progress

Since the appearance of the internet, the world has changed in ways I could never have imagined in my childhood.

I suppose that my youthful self could have envisioned some of the more obvious and celebrated online conveniences and necessities. I would have understood the desirability of email, a single-point, globally-accessible source for the delivery of written communication. Like letters, but with immediate delivery? And you can log in from any point where you have a computer and an internet connection? (Or, y’know, a sufficiently clever phone?) Younger Elsa would have understood — and maybe even have predicted — the basic outline.

I could have imagined having immediate on-demand access to an encyclopaedia indexing matters of all kinds, that we could just call up a user-submitted page rather than debating trivial questions all weekend long: was Copernicus Polish? Was Burgess Meredith in How to Marry a Millionaire? What are the chief ingredients in gremolata? It would have blown my young mind, but I would have realized that it was both feasible and beneficial.

What I could never, ever have foreseen, and what blows my mind every single time: sitting on my couch and getting an email announcing a package delivery before I can even register the footsteps on the porch as “probably the UPS guy.”

dream logic

All week long, I’ve been having what sound like classic anxiety dreams, what should be classic anxiety dreams, but Dream Elsa keeps stepping up and mastering the anxious situations.

- A dream replays a real-life conversation in which a loved one asks me to do something I feel awkward about doing. In the dream as in life, I tactfully and pleasantly say no, re-establishing my boundaries; in the dream as in life, the loved one graciously accepts my refusal and we chat about other things before saying “I love you, bye.”

- I find myself at a party where I know absolutely no one. Instead of freezing up or standing in a corner, I pour myself some punch and smilingly make my way around the room meeting people.

- I awaken in an unfamiliar and busy bank lobby without pants. “Huh,” I say to the tellers, “my pants have disappeared, along with my wallet. I’ll have to get new ones! See you later.”

- The bank building shifts, as dream landscapes tend to do, and becomes a shopping mall bustling with shoppers. Unsurprisingly, all of them are fully dressed; I am still trouserless. “Well,” I think, it won’t be the oddest thing they’ll see today. Hmm, I bet I can buy some pants in one of these stores!”

- I’m out with The Fella in a busy bar when I’m temporarily struck dumb. He looks at me quizzically; I calmly gesture to my mouth and shrug, smiling to reassure him. He understands completely, flashes me a loving look, and without words we fist-bump, clinking our wedding rings in solidarity.

I’m not sure what these mean, but I wake up each day nodding in appreciation of this Dream Me who sizes up each situation and faces it with calm confidence and competence. I half-expect to dream of showing up, naked and unprepared, at a final exam — and to get an A+.

phantom pain

As I skulked around the unlit apartment, right hand clasping the hem of the blanket thrown around my shoulder ready to ward off any stray beam of sunlight, left hand clamped to my throbbing orbital socket covering my face from jawbone to hairline, I thought…

“Maybe the Phantom of the Opera just had migraines.”

little things

A few small pleasures on this gray rainy day:
- new boots, bought in the last days of spring and packed away for a rainy day;
- sugar cubes, bought for champagne cocktails but distinctly pleasant to watch them melting in a cup of tea;
- a whole basket of fresh tomatoes, bursting with juice and scent, too gorgeous to cook or gussy up;
- a brand new sketchpad and an excellent pen;
- a few minutes stolen with The Fella, bundled up in bed with blankets and books.

For the moment, I’m directing my writing energy elsewhere, but I’ll continue to check in with little things — and little things can be good.

bright side

You know what stinks? Being awakened by the plumbers removing the toilet a day early.

You know what really stinks? Having to wake up your houseguest to break the news that there’s no toilet.

You know what’s great? Seeing how your houseguest takes it all in stride and and heads out to the local coffeehouse with you, just so the two of you can pee.

You know what stinks? Having to miss a trip to visit The Fella’s family because the unscheduled plumbers* need someone to lock up after ‘em.

You know what makes up for it? Spending that unexpected free evening with your own vacationing family for one last dinner before they go home.

You know what literally stinks? The rotted subflooring the plumbers tore up.

You know what’s adorable? How carefully they tidied up after themselves, leaving just a few smears of mold.

You know what figuratively stinks? Splashing bleachy water on the floor, then tracking it all over.

You know what’s kinda fun? Putting paper towels under each foot and shuffling around the apartment like a Muppet to clean it up.

* Adding Unscheduled Plumbers to list of potential band names.

personal top 40

One of my online friends on another site challenged us to come up with our own personal top 40 songs. I hesitated, then decided that such a ranking is necessarily shifting and impermanent, which removed a lot of the pressure. The task proved both instructive and startling: I found an unsuspected folky streak in myself, and I’m surprised at how many of my favorite artists got edged out by songs that just make me feel good.

These aren’t the best songs by the respective artists, or even the most personally meaningful, but they are the songs that I would stop everything to listen to, that I would hear in my head all day, all week. These are songs I croon absentmindedly, songs I belt out alone or with friends, or songs I play when I want to feel the most like myself.

This exercise drove home something I’ve been thinking already: I need to find a way to get more music into my daily life. I need to get better speakers for the laptop, buy a cheapie iPod and fill it, move the stereo (which is now in a little-used corner) or maybe just move the speakers.

These are in no particular order, except that I put the one long note first.

1. Picture in a Frame – Tom Waits (I coulda picked any of a dozen Waits songs, but this one is special: I pitched hard for this to be the first song at our wedding. The Fella, who loves Tom Waits even more than I do, nixed it, though I’ve never understood why. C’mon: “I’m gonna love you ’til the wheels come off”? Every time I hear it, I get all teary-eyed.)
2. No One Will Ever Love You Honestly – Magnetic Fields
3. A Town Called Malice – The Jam
4. 1952 Vincent Black Lightning – Richard Thompson
5. Baby’s On Fire – Brian Eno
6. I’d Like That – XTC
7. Is She Really Going Out with Him?- Joe Jackson
8. Crazy Little Thing Called Love – Queen
9. Los Angeles – X
10. Jezebel – Iron & Wine
11. My Baby Just Cares For Me – Nina Simone
12. Suffragette City – David Bowie.
13. Wicked Little Town from Hedwig and the Angry Inch.
14. That’s When I Reach for my Revolver – Mission of Burma.
15. The KKK Took My Baby Away – The Ramones
16. Elvis Costello — like with Tom Waits, I could’ve chosen almost any song at random, but I actually gave it some thought and came up with I’m Not Angry, one of those rare songs that still sounds as amazing to me as it did when I 30 years ago.
17. Girl – Beck.
18. Love Will Tear Us Apart Again – Joy Division
19. I Don’t Love Anyone – Belle and Sebastian
20. Let’s Do It (Let’s Fall in Love) – Ella Fitzgerald
21. Sway. I just love the song, not a particular version — but I first noticed the song while watching “Dark City,” so I’ll link that version.
22. Who Loves the Sun – Velvet Underground
23. Life During Wartime – Talking Heads
24. I’ll Follow the Sun – The Beatles
25. A Day in the Life – The Beatles
26. When You’re Next to Me – “Mitch & Mickey” (Eugene Levy & Catherine O’Hara)
27. Working in a Coalmine – Devo
28. Give Up the Funk (Tear the Roof off the Sucker) – Parliament Funkadelic
29. Llorando – Delores del Rio a cappella [Note 1: warning! Mulholland Dr. spoiler in that clip! Note 2: oddly enough, I don’t care for Roy Orbison’s English-language version at all.
30. I Hear the Rain – Violent Femmes
31. Driver 8 – R.E.M.
32. Why Don’t You Do Right – Peggy Lee (more recently made famous by Jessica Rabbit)
33. the abysmally depressing My Man – Billie Holiday
34. Lithium – Nirvana
35. Bye Bye Blackbird – I don’t have a favorite version, but I’ve linked to one by Diana Krall that approximates what I hear in my head when I sing it. (What comes out of my mouth is almost certainly quite different.)
36. Brick House – The Commodores
37. Bear Necessities – Phil Harris (The Jungle Book soundtrack)
38. If I Should Fall from Grace with God – The Pogues
39. All Day and All of the Night – The Kinks
40. (You will think I’m kidding but I’m not.) How High the Mountain (Y’all Are Brutalizin’ Me) – Ronnie Dobbs (David Cross)

I know there will be a handful of songs I CANNOT BELIEVE I left off this list, but for the moment, this feels pretty solid. “That one’ll do.” “Let’s go have us a champagne jam.”

gratitude

Things, little and big, to be grateful for this week:

- One Step Beyond! I’d never even heard of this Twilight Zone carbon copy, and now I have four DVDs of it, with its original Alcoa promos intact. Thanks to The Fella!

- Pajamas and pearls! (I ordered new pajamas, then made myself a new double-length string of pearls. Obviously, I’m going to wear them both right away.)

- Surprise bacon!

- Graduating from mooshy food to semi-soft food!

- Passover Coca-Cola!

small good things, big good things

Good things make life good. Some of the good things are small, some of the good things are big, and all of the good things are good.

- fresh-baked anadama bread, fragrant with molasses, chewy with oats and whole wheat, and hot from the oven. I love the way it fills the whole apartment with its rich, wholesome scent.

- wrapping Christmas presents, which gives me a marvelous calm feeling of accomplishment. And the penguin wrapping paper I picked up at Local Surplus & Salvage Shop is pretty darned cheery.

- snow! Granted, by the time I got outside in it, it was just lashings of cold and wet, but still: SNOW!

- hot tea with milk and the faintest lacing of sugar.

- anadama bread again, because it’s just that good. Also, because I’m making a second batch already.

- bright red coarse-weave fabric (also from Local Surplus & Salvage Shop) for reupholstering the Danish modern chairs Gaoo gave me. (She rescued them from the junk pile at our parents’ old house, so they’re endearingly familiar, too.)

- Nick Hornby’s About A Boy.

- The sweetest husband in the world, who knows me inside out and upside-down and who loves me with all my flaws.

autumn goals

With summer dwindling down and most of my summer goals checked off (and a few shelved until next year), I’m starting to think about autumn.

- Scrumpy!

- Fried green tomatoes with Gaoo at the neighborhood joint.

- Apple pie, apple crumble, apple cobbler.

- Fix the camera. Use the camera. Accomplished! Well, accomplished-ish. One camera completely punked out after a mere few months (way to go, GE!) and the other is missing its memory card. Still, it can take a few shots at a time, so HUZZAH!

- Once again, polenta fries and prosecco… on the patio if it’s still open. My dream date: The Fella and I stroll over to the patio for snacks and drinks, carrying a basketball with us. Then we can pay our check, zip around the fence, and have a round of one-on-one at the neighboring hoops court.

- Woman, you have three bottles of fancy balsamic vinegar on the shelf. Stop hoarding it. Be lavish with it. Be extravagant with it. Be reckless with it! See if you can’t empty one bottle before the first snowfall.

- Experiment with a new scent or cologne. For more than half my life, I wore the same perfume, and my longtime [whatever] E. used to buy me a bottle of it every year — at my birthday or at Christmas. The first year after E. died, my mother bought me a bottle, and hugged me quietly when I burst out crying. As much history and love as there is in those memories, I don’t need to keep wearing them around my neck every day.
Update: Check! This is a goal I’ve been turning over for some time, so within a few hours of writing it, I went to Demeter and ordered three small bottles of fresh, fun, or nostalgic colognes.

- Refinish and recover those two chairs Gaoo has been saving for you. They’ll look smashing.

- Turn the mattress! Done! Without my knowledge, even! Three days after I wrote this, The Fella mentioned in passing, “Hey, I saw your goals list, so I flipped the mattress.” Yes, I am very lucky.

- Replace the bathroom curtain to go with the bloodcurdling shower curtain that A. picked out for my birthday. Swap out the faded front room curtains for the nicer ones that are currently balled up in a box. Hang a nice curtain in the bedroom so you can stop staring at those stupid blinds.

- Get cracking on your Christmas list! (I already have one tiiiiiny little thing for The Fella, like a gleaming little coin in my pocket, and a new craft project that’s shaping up nicely. Who’s it for? Maybe for you!)

- Chocolate feet once a week! (Cryptic, no? I’ll explain this in a future post.)

In addition to these goals, after the luscious long days of summer, I’m ready to welcome crisp air and crunching leaves underfoot. A few of the autumnal joys I’m looking forward to:

- My online bookclub is reading Franny and Zooey, a book I re-read every few years without ever really getting to the core. After the very insightful discussion of Lolita, I’m eager to dig into F & Z.

- Cooler weather means using the oven more. More fresh bread, more coffeecake, more lasagna, more roasted vegetables, more of everything cozy and crispy and crumbly and warm.

- Cooler weather means more red wine, at least in Elsa-world.

- Boots! Boots! Boots! I love boots! [I also love that boot season affords me the nostalgic pleasure of uttering ""It was something about boots."]

tiny

Awwwwww, the cutest: tiny octopus on finger. (Or, less adorable but just as cool: GIANT OCTOPUS on MASSIVE FINGER.)

Tiny frogs discovered living inside pitcher plants! Here’s an mp3 of their tiny, high-pitched froggie croaks.

Tiny turtle thwarts taxiing jet’s takeoff.

Aaaaand the marvelous Flickr set Tiny Animals on Fingers.