Unwritten novels.

I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet?

REBECCA WEST.

The city hung in my window, flat as a poster.

I think this feeling is the one I fear the most—flatness, disconnectedness, being incapable of escaping from my own head. It’s not something I’ve ever experienced. I can only guess at how it would feel. What if one day I couldn’t immerse myself in the world around me and feel better?

The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence. I knew perfectly well the cars were making a noise, and the people in them and behind the lit windows of the buildings were making a noise, and the river was making a noise, but I couldn't hear a thing. The city hung in my window, flat as a poster, glittering and blinking, but it might just as well not have been there at all, for the good it did me.

SYLVIA PLATH.

What actually sustains life is far closer to home and more essential.

Our Economy of Kindness from Mother Jones.

Capitalism is only kept going by this army of anti-capitalists, who constantly exert their powers to clean up after it, and at least partially compensate for its destructiveness. Behind the system we all know, in other words, is a shadow system of kindness, the other invisible hand. Much of its work now lies in simply undoing the depredations of the official system. Its achievements are often hard to see or grasp. How can you add up the foreclosures and evictions that don't happen, the forests that aren't leveled, the species that don't go extinct, the discriminations that don't occur?

The official economic arrangements and the laws that enforce them ensure that hungry and homeless people will be plentiful amid plenty. The shadow system provides soup kitchens, food pantries, and giveaways, takes in the unemployed, evicted, and foreclosed upon, defends the indigent, tutors the poorly schooled, comforts the neglected, provides loans, gifts, donations, and a thousand other forms of practical solidarity, as well as emotional support. In the meantime, others seek to reform or transform the system from the inside and out, and in this way, inch by inch, inroads have been made on many fronts over the past half century.

The terrible things done, often in our name and thanks in part to the complicity of our silence or ignorance, matter. They are what wells up daily in the news and attracts our attention. In estimating the true make-up of the world, however, gauging the depth and breadth of this other force is no less important. What actually sustains life is far closer to home and more essential, even if deeper in the shadows, than market forces and much more interesting than selfishness.

Most of the real work on this planet is not done for profit: it's done at home, for each other, for affection, out of idealism, and it starts with the heroic effort to sustain each helpless human being for all those years before fending for yourself becomes feasible. Years ago, when my friends started having babies I finally began to grasp just what kind of labor goes into sustaining one baby from birth just to toddlerhood.

But don't worry, I'm not the bread and the knife.

You are the bread and the knife,
the crystal goblet and the wine.
You are the dew on the morning grass
and the burning wheel of the sun.
You are the white apron of the baker,
and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.

However, you are not the wind in the orchard,
the plums on the counter,
or the house of cards.
And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.
There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air.

It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge,
maybe even the pigeon on the general's head,
but you are not even close
to being the field of cornflowers at dusk.

And a quick look in the mirror will show
that you are neither the boots in the corner
nor the boat asleep in its boathouse.

It might interest you to know,
speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,
that I am the sound of rain on the roof.

I also happen to be the shooting star,
the evening paper blowing down an alley
and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.

I am also the moon in the trees
and the blind woman's tea cup.
But don't worry, I'm not the bread and the knife.
You are still the bread and the knife.
You will always be the bread and the knife,
not to mention the crystal goblet and--somehow--the wine.




BILLY COLLINS. LITANY.

Some of its houses spoke.

Some of its houses spoke, by lovely broken woodwork and tiled roofs fistulated with neglect, of a vital tradition of elegance strangled by poverty. There were lilacs everywhere, and some tulips. There was nobody about except some lovely children. From the latticed upper story of one of the houses that were rotting among their lilacs there sounded a woman’s voice, a deep voice that was not the less wise because it was permeated with the knowledge of pleasure, singing a Bosnian song, full of weariness at some beautiful thing not thoroughly achieved. They became credible, all those Oriental stories of men who faced death for the sake of a woman whom they knew only as a voice singing behind a harem window.

REBECCA WEST. BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON.

The possibilities of the life of the body in this world.

"Life is not very interesting," we seem to have decided. "Let its satisfactions be minimal, perfunctory, and fast." We hurry through our meals to go to work and hurry through our work in order to "recreate" ourselves in the evenings and on weekends and vacations. And then we hurry, with the greatest possible speed and noise and violence, through our recreation — for what? … And all this is carried out in a remarkable obliviousness to the causes and effects, the possibilities and the purposes, of the life of the body in this world.



WENDELL BERRY. The Pleasures of Eating.

Home, Take Three.

We made a lightning dash to IKEA in Schaumberg yesterday and then Adam helped us assemble our sofa, and my new bookshelf and dresser. The place looks complete… which is... kinda important since Bernd’s dad will be showing up this evening! I’m glad today’s a furlough day for the state—it gave me an opportunity to clean everything up and practice my German.


My project this morning.








World map pillow is from IKEA. I sewed the others.


EVOL.








I can’t resist taking a picture of him every time I make the bed.

It's autumn. I am thinking all the time about the young woman I want to be, and how far I have to go. I think it will be a joyful journey, but along the way, I am running into contradictions.

I am reading hard books and struggling with what they tell me.

I am loving my job. Loving it. It has me rethinking my career goals, that's how much it's shaken me up this week. Mostly, I do research. I know that as soon as I know my territory there I'll want more responsibility. I'll want to be the one who jets off to conferences in Atlanta, Chicago and Vancouver, to listen and learn and share. This week, I am in love. I am paid to care about something WORTH caring about. What more could I ask for, really?

What, why and how.

What bothers you most about adults? Why? How do you want to be similar or different from adults you know when you become an adult?

New digs.

We just moved in yesterday (as in, moved the furniture yesterday - thanks, Adam - and spent our first night here) and it already looks and feels even more like home than the last place... it's really wonderful.




Living room – still under construction… we’re going to IKEA this weekend or next for a bookshelf, sofa and coffee table.


Bernd’s new pride and joy, a 42” LCD TV. You can also see my desk in the next room and our bicycles in the hallway.


We each bought a Philip Singer print at the Art Fair on the Square. This is the one I purchased :-)


Kitschy $1 Eiffel Tower vase from St. Vinny’s down the street, and drum from East Africa.


Walk through the living room to the dining room…




My desk! I love my whale mug from Goodwill. The fan was a favor from a friend’s wedding last spring.


Turn sideways into Bernd’s office/man cave.






Go back through the dining room into the walk-through pantry.








I guess I only took two shots in the kitchen…






Cross the hallway into the bathroom.








And then there’s the bedroom, where we’ve really only assembled the bed!


I do love my Ugly doll, though. He looks so terrorized tucked into bed.

On the plus side, the next week-and-a-half means
- Madison World Music Festival (!!!!)
- Willy Street Fair (!!!)
- Obama on the UW-Madison campus (!!!!)
- Wicked (!!!!)

and

- moving into our apartment tomorrow, finally!

and

- my old boss is willing to send me out to work for the State of Wisconsin as soon as a position opens up!




On the downside, Bernd and I are both super sick, and our apartment still looks more like a battlefield than a habitable space...

Warn me that you'll steal my heart next time.

We survived! We got back super late last night (1:30 or so) and only stayed awake by blasting really terrible pop music that we would find odious and intolerable in any other state.

I only have one picture, which Bernd uploaded to the Internet on the fourth day of our trip. Here I am at Black Canyon of the Gunnison!



Awesome! That was, admittedly, not on a trail, but the caged viewing area was so boring and I only stepped on rocks - not plant life or soil - to reach my preferred vantage point. And there were no small children watching who could be influenced by my bad behavior, although Bernd plunged eagerly after me as soon as he lowered his camera...

Slow down.

Aaron is growing up. I dropped by this afternoon just as he was waking up (slowly, oh so slowly) from a nap and he was “g’barrassed” to be seen sleepy, “g’barrassed” to be seen half-dressed. His mother gently reminded him that I’ve seen him naked many times, changed many diapers, but he hid until he was awake and dressed, and only then did he want to play. This is the little boy who just a few months ago ran into the living room naked as the day he was born and presented his exposed little self to Bernd, proclaiming that nakedness was “the secret of Santa!” He’s five. I forget he’s five. I don’t always want him to be five, bright and loving five-year-old though he is. Sometimes, I still want him to be three.

Bean!

The past few days - glorious high summer days, all of them - I've been in the grip of a sudden, confounding and pervasive melancholy. I've been alternately restless and pensive, pacing and retreating.

Last night, we lounged on Adrian's porch and I laughed so hard that my cheekbones still ached in the morning. Tonight, the air in the house is hot and still, and Bernd is snoring loudly down the hall.

I'm not melancholy for any one obvious reason. As far as I can reason, I am (and have been, and will remain) stuck in a holding pattern until we determine our next moves. Why should I invest time and energy seeking a new job now when I may be hunting for jobs across the country within the month? Even my ever-present desire to forge new friendships seems temporarily on hold. So that's something.

And I wonder about my expectations--not so much what I expect to receive from the outside world, from those around me, but what I expect of myself.

I wouldn't call myself an optimist, but I am an immensely hopeful person. Yet I think we live in an unjust and unkind place in an unjust and unkind time. And I'm a participant. I participate in this injustice and unkindness. I can't exempt myself.




It's the height of summer. Moments of pure exhilaration are not infrequent. Biking through the city, cat-napping in the park with George Kennan and Paul Nitze, striking up a conversation on the bus, dancing Wednesday nights until too late and walking tenderly Thursday mornings taking big gulps of coffee, the voices of faraway friends sweet in the whorl of my ear.

Graduation party.

I picked the right man for the job - a man with matches.

Tight-lipped tulips near the Capitol.