and it retreats again

The Band - The Weight from The Last Waltz (1978)

This beautiful rendering of The Weight by the Band got my attention thanks to a friend thrice removed.

Oh, and I want further to investigate Danish folk-metal. Don't let me forget that.

Boo hoo, I want to be sleeping, but my tummy is hurting. I forgot to take my medicine this morning so I didn't get it until evening and am wondering if that could be the culprit -- or if it's something I ate. Hopefully the bicarbonate of soda & ginger/chamomile/mint tea will kick in soon and allow me to return to bed.

I still owe you an email, dear Marcell . . .

Rruar, baby!

I need to ask my favorite expert on Albanian language: Do you really have twenty-seven different adjectives specifically to describe moustaches? Besim, will you weigh in on this?

ice spreads its wings across the surface at dawn

There's really no doubt about it: This is totally an insane life. After not writing a word all semester for a professor's eyes other than emails, I'm now on my 47th page in a week. Thank God for snack food, no neighbors complaining about my late-night music or observing my computer light on at 2 am or my belly-dancing around the cottage to keep myself sane. Thank God for Regina Spektor and the ability to wear my pajamas without showering all day long while I sit here artificially constructing a qualitative paper as the first step in a hypothetical mixed methods study for university administrators interested in the needs of graduate students in terms of their work spaces for scholarly labor. Thank God for my amazing talent for bullshitting. Thank God I'm almost finished with the phase of my graduate life where I'm working simultaneously on four degrees, and where I'm effectively doing three jobs. Because, um, can I just say again how totally unsustainable this is!?

I had wondered and wondered what it might look like when the lake started to freeze over. Surely it wouldn't happen overnight, I thought, but in a process; but what would the process be like? When we were still seeing raspberries at the farmers' markets in late October, I wondered if it would even truly happen. But the time of winter has come, and I am burrowing delicately into the new world I find myself surrounded by, furnishing my inner world with words and soundscapes new or dusty from disuse, and polishing them to match the startling gray that is emerging all around.

What is that like, you wonder? Here I have created a less than perfect panorama, but a panorama nonetheless. (I would love to take a course to improve my digital photography skills in shooting and editing . . . and also to buy a camera that gives me more flexibility. But for the moment, I have what I have.) Click it to see the full view. (Click the little tiny box that isn't loading below for the huge version.)

Photograph by Marcell Nimfuhr. (Please let me know if you'd rather I not leave these up here, Marcell!)

Oh, my heart is a little broken over missing Robert Hass reading at UMMA yesterday. He is one of my very favorites. I even got out my old copy of Praise to lend to Katie after our late-night giddy return to e.e. cummings a few weeks ago.

(Late-night Monday edit: Oh, Marta, remember reading "Meditation at Lagunitas" aloud to one another with Ross, over and over again, when we were all ailing and huddling around together on the beds in our room in Spiti?

[It was Kaza, wasn't it? Where I hung on the shoulders of you both, and you dragged me, complaining the whole way, down the hill into the valley to the hospital, to get me medicine for my intestinal bug, only for us to discover a week later that I'd been taking sulfa drugs that gave me hives, and for Ross to discover a few months later, that the mangoes you brought me for comfort everyday were only further contributing to the allergy!? Those were the good old days, I tell you. The good old days of riding on a tractor to get between villages, drawing our tupattas over our mouths and noses to filter the dust, then taking turns racing to the toilet for our assorted ailments. . .] And then there was the night you went off on your date and the Scandinavian/Korean Christian Buddhist wooed me from below the wall where I was sitting and singing by myself, and gave me the book Living Buddha, Living Christ that I still can't quite let go of, though I've never quite read it either. . . Oh, how I miss being young, sometimes.)

Photograph by Marcell Nimfuhr.

Fitting, by the way. . . I'm the Hermit today. I wish I could hide away for a few more days. I think I could finally get all my work done if I could just have a respite from the social and not have to prepare a face to meet the faces that I meet...

I'm putting off even writing to and calling people I love. Yeah, I think that "I" in the Myers-Briggs from years ago probably still holds, even if I do flirt more than anybody you know. :P