rock Diva-dom

because I need to remind myself to pray more, and because Daina is so lovely

i am a little church(no great cathedral)
far from the splendor and squalor of hurrying cities
--i do not worry if briefer days grow briefest,
i am not sorry when sun and rain make april

my life is the life of the reaper and the sower;
my prayers are prayers of earth's own clumsily striving (finding and losing and laughing and crying)children
whose any sadness or joy is my grief or my gladness

around me surges a miracle of unceasing
birth and glory and death and resurrection:
over my sleeping self float flaming symbols
of hope,and i wake to a perfect patience of mountains

i am a little church(far from the frantic
world with its rapture and anguish)at peace with nature
--i do not worry if longer nights grow longest;
i am not sorry when silence becomes singing

winter by spring,i lift my diminutive spire to
merciful Him Whose only now is forever;
standing erect in the deathless truth of His presence
(welcoming humbly His light and proudly His darkness)

~e.e. cummings