LXXXVI.

I used to dream I was falling. I’d be swinging on one end of a long, long rope, and I’d look up all of a sudden and see that the other end was not connected to anything and then I’d be falling, my stomach in my throat, just hurtling downwards until I woke with a gasp.

I used to dream I was trapped in spiderwebs. I’d wake up still feeling them brushing my face, arms, chest, tightening as I struggled, cotton-soft, strangling.

There are times now when I lie awake feeling just as disconnected, just as trapped.

LXXXV.

John Francis at TED, on deciding not to ride or drive motorized vehicles anymore, and on 17 years of listening and not speaking, and on returning to speaking, and returning to using motorized vehicles again:

And I know that a lot of timeswe find ourselves in this wonderful place where we’ve gotten to, but there’s another place for us to go. And we kind of have to leave behind the security of who we’ve become, and go to the place of who we are becoming. And so, I want to encourage you to go to that next place, to let yourself out of any prison that you might find yourself in, as comfortable as it may be, because we have to do something now. We have to change now.

LXXXIV.

I am always trying to find the right balance of recklessness and routine. Not that I am all that reckless, it’s just little things like living on 5 hours of sleep for a few nights. As for routine, I do find it meditative to wake up early on a Saturday, make coffee, and work on a translating a story for Spanish book club for an hour or two. Doing both seems difficult.

LXXXIII.

Student, to another student: You look down. Did your goldfish die?

Me: Do you know that he has a goldfish?

Student: No, but my goldfish died.

Me: I’m sorry! Did it happen recently?

Student: No, about five or six years ago.

LXXXII.

From Billy Collins, “Nostalgia,” found here:

Remember the 1340’s? We were doing a dance called the Catapult.
You always wore brown, the color craze of the decade,
and I was draped in one of those capes that were popular,
the ones with unicorns and pomegranates in needlework.
Everyone would pause for beer and onions in the afternoon,
and at night we would play a game called “Find the Cow.”
Everything was hand-lettered then, not like today.

Read the whole thing. I’d quote the last stanza but I think it’s best read in its wry whole.

LXXXI.

He has no more than one dollar in his pocket, and he goes down to Atlantic City. He puts that dollar in the slot machine, and he plays all night. So I’m telling you this just to say, if you’re meant to win, you’ll win. That’s all I called you for.

Overheard leaving the subway at Atlantic-Pacific. A woman in a green uniform, sweeping the steps and talking on her cell phone.

LXXX.

Our kitchen smells moist, sour, green. I noticed the smell yesterday morning and wondered if something was going sweetly, pungently bad, perhaps in the fruit basket or the trashcan or stowed on a shelf. But I couldn’t find any rotting fruit and the smell, itself, telegraphed ripeness, not rot.

In the evening the smell was there again, in tendrils as I walked down the hall and then the full body of it. Again, I looked around, more certain this time that I wasn’t just stumbling around in the memory of a dream. Over time, as I cooked dinner, the smell faded, masked by the onions and peppers I was chopping, by the smell of oil on the griddle, and by the body’s ability to adapt to and filter a stimulus.

Later, talking to my roommates, I suddenly looked more closely at the little green apples in the fruit basket. I picked one up; it was not an apple. I held it up to my face and inhaled. The sharp sour scent hit my senses first, then a flood of sweeter scents. Guavas.

LXXIX.

Yesterday morning, I woke up too early, feeling tired and a little directionless, a little uncertain of my commitment to the things that had made me so happy for two weekends straight, a little lonely, a little of that old winter-is-coming-and-I’m-not-ready. And I had nothing in the refrigerator but eggs, and couldn’t eat eggs so early, so I put on formal shoes with my sweatpants and ran down the street, around the corner, down another block to the deli. When I walked back home with cream and yoghurt in a black plastic bag, I suddenly saw that the morning was brilliantly sunny. But it wasn’t just the sunshine: it felt, for a few minutes, like everything was going to be okay. And then it was.

I think I am just getting the creative part of my head back from where it’s been for two months, on the good side, poured into pushing my teaching to somewhere it hasn’t gone yet, on the bad side, reluctantly given over to trying to be the person someone else wanted me to be.

LXXVIII.

Designer Philippe Starck on human possibility & responsibility:

The bacteria we was had no idea of what we are today. And today, we have no idea of what we shall be in four billion years. And this territory is fantastic.

That is our poetry. That is our beautiful story. It is our romanticism. Mutation. We are mutants. And if we don’t deeply understand, if we don’t integrate that we are mutants, we completely miss the story. Because every generation thinks we are the final one….

And here is something: nobody is obliged to be a genius, but everybody is obliged to participate.

LXXVII.

The number of people present on the court to make a match between two players possible at the US Open is astonishing. I counted more than twenty. That doesn’t include most security or any of the people who make the whole event happen.